You may have noticed that I seldom post about workshops, let alone my own speaking engagements on this blog.   Here’s an easy exception for me:  Alex Buono and his "Art of Visual Storytelling Tour."   As you may know Alex and I are both Canon Explorers of Light (EOL) and that means that we both speak at the same big venues (Such as NAB) on a regular basis.    There’s a lot of joking around between the EOLs about who did the best presentation and who waited until the very last minute to finish their presentations before stepping onto stage, but there’s one thing we all agree on:   Alex is very likely the best amongst the group.

Alex will start on June 3rd in Minneapolis all the way through August 4th in Seattle after touring 31 cities around the United States.   If you can’t make it they’ll also be putting a DVD together.  I’ve seen Alex speak a few dozen times for Canon and several times at Masters in Motion (my favorite multi-speaker workshop of the year) – and I can honestly say I’ve picked something up from every one of his talks.    Alex is a fantastic filmmaker – and one of the best educators out there – PERIOD.     

Here’s a quote that I agree with fully:

Alex essentially crammed four years of film school into a mesmerizing two-hour tour de force performance that left people’s brains aching from information overload."

Jon Connor, co-founder – Masters in Motion, shooteditlearn.com

So if you’ve been waiting on the sidelines to attend a workshop because you thought you might not learn anything – this is likely the time to take the plunge.  And the tour’s daily structure is also intelligently broken down into several sections each day, which as an educator I can tell you is the BEST way to educate people of all levels of experience (they can attend the portions they are interested in.)   So go learn something, this is a workshop that I can recommend without reservation.    Go ahead an learn something from Alex – who is also a heck of a nice guy…

 Oh, and did I mention he’s also an Academy Award nominee?

Today was a pretty momentous day for several people related to the MōVI.

As you’ll see above the MōVI made its first appearance on set of it’s first Network Television show – NCIS Los Angeles just a week after it was revealed at NAB.   

As I shot the still frame above (full resolution file here), I saw a pretty interesting depiction of what I think are 3 very important steps in the evolution of Cinema – the Dolly, the Steadicam and the handheld MōVI.   I wish I could show you how the 3 operators worked in total unison to work 3 unique angles on this shot…

The MōVI videos also broke the 1.9 million view mark today with just under 10 million loads.  (I mention loads because YouTube tends to autoplay their videos, ergo everyone who loads the page counts as a view.. ergo a Vimeo metric is a bit different than the "views" you might see on YouTube videos… now you know a bit more about how PSY’s Gangam Style reached a Billion views…)

Another lucky person woke up early this morning in the Leeds, England by a Direct Message letting him know he had won the very first MōVI off the production line.   Mike Ritchie is a 28-year-old director/cameraman who has been making films since he was 15 – which is when I started with photography on my end anecdotally.    The winner  (Mike) was picked when we selected a number from zero to the total number of followers @freeflycinema had on the closing hour of NAB last week with a random number generator app.   Once we downloaded the list of followers, the task of figuring out who that exact person was, took our very tired brains a few days to figure out and confirm    So I’m happy to announce the first winner of the MōVI here!

We’re going to pick the second winner of a MōVI M10 this month – and all that you need to do to qualify is to follow @freeflycinema and @vincentlaforet on Twitter.  

That’s it.  

We’re going to pick a slighlty more exciting way of picking the second winner… we had a great idea at NAB but there was simply too much packing up to do to put that together in time.

The MōVIs are in production and Freefly is taking pre-orders here should you be interested in putting your name down on the list with a $2,500 refundable deposit.   

If you’d like to read more about the MōVI you can do sohere as well as here should you want answers to common questions.   And download footage here while also making a small donation to a wonderful charity.

From Mike:

I’m 28 now and have been making films since I was 15. My first project was a horrendously cheesy gangster film, shot on a PD150, where we pretty much taught ourselves to shoot, direct and edit. My shining moment of creativity that film was the synonymous shot from inside the boot of the car as the gangsters unload the gear. We had no idea what we were doing but it was a lot of fun.

 

I love working with actors and telling stories, I’m also a huge camera geek. The price/performance ratio of cameras and gear now is staggering, which is a brilliant thing for anyone wanting to get into the world of film making.

 

I try to spend as much time as I can working on my own projects – mostly simple, short dramas exploring a particular theme or idea. One day I hope to start making features.

 

In my free time I love travelling – I’ve been fortunate enough to explore a fair chunk of the world so far. I’ve recently bought a wreck of a house, so I’m learning DIY the hard way. And I’m looking forward to getting married to my fiancée, Katy, in 2014.

 

and a final note from Mike that he was nice enough to share:

 

I was absolutely amazed when I saw the first MōVI shots. I couldn’t wait to try it out but had no idea when or how I’d get my hands on one!

This is awesome, I’ve got so many ideas for my first MōVI shoot. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Thank you SO much to the guys at Freefly. Wow!

Finally I’ll leave you with a funny anecdote:   I always try to answer to EVERY single comment and e-mail that I get… but there’s ONE thing I usually don’t respond to (you might want to take note  and that involves people sending me video links.   The reason is simple:  I’m often on a plane with no (or slow) WIFI when doing e-mail (it’s the only time the phone isn’t ringing..)     As I looked Mike up on Twitter, I found an unread DM from him on my twitter account asking me to look at a video… needless to say I took unusual pleasure in finally responding to him… with the great news that he’d won a MōVI!  

Blind from Mike Ritchie on Vimeo.

Dreamcore – "Lights" from Tom Lowe on Vimeo.

I have two friends who put videos up yesterday that I wanted to share.   They also happen to be interestingly connected with one another.

The first is by Tom Lowe of Dreamcore.   You may remember Tom from TimeScapes – an amazing film comprised of gorgeous live action and time lapse sequences from around the United States – notably national parks and our nation’s natural treasures.   I realize I never reviewed his film on my blog even though I attended the premiere and I consider Tom a close friend.   So if you haven’t checked it out I highly recommend you do so – the film is available in a multitude of formats all the way up to 4K (and was notably the first 4K film ever sold the to the public) for those of you with a fancy new 4K television hungry for content:  the visuals in the film are stunning and won’t disappoint.  The music is done by yet another friend John Stanford who was also the executive producer, find out more about how this film was made here.

Above, you’ll find another video that Tom worked out with several friends of ours (it’s a small incestuous little world this film business.)  DP, editor and unit director: Tom Lowe Director: Kevin Kerslake Crew: Jon Bregel, Kevin Packer, Josh Owens, Dustin "Dr. Kanab" Kukuk, Marcus Del Negro, Eric Hines.

It’s also worthy camera porn if you will as it combines the old world with the new.   Many of these shots were made with the Leica M Noctilux f/0.95 lens combined with the Red Epic and a then prototype Leica mount for the cine camera.   While the Noctilux lens has definitely been modernized by Leica, it has always been a lens of desire as one of the sharpest and "brightest" lenses in the world.   Combined with 5K imagery and high frame rates (120 frame per second) the results are quite unusual – notably the bokeh.   It’s important to realize that this is cutting edge cinematography – without the f/0.95 aperture that allows a tremendous amount of light to reach the digital sensor, the sensor would not have been able to capture enough light at the evening events at the high frame rates (which let almost 16 times less light in than a traditional 24 frames per second.)

Filmed at Electric Daisy Carnival Las Vegas, 2012 -  Download the 4K H264 (1.28GB) file here: eveninfinite.com/tom/lights.mp4 or torrent: thepiratebay.se/torrent/8377852 and Follow Dreamcore at: facebook.com/DreamcorePictures and Follow Tom Lowe at: twitter.com/DreamCorePics Special thanks to Agata Alexander  Music: "Lights" by Ellie Goulding (Bassnectar remix): 

beatport.com/track/lights-bassnectar-remix/2054773

Second is a recent video collaboration between musician Moby and Mark Lanegan. As some of you may know I got to know Moby following the release of "Reverie" 5 years ago. He e-mailed this video to me yesterday and I thought it would be a great time to put both of these friends’ work up on the blog. The fact that they were both released on the same day and that Tom photographed so many of the same location in Moby’s video in Timescapes makes this all come full circle somehow. Enjoy the awesome cinematography within both of these videos – and I’ll go ahead and add the TimeScapes video for good measure at the end of the post to help come full circle.  Music: ‘The Lonely Night’ by Moby & Mark Lanegan - Cinematography & Direction: Colin Rich (deer-dog.com)