I’m sure by now many of you have already seen this – but it is still worth mentioning. Nike‘s new ad for their “Fight the Future” campaign in conjunction with the World Cup 2010 is simply stunning. The three minute spot, directed by Oscar nominated director Alejandro González Iñárritu, is a finely crafted piece of visual storytelling – a different league than your typical advertisement. As a commercial director, I can only aspire to get the chance to do something like this someday . Enjoy.
I’m excited to finally see iPad apps come out that take full advantage of the device’s size and functionality relative to the smaller iPhone/iTouch.
I can’t wait for the day where we will be able to use an iPad to interact with our HDDSLR cameras – let alone alone use one as a wireless reference monitor. What excites me even more is the potential to do some color correction or pre-visualization on location, fine tuning the look of an image live on set. Countless hours of adjusting light and color balance could be saved if they could be done on the fly with a computer. (What I’m saying here is: a lot of a film’s look today is created in the grading/color timing/color correcton suite… a lot more than most of us know. Back in the day most of the film’s look depended much more on film stock selection, lighting, filters and gels… now it’s often done more easily and cheaply with a mouse in post… Either way a DP/Gaffer STILL need to know what they’re doing and how to light of course – but giving them the ability to see how things will look after a certain post-processing look is applied – while STILL ON SET – is a huge benefit.)
Can you imagine plugging your iPad into your 5D MK II, RED, Genesis, or Alexa and doing this someday? It would be wild! But we will probably have to wait a little while for such things.
For now let’s take the first babystep in that direction.
The DSLR Slate App (by Chris Bayol) is a digital slate specifically designed for use with HDDSLR productions and works with iPads and the iPhone/iTouch. The app operates as a traditional slate, providing you with all the standard information (see picture above), but it also goes a step further and provides information tailored to HDDSLR production, allowing you to log shutter speed, ISO, aperture, lens, and many other details (which can come in handy while shooting tests). All of this additional information is stored by the app, and then displayed for the camera in quick bursts so that each page of information is captured for only a few frames. This makes slating on set efficient, and ensures that you have all the information you need in post-production.
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A few months ago Canon came to me asking if we could do a shoot together that demonstrated the unique capabilities of their newest HDDSLR cameras – in this case the Canon 1D Mark IV. We decided to shoot a spec ad for the VW Bug. It was shot over two days in downtown Los Angeles with a Canon behind-he-scenes crew on site that documented each step along the way.
Go check out Canon's really great site with behind the scenes footage.
Today, I am happy to be able to share the final product with you, as well as a link to the Canon Digital Learning Center. Canon has just published the first installment of their behind-the-scenes series on this project, and are planning on releasing a new episode each week for the next five weeks.
Following my initial shoot with the 1D Mark IV on “Nocturne” – which highlighted the camera’s incredible low light performance – I decided to explore another facet of its capabilities with this project. I wanted to show how the camera could perform on a multitude of platforms – in this case the Filmotechnic crane mounted to a car. I really wanted to see how this camera would work on the crane when connected to the zoom and focus controllers and live feed – confirming that Canon HDDSLRs could drop into a system designed to house motion picture cameras and pull off the same cinematic results. Another goal was to show that the camera performs well while in motion and with moving subjects, and I found that 1D Mark IV has significantly corrected the “jell-o effect” relative to the 5D Mark II.
