Finished another 2 days of cinematography workshops at Northern Secondary School in Toronto. The group was a little smaller which was great for doing some more hands on demo’ing.
This group of students, along with Ernest C. Drury will now head into production as the make their films for the Toronto International Deaf Film and Arts Festival happening in May. Good luck to everyone!
Music video I shot for Klooch with Director Jeff Campagna is up. Jeff and I are planning another music video shoot at the end of this month.
My friend and fellow filmmaker Darrell Faria approached me a while back with this idea for a small personal project that he had. The idea was to shoot a timelapse shot of a banana slowly rotting over the course of a few days. The idea is to use this imagery as a way of speaking about global warming and how in fact something as simple as a banana is being affected, but has no choice in the matter, unlike humans who do. According to Darrell’s research, as well, the typical banana that we know of today aren’t the same as a string of earlier generation banana’s, who were wiped out due to a global change.
The timelapse is being shot with a Nikon D80 tethered to a computer and shots are being stored directly on the hard drive. A Nikon 50mm 1.4 is the lens we’re using. After some calculations I determined that it would be best to shoot 1 shot every 5 minutes for 24hrs a day. Darrell estimated with some earlier tests it will take at least 10 days to get the banana in the blackened state that he’s looking for. Eventually all the images will be strung together and outputted as a DVC-PRO HD file @ 24 FPS for post. There will be digital camera movement and other animation elements in the final with the intended length being 30 sec.
The banana’s are being lit with a workshop fluorescent light with Phillips Colortone 50 tubes which are 5000K tubes with a 96 CRI - unfortunately I couldn’t spare my Kino Flo’s for a whole 10 days or I would have used that instead. Safety and efficiency (we are after all shooting something about global warming!) had to come into play as the setup will be up for so long and often unattended.
The setup. Our hero banana’s sitting on some seamless. You can see the camera sitting on a wood block riser. I built the riser so Darrell could get to the battery compartment to change the batteries. With the camera sitting flush on the head you can’t get to it. In the end the batteries are dying a lot quicker and more frequently then we thought so we just bought a DC supply.
Dare checking last minute things.
Me lining up the shot.
I was fortunate to be asked to speak about cinematography at Ernest C. Drury Highschool for the Deaf in Milton to a group of students. A colleague and friend, Catherine MacKinnon, whom I worked with last year on a shoot, spearheaded this fantastic initiative that spent 3 days exposing students to the various elements of filmmaking (screen writing, producing, wardrobe design, etc) through various guest presenters.
The students will now take the skills that they’ve learnt and apply it to making short films as part of the Toronto International Deaf Film and Arts Festival in May. It was wonderful to see the students so enthusiastic about movie making and I can’t wait to see the films that they end up making.
I will be giving a similar presentation this week to Northern Secondary School in Toronto.
Group shot with the students. Some of the guest speakers and myself in the front row. Catherine MacKinnon, in red, who put this all together, in front with us also. Also pictured are some of the teaching staff and wonderful translators.
Wishing you all a happy New Year and best wishes as we all commence 2009.
There will be a major site overhaul in January as well as some new content from projects I shot in 2008. Stay tuned.
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