Slow It Down A Little....

Ever wish you could attain that amazing "300"esque, water droplet dripping, emo-music video rain pouring slow motion effect on your visual creations WITHOUT having to go into debt, blowing cash and credit cards on a Phantom Camera rental?

Fortunately, RE:Vision Effects has developed TWIXTOR, an incredible effects plug-in that has the ability to take video and stretch out frames at the pixel level and conform them into frame rates reaching upwards of 1,000 frames per second. An example of this can be seen in Oton Bacar's work, featuring the Canon 7D, originally shot 720p at 60 frames per second and TWIXTORized to 1,000 frames per second! Like Dave Chapelle said, everything always looks better in slow-mo.

Though at nearly $600 for a pro license, this wicked piece of alchemy isn't cheap nor perfect, but it far undercuts the Phantom, saves a budget allowing us to put the production value on the screen and can ultimately be shared costs amongst partners in order to achieve similar ambitions.

All Gifted Reading October 2010

Saturday, October 30th, 2010 saw the latest reading of All Gifted, a re-imagined action thriller featuring Pandora, in a contemporary vision that follows her crusade to reclaim the evils she released thousands of years ago, and the many players who have their own schemes in either helping the "mortal" world, or condemning it.

Thanks to all involved! Stay tuned, more to follow as the journey to re-imagining Pandora continues!! Check out the pics below and see All Gifted: The Meet & Greet, a proof of concept to give you a peek at what's in store for the coming of a new Pandora!

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO THE LEFT!

A special thanks to photographer and illustrator Joe Nunez for documenting this event! See more about him HERE!

Behind The Scenes...

Digging in the archives opened my eyes to some amazing behind the scenes stills, taken during our production of Inspiration Transformed. Brought to life by the talents of Adriana "Adi" Spencer, Cory Antiel,  Candice Vernon & Anthony Burwell, you can check out this love story short by scrolling to the bottom HERE! See more of the Behind The Scenes stills of Inspiration Transformed HERE!

This past weekend saw visual storytellers UNITE! In the first ever Double 7 Images shoot, C3Stories was honored to be a part of the shoot to launch a new campaign that will redefine what 360 degree storytelling really is! Check out some of the pics from this shoot HERE! More stills and the intro, coming soon!

Lastly, check out the intro to The Bridge.TV website that takes you into the world of The Bridge, A one-hour cable TV series and Interactive Media Platform giving you a first person account to what it takes to keep a club running and the many stories involved!

No Strings Attached: New Wireless Live Video Monitoring On Set!!

All in-car footage is 1080i @ 3Mbps using H.264 High Profile Level 4.1 compression.

On much larger expensive production sets, I remember always seeing "video village". A technological cadre of displays all serving a different purpose. Whether it was the producers making sure money was being well spent, or the Director and talent reviewing the playback, or the Digital Technician just making sure the image coming onto to Film, Tape, or Card was A-OK, video village was always key.

One thing I also remember were the endless cords that went on from the camera to the video village, in some cases, the lengths of football fields!! Though necessary, very cumbersome, time consuming to set up and breakdown and heaven forbid you trip on a cord that wasn't tied down properly. MEDIC! A company just coming to my attention, TERADEK, has developed a wireless video transmitter that REMOVES the wires entirely! All you need is a wireless connection like Apple's Airport or router, some free share ware and it is game-on.

Currently utilizing free shareware VLC, the video signal coming from The CUBE, is streamed wirelessly to one's laptop, using an account created via Teradek's site. Coming plans are to have VLC become APPS for the Iphone and Ipad, thus giving all of us recent DSLR visual storytellers something to make you EVEN MORE SEXY- and portable. It also gives bonafide productions a way to become more sleek and streamlined where time is truly money. Shout out to Teradek, VLC and Philip Bloom, who shared his first hand experiences with the device here using the Canon 5D Mark 2 AND the RED.

To see Teradek's testing of the Cube device in real world scenarios CHECK OUT THEIR VIDEOS ON VIMEO! To a safe, recharging, productive weekend people!

Progress...

Thought I'd share a video by some folks over @ CREWS.TV who got a chance to check out a test model of Panasonic's new AF-100/101/2. Looking good, and it's still being improved before it ships, stay tuned. See THIS LINK for my original post of what new toys Panasonic has to offer.

This is an independent evaluation by members of CREWS.TV of the Panasonic AG AF 101/102 micro 4/3 camera.