Nikon D700, 35mm f2, ASA 1000, 1/60th, f11, Copyright 2011 David Harry Stewart

I remember working on a big ad job in the 80s talking with the CD about how they did their last shoot. They had hired a full film crew, shooting super 35. They ran the camera all day and then pulled frames out for the ads. THEY WERE NOT EVEN SHOOTING FOR A COMMERCIAL! This was of course in the time of virtually unlimited budgets and massive waste. Think MadMen. The problem according to the CD, aside from the hundreds of thousands of dollars of film stock, was the month it took them to edit all that into 4 or 5 single frames.

I just sent a batch of 3400 images to my freelance photo editors KidsWithCandy, from a friends wedding I shot the other day. I said give me the 30 best and then the 300 best. I got 20 and 200 as there were not that many really great images. Of those 20 images were some that I hadn’t noticed in my run through, which makes for a very interesting collaboration. It makes me a better photographer by having someone else see the great images I took, but overlooked which didn’t match my intentions.

Now imagine what happens if I were to send them say 4 hours of 60 frames/second super high res video and said edit this into 20 images? Then the creative decision of the decisive moment gets shifted to the PE. But you say this is already the case with film editors. Yes, and no. The film editor is concerned with gesture, expression and framing, but is more concerned with how do the images montage in a time line. A still image is looked at and studied by the viewer for a longer period of time, which makes it is a totally different animal.

I just read over at VL’s blog about the new Red Cam which essential does what I am describing. Of course, what VL doesn’t mention is that to use one of those cameras and manage all that data one generally needs a person to work the computer, another to operate the camera functions such as focus, and a third to actually frame and move it. Not to mention a lot of gear and electricity. I take well his point though that this is the beginning of something.

Which brings me to the PE. It would seem to me, that having the eye and the skill to be able to make those decisive moment decisions is going to be a whole new career opportunity. For those of us who make the images, we are not going to have the time to go through all that footage frame by frame. We are going to have to rely on a PE that we trust to do that for us, at least bring it down to the 200 or so images that we, the agencies and the magazines can look at. It would not surprise me at all to see a new line item on estimates for a PE, just like there is a line item for post.

Note to SVA students. Being an image maker in a few years may have nothing to do with touching a camera.

Werner Herzog via Still in Motion

What I want to tell everyone about today are a couple of Apps that I have been using. Most of my work is location, so things like weather and the direction of the sun are are always the first things I want to know when we start the tech scout.

The first App is Sun Seeker. This one has been around for a while, a lot of people use it, but it is worth mentioning because it is so great. Basically, if you put it in 3d mode, you can see on a picture of your set with the direction of the sun supper imposed on it. I have an older iPhone 3, and probably due to my abuse of the phone, the internal gyro widget seems to be a bit off. If needing to know exactly what time the sun is going to clear a specific tree is critical, check it using at least 2 different phones. On my job last week, my iPhone was off about 10 degrees while the locations scouts phone was pretty right on.

The second app is the one I am really excited about. It’s called Radar Scope. Last week I was sitting in the motor home, it is pissing rain outside and myself and the production crew are having a pow wow about what to do. I wanted to know hour by hour what the weather was going to be at an exact location. In cases like this, weather.com is useless. Chance of rain 30% when it looks like it is time to start ark building is really not going to cut it. The suggestion was made to look at the local TV weather babe’s radar map to see if we could get a better idea. ( I am fascinated by the outfits of TV weather babes. A strange sub-cult which needs further semiotic study). My assisant Franscico pulls out his phone and introduces us to Radar Scope. Basically it is a real time weather radar. In 5 minutes everyone in that meeting had purchased the App for their own phone. At $10 it is an amazing value considering that making the wrong weather call could cost 100k that day. If you are like me, you probably have no idea what base reflectivity or storm velocity are. The web site for the app is very good at explaining all this and if you are so inclined, and you have the cleavage, it may give you a shot at being the new weather babe. Or not.

I have a ton of semi-useless apps on my phone, which have enriched Apple and temporarily entertained me. These two are keepers though. I can’t imagine ever going out on job and not having these. Give me a shout if anyone has any apps that they are loving. Would love to know.

Wow. Check this out. Here is an example of what happens when the best photo editor in the business makes a piece of on line content. File it under ” Wish I had done this”. A fantastic tour de force by everyone involved. If anyone has any doubt about the future of magazines and will people want to pay for content, this puts an exclamation point on yes they will, if the content is worth seeing. My congratulations to the photographer Solve Sundsbo and composer Owen Pallett for this inspiring work that raises the bar for all of us.

The good folks at StoryTeller contacted me a couple of months ago to ask me how I go about making films. I love doing interviews, for the same reason I love mentoring: by explaining I understand. I learn more about what I do from telling other people about it than from anything else. So if you want to understand what you are doing, tell somebody about it. It works time and again for me.

Here is an excerpt from StoryTeller:

- As someone much smarter than me said: “Video pushes and sound pulls”, tells Stewart.

The sound pulls the viewer forward, prepares them for what is coming. The other probably quite obvious thing is that sound functions in the brain on a deeper less conscious level than visuals. This is something we discovered as we started layering the sounds in. We noticed that by putting in the sound of a dishes clacking (recorded seperatley in the kitchen of my studio) that even though it was barely perceptable, it made the shot of the woman in the kitchen stronger. So we did a lot of that. Little bits of tuk tuk noise, the Tokyo subway, bar sounds.

If there is one thing that will kill your video, it is bad sound design. However, the reverse is also true.

Read the entire piece here.

First, find the vision, then figure out how to technically follow through. The hard part is the seeing, the easy part is figuring out the process. You can always get help with the technical, but the vision is your alone.

Venice Skate Park, those gorgeous ribbons of polished concrete set in the beach 200 ft from the Pacific Ocean, is the mecca of the west coast skate scene. I used to skate at Mullaly in the South Bronx, and this was about as far from that scene as you could get. There was so much beauty at the Venice park, and the skate crew, though not without the requisite Malt 40 and blunt set, was pretty chill. It was a family kind of place, lots of different ages, a couple of girls, and none of the super agro vibe that often comes with locals and their pet skate spot.

The main thing about this film is that it is about the lifestyle feeling of the Venice Skate Park. I wanted to set this film apart apart from all the similarly-themed videos out there by focusing on the lifestyle of the park, and doing it in the casual style of my stills work. The idea was to glamorize in a very relaxed and natural way what the scene was about. Which is exactly what I do in my commercial photography, make truthful and hopefully beautiful pictures of the lifestyle of a person or place. The music in my head from the beginning was Best Coast. I say this over and over, but the most important part of any project is learning to “see” it. The technology of making it happen is something that must be learned and overcome in order to put it in the service of the vision. But without that vision, there is nothing.

I directed while the cameras were mostly worked by my main camera operator Dante, and my collaborator co-conspirator Kevi Krakower. Having experience skating ramp, and knowing what can and can’t be done, I shot the more risky fly over head clips myself. Shooting fly overs with a 21mm lens is not for the faint of heart. Most of the time, my job was to direct the other guys, corral and cajole the skaters, and to keep the lifestyle vision of the project on track. We shot a total of 13 days on this project, which sounds like a lot, but needing to match the lighting, we worked the same last 2 hours of daylight each day. One thing to note when working with young skaters: they are not the most reliable, and their attention spans tend to run in nano seconds.

For you technically curious, here is some of what we used: Canon 7Ds at 60p for the slo mo, 5DIIs, 16-35 f2.8, 17-40 f4.0, 70-200 IS 2.8, 24-70 2.8, 35 1.4, Zeiss 21 2.8, SteadyCam Merlin, Redrock rigs, mono pod, Zoom H4N sound recorder, Minolta color meter, B+W ND filters, boom cam ( a 7D at the end of a long pole hovered out over the ramp with a Marshall 7″ monitor on a long HDMI cord for framing), running cam ( a top handle mount on a Redrock rig with a Marshal that we would chase the skaters at knee level with), Zacuto Z finders, stacks of 16 gig UDMA cards, lots of flags and flexifill refectors. If anyone would like more tech info on the process, drop me a line.

We shot till dusk, would go to the studio to dump the cards into the computers, back the footage, then have the machines run overnight transcoding into ProRes. The next morning we would review the footage, see what we liked and what we missed, then go back that afternoon and repeat. We did the edit ourselves in FC and graded in Color.

The Creators Project selected the film to be shown at the Beijing Creators Conference in September. All my deepest thanks to the skaters, and especially to Kevi and Dante for great work.

Oh dear – not a wise question to answer; three is nowhere near
enough and as time goes by the list only gets longer. But there are
historically relevant answers possible, based on what was out in theaters before, during and after I was a student in Rochester when my universe was forming and so I’ll stick with that period. And I’m going to mention work by a fourth cinematographer because of the time period I’m talking about, and how important three films of his were because of the way they looked, when I was just starting to see.

Easily the first film I remember being stunned by in every way, from the imagery to the music was “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC. It was so incredibly real looking, and seemed more like a documentary to me than any Hollywood movie I had seen at that time. It was so beautiful and pardon the “eye-opening” pun, but it was stunning then and still is. I didn’t yet know what was different about what he was up to, but I knew that I would expect certain things from the way films looked forever after. The film came out a couple of years before I was even thinking about being involved with motion pictures but as I say the damage was done. Another film from that period was “Sugarland Express”, also photographed by Vilmos. It was like a logical extension of the sense of reality that came to me from “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”. Keep in mind that the gear and film stocks were nothing like what exist today, and Vilmos’ night work is still superb without an HDSLR’s sensitivity to help him out of a jam: he shot his way out of it. And then came “Close Encounters of The Third Kind”. This one killed me dead, because it was his ease of creating “reality” instead of “Hollywood” again that had me sitting there with my mouth open. And then for him to be given the key to the city by Steven Spielberg and the freedom and support to pull out all the stops at the end of that film in a way that has never been bettered; great, great job. By the time I had seen “Close Encounters” I was back in LA, having ended the Kodak period in Rochester and the year at a PBS affiliate, and was going to films alone in the afternoon, just hoping that some of it would filter or sink in, and be retained. You may not know how to do it yet, but it helps to know what you want to do.

The next cinematographer that blew me away was Caleb Deschanel, ASC. When I saw “The Black Stallion” I was amazed at his balls to let things dark stay that way, and to leave it that way for good reason. And if the shot needed to be on the screen for a while and it needed to be dark, it damn well was. I guess with the beginnings of my photographic life being in photojournalism and street photography, followed by documentary films and a firm belief in “naturalism” as the basis of everything, all made Caleb’s choices of what to light and what not to light as inspirational as Vilmos’ certainly and then when you couldn’t stand the natural beauty of his work he’d crush you with a lighting job if you hadn’t had enough. The night scene in “The Black Stallion” where Micky Rooney and the kid take the mystery horse to the track for a private “running” in the rain before the master of horse racing, are simply as beautiful and perfect as anything will ever be. The only films as hard to take if not more so, would be two more films shot by Caleb: “The Natural” and “The Right Stuff”.

The “third” of the early inspirational shooters would have to be Allen Daviau, ASC. “E.T” reminded me again of the sense of a near-documentary feel from the lighting, and then once you remind yourself that’s it’s all been created from nothing and still feels absolutely genuine do you appreciate what must be going on here; simple mastery of one’s craft. After “E.T.”, Allen’s films “Empire of The Sun” and “Avalon” were knocking around in my brain for weeks, and still do whenever I see either one of them. Next would be one of the most perfectly photographed films of all time in my opinion, “Bugsy”. What’s to feel real does, and what’s created for effect and punctuation of the story when Bugsy Siegel meets Virginia Hill on a movie set for the first time is as brilliantly-lit as anything ever done, and always will be.

Three more films that also had a real effect on my visual education just when I was beginning my life in film at RIT, were all photographed by my “fourth” cinematographer, Owen Roizman, ASC. Those films would be “The Excorcist”, the original “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” and “Network”. Owen has such a commanding way of showing you how things really look, and what they’re supposed to look like. The choices that great shooters have made are what’s so interesting to look at; it makes you think about all the other things that might have been done in given situations but were not. And with certain people behind the camera you can’t believe there really would have been a better way to go.

The good news is, if you simply want to be inspired and educated about what’s possible when genius and instinct are involved, just watch the films I’ve mentioned by these four superb cinematographers, and more than once. These films weren’t shot yesterday, but then I’m only mentioning the work that was current when my brain was still in the “drying phase” regarding it’s “preference emulsion” and what I thought was inspirational. Nothing that you’ll see “today” is any better, it’s just more recent. Dozens of films are equally masterful in their cinematography at this point, and you draw from them too. The point is to see as much as you can, and you’ll see your own way soon enough. The bad news is you might well be too discouraged to continue as a shooter in your own right if you stay in front of these films too long – at some point you’ll have to get up and go do it yourself. When you get to where you hear a little voice that says “what do I want this to look like” instead of “what is this supposed to look like” and you’re willing to fight for it to be that way, you’ve got a chance.