In LA

Fitz and the Tantrums – Out of My League from Jordan Bahat on Vimeo.

My friend Jordan directed this music video for the band Fitz and the Tantrums (released on 4/22 on VH-1 and on the band’s web page and on vimeo in better quality), and I got to help plan and execute a technically unorthodox portion of the shoot. It’s a little odd for me to be involved on the production end of a project and to not work all the way through post-production (on films, post often lasts for more than a year) –but it was fun to shoot a bunch of stuff, hand it to the producer, and then see the final result weeks later. Now I know a little better how production folk must feel. Kudos to Jordan and producer Taylor for seeing the project through to the end.

At around 30 seconds in, you’ll start to see the lo-fi 3D imagery I helped capture and visualize –point clouds and wire-mesh renditions of members of the band, rendered from various virtual camera positions.

The data was shot head-on from a fixed camera position¹, using a Canon 5DmkIII DSLR to capture video and a Microsoft Kinect sensor connected to a laptop to capture a video depth map. The DSLR and the Kinect were locked to one another with a 3D-printed mount. Jay Trautman² (thanks!) operated the laptop while I manned the DSLR.

The depth information for each pixel (or ‘D’) captured on the Kinect was recorded and later paired with the video info for that pixel (RGB) using a piece of free software³ called RGBDToolkit. It’s fun to play with. If you’ve got a Kinect and a video camera, you might give it a try.

There were some even-more-ambitious 3D data capture techniques at play during the shoot, involving an array of kinects and cameras (thanks Cedric!), which I’ll talk about another time. The non-3D shots were also captured on a Red Epic camera by D.P. Andrew Wheeler and his team.

My cousin Jenny did some great storyboards for the video, if they make it into her portfolio I’ll link to ‘em. A ton of other people worked on the video. I’ll link to the full credits soon if I can find them.

1. i.e. the camera was locked into position using a tripod [↩]
2. I worked with him previously on The Man with the Iron Fists [↩]
3. free as in beer and as in “MIT license” [↩]

Perhaps that title is a bit dramatic. As best I can tell, one of the engines is bad, shut down in flight, and then its pylon snapped free from the wing. The copter/plane is all patched back together now, and will be ready to fly again as soon as I receive a new motor and two replacement propellers.

Video was captured using a GoPro camera mounted to the Quadshot Mocha multicopter’s built-in tripod mount, and an 808 keychain camera #11 with D lens velcro’d to the Gopro (accidentally rotated to the vertical).

More to come.

People often ask me for recommendations for DSLRs with which they can shoot video. I think the Canon Rebel series of cameras (T2i, T3i, T4i) are the best bang-for-the-buck in that category. Today, perhaps in celebration of Ridiculous_Invented-name_Consumerism-holiday¹, a couple of very good deals on nice entry-level Canon DSLRs have popped up. I read about these deals on the site cheesycam, which is a site I would recommend to any budget-minded filmmaker who is looking to save money and can manage to not buy so many good deals as to render the idea of “saving money” a bad joke.

Deal 1: $499 for Canon T3i DSLR Kit (includes a lightweight and dim 18-55mm lens with built-in stabilization)

Deal 2: $669 for Canon T3i kit with 18-55mm kit lens and 2 additional lenses (55-250mm, 75-300mm). I tend not to recommend lenses that cover long ranges as there are so many design compromises that go into maximizing that range that other qualities of the lenses suffer, but in this case they come out to costing very little. If you don’t like them you could probably sell them on eBay afterward and cover a portion of the cost of the camera.

As far as I know, the video quality of the Canon T3i is identical to that of the T4i and T2i, and pretty indistinguishable from that of the 7D and 60D. If you need such a thing, both of the deals listed above seem pretty good to me.

1. “Cyber Monday”, ew. [↩]

It’s not every day I see a film I’ve worked on listed on the Fatwallet Hot Deals forum as a hot deal. But today’s that day.

Assuming the deal lasts at least until this link is clicked, Amazon’s selling The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray] for $5.99. That’s a two-disc set full of tons of extras. Even if you’re just technically-minded, those extras alone are worth the cost, as it’s fun to see how the tons of VFX shots were executed. I’m not just talking about the head replacement –the boat floated in an impressive CG sea, actors were aged and youthened, foreign and domestic locations stood in for one another. Lots of groundbreaking VFX.

I’d previously posted when the film was at Amazon for $14.99 back in late ’09. I don’t really understand how film retaling works, I’d love to see a graph of its pricing over time, I wonder if this is a normal price decrease or if they’re hoping to spike Christmas sales.

Regardless the reason, this is a good deal. I think the DVD’s $1.99. But if you can play Blu-ray, go that route. It’s a great-looking film.

Here’s a table of links to all of Blackmagic CEO Grant Petty’s posts to his company’s forums regarding the Blackmagic Cinema Camera‘s manufacturing delays. Apart from the whole “you’re not getting your camera yet” part, they’re a fun read; the sort of engineering details one gets access to as a backer of a kickstarter project. I found the 11/7 update to be full of particularly interesting details.

9/25/12	Update on Camera Shipments
10/19/12	Camera Shipping Update: 10/19
10/29/12	Camera Shipping Update: 10/29
11/7/12	Camera Shipping Update: 11/7
11/15/12	Camera Shipping Update: 11/15
12/14/12	Camera Shipping Update: 12/14

This naked gopro housing fit perfectly on the various gopro mounts. I need to modify the design to get it to better fit the gopro with Wifi Bacpac attached.

LCD panel in progress to control my printrbot+ without a computer.

Snoop Lion (née Dogg) recorded the song, Eli Roth directed the video, and I helped with some of the VFX and did the color grading.

In case you were wondering about the proximity of kids to smoking fruit or brightly-colored animals, fear not, it’s all an illusion –the animations and smoke were added in post. Granted, smoking has fallen out of favor in the modern age, but pineapples don’t even have lungs, so they don’t face the same risks as humans.

I got my hands on a prototype BlackMagic Cinema Camera for a couple of hours last week. To cut to the chase, I was blown away by the dynamic range recorded by this camera, was impressed by the level of detail in the images, and I didn’t find the super-16 sized sensor to be nearly as much of a limitation as I’d expected. Using great Canon EF-mount lenses I already own, I was able to execute the kind of images I wanted, and at better quality than the video from any DSLR.

If you haven’t yet heard of the BlackMagic Cinema Camera (henceforth BMCC) and you are a filmmaker, it’s time for you to read up on it, watch a review, and view a great comparison between the BMCC and the Canon 5D mark III DSLR. As long as BlackMagic manages to ship the BMCC in bulk, people will be making tons of very good looking low-budget films using this camera, and it’s going to displace many DSLRs and prosumer camcorders. The image quality for the price is unmatched.

Did I mention dynamic range? Here’s a still frame from a clip shot at the latter end of dusk. The camera was set to its minimum ASA setting of 200, which explains why the initial image looks very dark. Because The BlackMagic Cinema Camera records each 2.5K frame of video as an individual 5Mb 12-bit raw file, and because its sensor captures a staggering 13-stops of dynamic range, there is much information in the shadows (and highlights) of the image that can be revealed when adjusting the image. I knew this, but was still amazed to see just how much information was waiting in the shadows. Click the ‘graded’ link below the image, drag the green handle to the left and right, or tap around within the image if on a mobile device, to compare the original image to the graded version.

Here’s another still, from a clip shot slightly earlier in the evening. It initially looked unsalvageably dark, which is pretty close to how it looked to the naked eye in real life. I adjusted the image and warmed the color temperature a little bit to see how far I could pull it. The result I’m going to call “night-for-day shooting”! (again, click the ‘graded’ link or drag the handle to compare the original and processed image).

One more before-after comparison; I do prefer the stark, silhouetted look of this as shot, and our model Erik really knows how to create drama when striking a pose –but if it were part of a scene in a film in which the actor’s facial expression was important, it’d be nice if there were detail in the shadows to bring up. With the BMCC, there is that option.

My biggest concern with the BMCC related to its sensor size. I was worried that, in order to shoot a decent medium shot of an actor while throwing the background slightly out of focus, I’d need to back away from the actor so far that the image would take on a distant, flattened, surveillance-ish feel. But this shot reassured me that this wasn’t going to have to be an issue.

It was great to get a chance to play with this camera and evaluate its potential. It exceeds the hype. We’re going to see good things coming from BMCCs, assuming BlackMagic can get them shipping in bulk soon. And I hope they do, because a couple of days after I shot these tests I sold off a piece of equipment I’d deprecated and pre-ordered my BMCC.

This video makes me so happy:

During the 2+ hours it took to print the full-scale Yoda Lite at .2mm layer height the other day, I decided to power up the DSLR and LED light, and document the process. The result is this short video which includes many handheld macro shots of my Printrbot+ in action.

The music is Kenichi Ōkuma’s track for the Flat Zone 2 level of the Wii game Super Smash Bros. Brawl; A gratingly blippy tune¹ that evokes 60s-era space age lounge. I wouldn’t normally use commercial music, but as far as I can tell this track is unavailable for purchase (at least in the USA), and it deserves some exposure outside of the 4-year-old video game for which it was composed.

1. I use the word “grating” with much love, I admire the way the otherwise unpleasant beeps form a catchy tune. [↩]