My New Favorite Thing...

My new favorite thing is "The Big Score". It's a streaming radio station that plays film scores - Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman, John Williams, et al. It's great to have on in the background but can be a bit dramatic during dinner. Oddly enough, the business and programmer is near by in Antelope.

Here is their site, scroll down 3/4 the way to "The Big Score".

http://www.gotradio.com/MusicRoom.mvc/All

Oakland Goodwill Clock

We had an hour to kill between field trip locations, so I stopped by a goodwill store in Oakland. I found this 1970's era wind up wall clock. The face and case are 1970s faux american colonial style. Too tacky to use in in real life, yet not tacky enough to be cool. It was $9.99 and had nice mechanical movement under the face, so I bought it with then intent of making a cool steampunk exposed movement style clock. We shall see once I rip it apart.

Field trip to Chater Camera and DTC Grip Electric

I took the cine and advanced cine classes on a field trip to DTC grip electric and to Chater Camera in Oakland. John Chater and some of his staff were nice enough to keep the shop open a couple of hours to accommodate the students. The even set up for us several note worthy cameras to play with including the Panasonic AF100, the Sony F3, the Arri Alexa and the Phantom Flex - super cool. There were also other gadgets like the Hot Rod GH2 PL mount and more lenses than you can shake a siemens star at.

John Chater demoing an AF100.

We shot footage from all cameras and John set up a very nice impromptu Phantom demo. Some splashed water and a flip of the hair at 2,500 fps. I'll put up some footage soon... it's flipping amazing.

John Chater giving a great overview of cameras and cinematography and business advice and...


A very quick setup for the Phantom demo. Student Tiffany Ireland stood in with a Joker 400 as the only source backlight with bounce fill. Simple, elegant.

More cameras filming than at 2nd grade recital.

Here is the video: awesome.

You can see a much cleaner version on Vimeo here: http://vimeo.com/20728422

The obligatory water splash @ 2,500fps.

As I get older, I find I look more and more like a bird.

At DTC I found 50+ students waiting for me - far more than I figured would make the trip... I guess that says good things about their dedication and bad things about my planning skills
.
The tour was led by operations manager Dan Mode.


Inside the shop they got a chance to see a fully equipped rental house.

This is the group. This is what I get to look at all day...

;-)


Upstairs was something almost as menacing...