Cinegear 2007!

Cinegear: Wooooooo!


Sorry, just a little excited. This weekend I went down to LA to visit a friend and attend cinegear. My good friend and best man picked me up at LAX and we headed over to the Expo. I've missed the last 3, so I was excited to see what's new. Afterwards we stopped by Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles - YUM!

Here are some pictures from Cinegear:

Socal DP and best man E. G. Petersen at the Briese lighting booth with their 11' umbrella reflector: http://www.brieseusa.com/index.html


Element labs was also impressive. http://www.elementlabs.com/ They have a 5 phosphor led light that does near full spectrum lighting. Most are white LEDs only, some use RGB lights to make white, These guys add Magenta and Yellow to fill out the gaps. They also make a *very* cool led panel display that can be as large as a building and can display full color motion imges. This display was showing a quicktime movie off of a lap top.

Here is Eric getting a closer look:


Some other items that caught my eye:

A 58k light from the people at photosonics. No, not 58k color temp - 58 thousand watts. 58 1k bulbs packed tightly in a 2'x3' box! This thing can only be turned on for 10 seconds max before it starts to melt the diffusion screen.

http://www.photosonics.com/soft-box-lights.htm

Dragon Grips was cool with their ladder platform and cross beam-less dolly track:

http://www.dragongrips.com/

These guys had a cool aesthetic for a rental house:

http://www.monsterlighting.com/

The Nila LED lights were 1,200 Par HMI equivelents, with less power and almost no heat:

http://www.nila.tv/id6.html





And this is where old steadicam ops go to retire...

Olson Olson music video

This weekend we began production on a music video for the band "Olson Olson" The first phase of production was on the white cyc stage at the studio center in Sacramento. Two weeks from now we begin production of the narrative scenes. The band helped out by painting the stage. Nothing teaches respect for the white cyc than painting it. In fact, the only errant footprint that day was one one of mine...

Loading the "Shabby Chic" Piano into place.

The final product, good as gold.

I went to the movies.

I went to the movies this weekend and saw two really good films.

The first was the cheap theater screening of 300. I was wary of this film because of all the hype and the strong visual treatment, but seeing how this was a mythic tale, it went well with the film.

The second movie was "knocked up" Everyone over 16 should see this movie. Good film.

It's interesting to note that upon reflection of the amazing cinematography in "300", I realized that I went through the entire 2 hrs of "knocked up" and never noticed a shot, angle, movement, or lighting setup. In retrospect I'd say that "knocked up" has the better cinematography. Not once was I taken out of the story - not once. That's what makes for good cinematography, telling the story.