The Best Test Short I've Seen

Camera "test shorts" have been an interesting youtube trend over the past two years. With new digital recording products being released seemingly every two months, filmmakers have been eager to take these toys for a test drive, and in the process this new sub-genre of indy cinema was born.  I've seen my fair share of them lately as we're looking into various visual tools for The Project, and last week I came across this particular test piece on Vimeo, done by John Brawley, comparing various film and digital formats under available light.

Out of the scores of similar shorts, the brilliance of this particular one is that he doesn't tell you which format is which until the very end, hence allowing your eyes to pick up the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle differences on their own. For this little conceit, I nominate this for 'Best Test Short' of 2011.

Brawley tested—not in this order—35mm,  RED MX, Arri Alexa, 16mm, Sony F3, Cannon HDSLR with some interesting results. His Vimeo page and blog has more details as well, well worth the read.

Available Light Shoot - The Results from John Brawley on Vimeo.

Switching Gears

To say I’ve been infrequent about my blogging would be an understatement. However, I had my reasons. I set up this site over a year and a half ago, when I started developing a new, low budget feature project. During that time—amidst writing that script, musing abut politics and shooting our practice short—it was my hope that one day I could use this blog to chronicle the process of actually making said feature. Did that time finally arrive? Well, it’s still too early to tell, but I feel I’m in a position to switch into gear on the project.

The gears have actually been turning for a while now; over the past six months I’ve partnered with my friend Sachin Mehta to form Astraea Films LLC,  with the goal of making this project happen. As things are now starting to pick up speed, and we set out for this adventure in the coming weeks and months, I will also set out to give a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this indie thriller here on the blog.

Check back for updates about our progress, a look at the cast and crew, and other fun stuff.

The Pier Completed

The little practice short we filmed this summer, The Pier, is now complete. It was a fun exercise in minimalist filmmaking shot at Venice Pier over the course of several mornings to catch the perfect light during the "June gloom" days. Thanks go out to David Abramson at DekaFilm for his help on the sound post.

Check out the The Pier HERE.

A Skeptic's Burden

How an ill researched news article turned me into a card-carrying rationalist.

It all started innocently enough. On June 20, 2009 I was perusing the web in a fit of procrastination when I came across an article commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and Neil Armstrong’s historic “one small step” in 1969. I was on CNN.com, a news source that’s infamous for their determination for presenting both sides of any argument regardless of how baseless, disingenuous, or flat-out asinine any one side may be. In true CNN fashion, this article was about the claims that the Moon landings 40 years prior may or may not have been faked (far be it from CNN to take a side in this “debate”). I was relatively uninformed about this controversy at the time. For some reason I thought that claims of mock-Moon-sets on vast sound stages in the Nevada desert died a long time ago, but I guess I was wrong. So here I was reading about the possibilities that the world was bamboozled by a set of elaborate special effects put on by NASA at the order of Richard Nixon.

There was only one problem with this claim that I could clearly see, and that was because, unlike conspiracy theorists and CNN anchors, I actually spent some time studying special effects and their history throughout cinema, along with basic photography and optics. In 1969, eight years before the premiere of the original Star Wars (the visual effects of which, on the original non-retouched print, look quite dated) we actually had the technology to send men to the moon, but not the capacity to realistically fake the footage they brought back. The only way to fake the massive amount of footage generated by the Apollo missions was to send a crew to the moon to film it. (I’m not talking here of the ten second clips people like to show on YouTube, I’m talking about the ten minute continuous shots of 16mm footage that conspiracy theorists conveniently forget about. )

But this CNN article was just ill researched enough to send me on a Wikipedia fueled fact finding mission which eventually landed me on BadAstronomy.com, the all things science and space blog of the best selling author Phil Plait.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood - Trailer Now Online

The trailer for the new video game I worked on as a writer and creative consultant is now online. Brotherhood is Ubisoft’s new entry in their hit Assassin’s Creed game series that won numerous awards, including "Best Action/Adventure Game," from IGN, "Best Action Game", "Best PS3 Graphics"; from GameSpot and GameSpy.

Check it out.

Post-Production Continues on The Pier

Having dragged Sachin and Dylan out for six mornings to catch the sunrise at Venice Pier, our little short film finally wrapped yesterday.

Now in the editing phase, The Pier is scheduled to debut on my site soon. Check back or hit our RSS for updates.

View from the Bandwagon

I jumped on the bandwagon. I had to. Cannon made me do it. They practically forced me to join the HD SLR frenzy.

In my defense, I was on the lookout for a new digital SLR camera that would give me some decent pics but wouldn’t set me back too much. Just as I was doing my research, Cannon made the announcement of the EOS Rebel T2i. A digital SLR with a 24 frame High Def video function for under $800.

To put that into perspective, nine years ago, the hot new image acquisition device was Sony’s first 24 frame HD camcorder, the F900 which sold for upwards of $100,000 with a decent lens. Although true techies will argue with me on this, at first sight, this Cannon actually produces a better image than the F900 ever did. So, as you see, for that bang for the buck, I had to jump on the HD SLR bandwagon.

I’ve been putting my T2i to the test as both a still and a video camera, having shot my new short The Pier with it. Here are some of my initial reactions; my first views from the bandwagon if you will:

1. It IS a still photo camera. A pretty good one at that for the money. With 18 mega pix, it’s the still cam I needed for regular use with the video functions as an insane bonus to filmmakers, compared to what you would have gotten less than a year ago.