The Studio of Tomorrow

After two years, we are finally finishing production of a short film I crewed on. As luck would have it, two days of production were filming in Oakland.

I jumped at the opportunity to work with some long-time friends on what is quite possibly the best short film I have been associated with. Lots of cool people on this shoot, and I can’t wait to see an end result. I’m sure you will see something, as this project should be verry good. My job was Key Grip, I got to work with old friends Eric Petersen, who gaffed, Aaron Rattner who produced, as well as many new ones, including the director, Teddy Newton (of Pixar fame!) Life is good when you are working on a great project with a great crew, thanks guys for the opportunity!

I got to make my second cameo – look for the back of my head in the final edit!

Demolition Derby – State Finals!

This weekend was the demolition derby state finals, a two day event at the California State Fair. For those who have never been, you may snicker but everyone I bring to the derby gets hooked – guaranteed. This year was no different. The first night my wife and I went with her best friend Tala and her husband Mike. Then next night I brought my friend Erik Espera. Here are some shots:


Dinner - Fair Food!!!



Derby participants...






My Wife and I.





Erik and I.




The aftermath...

Everyone's a winner!

It couldn't be that easy...

So I’m experimenting with timelapse with a digital still camera for a promo shoot I‘m doing. I wanted to mount the camera to the front of my truck, and since it has a brush guard, that should help with additional mount points. But how to do it…? I’ve done lots of carmounts before, hostess tray, hood mount, even the doggie cam mount which worked very well. But I’m not near a rental house for such equipment, so how to mount on to the front of my truck… I could clip a couple of mafirs or cardilinies, then bolt on an “L” bracket and mount the camera to that, with reinforcement of course… So I went to take some measurements of my grill guard to figure it out when I saw this:







No way! Could it be this easy?!? The brush guard has two mount points for off-road lights. This goes against the second law of thermodynamics! All I had to do was unscrew a $2 garage-sale tripod head (thanks mom for that find!) and screw it on to the mount point:







Put the camera on, safety cable it to the grille and off we go, easy!








Below is a grab from the sequence, I put 2 ND.6 filters on in addition to the internal ND filter to help the camera take a slow picture for lots of motion blur: