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Q&A

Patagonia's shoots did you do one route for the entire shoot or did you pick specific locations that you could easily get the gear two and had this kind of general concept in your head and some of those pieces looked like they might be hard to get some other route? Sure so with every piece that I'm going to show well let me answer that in a different way so over the next three days we're going tow create a mock concept and really break down exactly how we approach the situation how do you get the most from a single location? How do you I like to call it milk the situation for a cz much visual diversity is possible and that same rule applies I mean the on ly exception to that rule is an expedition if and I didn't have a chance that I'll show you in another one of our sessions um expedition style shoot where it's really very tae filmmaking it's documentary filmmaking and that's when it's just me I'm with athletes in a remote location I can't ask them to do it over I'm just recording as w...

e go and in that situation you have very little control but everything that I just showed you on the screen I'm making super intentional decisions about where we do things what's most efficient how do we maximize a single location? Because even with small cameras and lightweight equipment every time you have to move gear, you burn hours at a time, so the short answer to your question was that polartec shoot that we did in patagonia we had three locations, we had a ski location, a climbing location and we had a glacier location and we probably did not move more than three hundred fifty feet from the original location, but it's like once we would get to that spot we map that spot out, we're going to do it here in the backyard of the lake, we're going to take one tiny doc and a little, you know, section of water and we're going to create twelve different scenarios in that small zone I mean, literally a two hundred by two hundred foot space, we're going to shoot an entire tv spot and we're going to shoot two unique still images for an ad campaign and that's that's always the philosophy it's, how do you create is much content in a small space most efficiently and because rarely our client's willing to pay you to go to twenty five different locations usually it's how do you make the most in a single location? Good question, so I guess I'm always curious how much you have to do with the creative like the writing, I guess because like you look at why in all the athletes it's like what they say is gorgeous right and it's like I know I shoot a lot and I'm like they're just not cutting it like you know the contents not being delivered and like it's almost like what those guys all said was like, you know, pre scripted and some kind of curious on that and then also like the language on voiceovers like do you play a part in that and how much sure sure that's a great question and again I'm glad you're asking that question because one of the things we're going to do on wednesday morning we're going to set up an interview or a voiceover scenario and you'll really see me interact with our model with our talent and get out of them what we want for the tv spot now it's going to be a candle line that we're going to do for our mock assignment but really the answer is part of your responsibilities being that visual artist and having great stuff you know pierre on front on camera in that frame but the other part of your job is to him and I hate to say it like be oprah winfrey right? Like you're supposed to be able to get out of your subject created dialogue be sincere forget about all the technical crap that's happening with the cameras and actually engage with the person you're talking to and have an idea because it's probably I'm sure this will be surprising to you but why is one hundred percent a nco just interview it's I had I made a list of questions and I'm not a writer I mean, I'm a decent writer I can write remember I don't even have a college degree, but I can write when I have to and but I can think and I love telling stories on the storyteller and so every interview starts with a list of questions you know, single one sheet and on why I asked the same questions to each of the athletes sometimes two or three times I wanted to steer them in another direction if I heard they were making mistakes with the answers, they were fumbling a lot, I would re asked the question or I try to do it in a way where it's not awkward for them and and then what it really comes down to is we distill two hours of interview per person down to two minutes of content and you know that better than anyone that's the other art the craft of cutting interview down teo something that's you know, bite size and really powerful with the punch uh, on the heels of that question, how often are your clients coming to you with or rather how general are the concepts that your clients are coming to you with and how much of your own creative input is going into the right productions you know, there's kind of two spectrum's in one camp there's that let's say the polartec piece and I'm glad that I now I'm thinking about what I just showed you guys polartec you know, it's a big time ad agency donor out of detroit, they're very smart folks, highly creative, they really do do giant campaigns, they had a very clear vision of what they wanted they had, they had a feel for what the style they wanted, they didn't know how we would do it. They didn't know how you get to mountains like that or where those exist on the planet, and I think we surprised I know we blew them away with the way we operated that small footprint production and flying an rc helicopter on the ridgeline and having riel athletes in the field that were also creative to shoot it blew them away and they were used to hollywood style, and this isn't picking on hollywood. By the way, if there's anyone from hollywood watching it's just this is two thousand thirteen I mean this is the future is there's more channels of media, we need to deliver a lot more content to specific audiences. Every budget can't be a million dollars or half a million dollars, so with polartec there was a very preconceived idea and the copy the voiceover was written by the agency so there was a lot of collaboration between this's the agency vision what could I add to it was practical could we actually pull off what they wanted that's on one extreme and I would say that somewhere in the middle ground is thie average project between the ad agency concept and why we're at one hundred percent control usually it's somewhere in the middle there's a concept but they want me to do it my way and that's the sweet spot that's also you know when when you have more control is the filmmaker in the photographer it means you actually have a lot of creative freedom and it tends to be that the budget goes down because it's there's less communication communication takes a lot of time and of course with clients the more you work with the client the more they trust you and once they trust you that you're going to deliver the goods and they trust your creative vision that's kind of the ultimate that's the sweet spot so and we'll talk about also a cz we set up our mock assignment how much direction our mock client is going to provide to us and how much freedom they're going to give us a lot of freedom by the way uh some curious on the time between when the clients is hey we do you say yeah and you have no idea how to go do it and so when you're actually to that point, I'm in that situation right now I'd say yeah, I'll go do this and it's like, oh, crap, I gotta figure out what I'm gonna do it, you know, different country, the job's different country shooting from boats and water and psych stuff I've never done before we got here, I've never tested what kind of getting to your head about how you find the experts of how you go about right getting that comfort zone and stuff you've never done before? I mean, I always I mean, and I really believe this, you know, when I was sharpening my teeth and the kid in college and I'm not that old, you know, thirty seven years old, but it was a lot harder to find information, right? There wasn't this thing called the internet or a tte the very beginning of the internet bubble was when I was in college, and so the result was you'd go to the public library and you'd try to find a book about, you know, filmmaking or photography, and there were twelve options and that's it they were pretty pathetic books today we have the internet I mean, it's crazy that you, khun you can go to creative live, for example, and download, of course, and probably anything you want to know you could go to youtube and start watching like home made how to videos people have written belongs there's web sites there's discussion rooms never has information been more accessible if you're willing to spend time on the internet today you confined I mean icon the folks at night gone hate it when I say this but it's really true, I don't think I've read a manual in the last ten years for a nikon camera and the reason is I can go to youtube and I do a single googles are oranges google search how to turn on the interval ometer on the nineteen hundred and boom some guy I don't even know how he got the camera it's like I just unlike the first guy with the camera and someone's already done a youtube video and like how to turn on the interval ometer on the nikon d a hundred it's insane how much information is out there and you read these blawg posts? You know, for example, you go to my block and in my block you're going to see the names of people that I work with and like where we found information and we're going to link out too that it's all there it's all there and then the other key is take nothing for granted it really does take time to figure out what the hell you're doing in the field meaning if you think if you have a week it's instantly drop the other things you're doing if you possibly can and start really using the equipment not just reading about it but actually you know feet on the ground camera in hand making the mistakes because guaranteed if you're doing it for the first time on the job you're going to make some mistakes I still make a lot of mistakes wow, sorry I'm just blown away I don't know about being in the chat rooms I think I'm going to be just focusing on you and the videos everybody at home can just know all right we have some great questions here for you cory I'll start with pro photographer and cool crew we're both are kind of asking if you ever take stills from the video pro photographer says if you use an image from a video as a still shot will there be a significant qualitative difference from the actual still shot right so there's a little bit of a complex answer to that no when we're shooting on the sl ours occasionally we will pull a screen grab in fact in the lead up to creative live I wrote a few stories for different blog's for the photo shelter blawg for chase jarvis's blogged for f stoppers there's I wrote some different fun blonde posts about shooting stolen video and the mistakes you can make in the lessons that you need to learn and all of those block posts we pulled still images actually from d for indie eight hundred content so for the web again it's all about it's in the eyes of the final recipient for a block post probably pulling a still image from video from a d eight hundred d for d six hundred is fine absolutely it's um it's pretty low resolution there's some limitations you know, oftentimes them shooting at one fiftieth of a second when I'm shooting video and so you can't really capture action it tends to be a little bit softer so the answer's yes you khun do it could the polartec ad campaign print campaign have come from the one hundred video grabs absolutely not like the quality's not there it's it's full hd video it's nineteen twenty by ten eighty that's the maximum resolution of that file the exception to that rule some of the larger projects that were doing when we outgrow the d a hundred d for we need specific attributes that the d forty under don't provide, for example, ultra slow motion we might switch to a red camera and then you have a little more opportunity to pull a larger quality file, but it's still very limiting like you still shutter speeds an issue we'll get into some of those technical details, but I think we're still a long way from I think that what they're really asking online is when will we get to the point where you only have to shoot video and you can pull stills from that video? We're quite a ways out specifically when it comes to action. If you're shooting a lot of action content and you need ultra high resolution files there's a big difference between a fork a file in a thirty six megapixel file a lot of people were asking about all the aerial shots is that one hundred percent like a quadcopter? Are a lot of those on a crane or rig, right? Right. So definitely I was like an early adopter of rc helicopters, remote control helicopters. The most of the flying you saw was either mike hagedorn who's not here with us today or sean haverstock, who is here with us today and all at them speak to the specific helicopters that were being used originally it was an arctic copter, I think now it's actually a four armed copter with two blades on each of the arms wait, we're not using the cheaper go pro style for arm seems to be the best selling copter out there, but the answer is yes, every bit of aerial footage that you saw was rc helicopter, and then the reason is super clear the value, the expense of getting an rc helicopter in the air versus a real helicopter abell two twelve, for example you know, one is at the high end, a few thousand dollars a day versus a few thousand dollars an hour, and so small footprint production, you get a lot of value out of an rc helicopter. Great, we'll do one more question, marianne, who is from bucharest, romania? Ass or asking about, like, the super, the super slo mo shots of the kayak falling? Are you doing that? I mean, I don't know if that camera has sixty frames or if you're doing that post, are you doing that a camera? So we said the shot I actually I'm glad someone asked that question when we shot. Why we shot dane jackson and vera cruz, mexico going over tamada falls, which the big waterfall, the d for only a sixty frames per second. And so in the post production process, we used a software called twixt er to slow it down to probably close to a thousand frames per second is the way you see it on screen, but twixt there doesn't work in every scenario that was kind of a perfect scenario betwixt her toe work, it was a white water falls like a curtain of white, small, bright object right in the middle of that curtain of white, so we got really lucky that twixt their work. I mean, if we had to deliver that content, if twister didn't work, then you have to go to a camera that has can shoot fast. Basically, in a phantom camera, red camera.