Category Archives: Video clips

Random video clips that I’ve made from work in progress or elsewhere.

Truly Seen

I’m thrilled to share this short video, which I made in collaboration with the amazing story team at UW Medicine Advancement. I’m truly honored to work with people so profoundly dedicated to healing.

NOV. 22, 2019 UPDATE: This video is the Bronze winner in the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) awards 2020, in the short video category.

The story reveals how Mary Larson, a nurse for 23 years at UW Medicine’s Pioneer Square Clinic, has found a very special way to truly see her homeless patients.

For this project, we set 3 GoPros running over a 2-month period to capture Mary’s artwork taking shape. Everything else was shot on a Sony FS5. Nothing fancy, just SLOG0-2 8-bit 4K internal, graded with Alister Chapman’s lovely Venice Look LUT pack.

This is another in a long line of projects that uses my never shoot interviews methodology (for the primary story subject, at least). For the rest, we had an exceptional fine space to film our interviews in – the empty top floor of the Pioneer Square Clinic.

Here’s a sample frame from that interview. Looks almost naturally lit, doesn’t it?

Interview frame

But no! Any time you have a large window in the background of a frame, you know you need to bring a big gun to bring up your subject to match those background levels. Here’s the setup:

UW Medicine shoot w/ Mary Larson and subjects. Photo by Doug Plummer.

This technique is called “carrying the light,” which results in a very natural, almost imperceptibly lit look. We used a single Aputure 300d bounced into a 4×4 foam core, over which we draped a 1/4 grid cloth 8×8 fabric. We had to flag it off aggressively to keep the light off the background with a piece of black foam core that you can see tight against the side of the diffusion. But that’s it – one big light for one beautiful result.

It’s also another example of a framing technique I teach my students: For a pleasing frame, it’s often a good idea to frame your subject in a corner. Not literally – best to give them plenty of distance from the corner – but by lining up the corner behind them in the frame. This adds depth and dimension to the composition. And when you have a window, it’s frame naturally cuts the light off the wall, giving a pleasing light fall-off.

Focusing on food

Big, naturally lit locations help make food pop in Nordstrom restaurant recruiting video

Nordstrom has released a restaurant recruiting video that I had the pleasure of shooting for director Kent Worthington a few months back in Seattle and LA.

For this project we shot documentary style, moving quickly. Almost all of the shots used available lighting, which in our LA locations was absolutely beautiful, north-facing window light. Whoever designed the two LA restaurants was obviously thinking about light, and it shows in the clips.

I used a Sony FS5 with Atomos Inferno to shoot in SLOG-2 at 4K DCI.

Lenses were vintage Zeiss primes, with the 100mm Planar Makro seeing a lot of action.

Another day, another reason to love ProRes RAW

I saw some interesting clouds forming around sunset the other day, and thought it might be interesting to shoot a quickie timelapse. But then I considered the post-production slog required to deal with the raw files from my Canon 5dmkiii. Um, no. My Sony FS5 can shoot timelapses, but what’s the point of shooting a timelapse without raw? Then I thought, wait a minute, you haven’t yet tried shooting a timelapse with ProRes RAW.

So I popped on my Atomos Shogun Inferno, opened the timelapse menu, selected 1 frame every second, hit record, and opened a beer.

After the sun went down, I opened the 4k file on my MacBook Pro. It played back without dropping a frame as I skimmed through the file and assembled an edit. To grade it, I simply applied the excellent Venice-look LUT made by Alister Chapman. Then I made a couple of saturation and hue tweaks in the killer new FCPX hue/saturation curves. Fifteen minutes of work later, I was posting the results to Instagram.

An aside: Alister’s Venice LUT is the perfect LUT for shoot ProRes RAW with Sony FS5 and Shogun. That’s because it’s got multiple versions perfectly matched across both SLOG2 and SLOG3. Having both is essential for shooting with Sony FS5 (which monitors as SLOG2) and editing in FCPX (which opens as SLOG3). Using the appropriate LUT means you’re seeing the same thing in both places. You can download his LUT pack free, but please do tip him – for the price of a beer you can acknowledge the years of experience that Alister has put into creating those precision LUTs.

ProRes Raw is the real deal. Not just because it looks great (it does), but because it’s so easy to work with in post. If you had told me 6 months ago that I’d be editing 4K RAW files in real time on a 5-year-old MacBook Pro, I wouldn’t have believed you.

ProRes RAW is the reason why acquiring in 4K suddenly makes a whole lot of sense to me.

A side benefit: I typically would need to deflicker when shooting a timelapse on a DSLR. But there’s absolutely no deflickering needed when shooting with the Shogun’s timelapse mode.

Technical details:

Are you shooting with ProRes Raw yet? Got any tips for me?

 

 

New work shot with Fujinon MK-series zooms in Montana

UW just published a piece I shot last summer in Montana. It’s about a young woman who grew up on a ranch in a remote part of the state, who is well on her way to becoming a doctor, thanks to a UW Medicine program that helps train rural doctors.

This project was the second that I’ve shot primarily with Fujinon MK18-55 & MK50-135 T2.9 Cine-Style Lens Kit (E-Mount) on the Sony FS5.  However, I haven’t shot another one since. Not because I don’t love these lenses, but because I miss image stabilization.

If you’re working quickly, without much crew, there really is no substitute for image stabilized lenses. When I sat down to edit this piece, I had to reject way too many clips because they had uncontrollable jitters. I had to post-stabilize a ton of the rest, with less than perfect results in a couple of cases. Nevertheless, I’m proud of how this story came together in the edit.

For those jobs where you have the time to work from a tripod or other stabilization, I’d highly recommend the Fujinons. They make tracking and holding focus easy, even when subjects are walking directly toward camera.

 

 

 

 

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The Healing Power of Music

When Seattle Cancer Care Alliance asked me to make a film about their third year of sponsoring Northwest Folklife, I knew immediately what I needed to find: a performer who could speak from personal experience about the healing power of music.

With some help from Folklife staff, I found someone who knew someone who ultimately put me in touch with Ricky Gene Powell. As fate had it, he had been diagnosed with cancer last December and was being treated by Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. When I interviewed him at his home, he spoke very eloquently about his experience, and I knew we had our guy.

Next I set up a rehearsal at Seattle Center, where we shot the piece. He hadn’t told me anything about his band mates, but I thought I’d ask them all one question: Can music heal? So after they’d played a couple of songs, I paused them and popped the question.

Imagine my surprise when Jim Marsh told told me the story about his father, and his own story.

 

This project was the first I’ve shot with Apple ProRes Raw (although the A cam angle was shot in v-log on a GH5). I didn’t grade in 12-bit, however. I exported out ProRes 4444 files and sent them to my colorist, Kollin O’Dannel, who graded in Resolve.

I am planning to spend some more time with this project in FCPX, to dial in the basics of grading ProRes RAW in 12-bit. Stay tuned for another post on how that turns out.

Meanwhile, I hope to see both Jim and Ricky on the road to full health soon. And I look forward to more healing, powerful music from them both.

And I hope to see YOU at Folklife.

New video for Seattle Cancer Care Alliance

Here’s an informative little cancer video project my crew and I just delivered to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, a client that’s been keeping us very busy this summer. We’ll be doing a lot more videos of this kind for SCCA over the next few months, uncovering powerful human stories about these innovative healthcare providers and the patients they serve.

How it was lit

I typically start to light a scene by deciding which light to take away. In this case,  the lab was grossly over illuminated (for filmmaking purposes) with ugly overhead fluorescents. I wanted to separate the doctor from the background, through both luminosity and color. So I turned off half the overheads, the half behind the subject, and left the half in front of him on. Then, by setting my Sony FS5’s color temp to 3200K, I was able to create a nice blue wash in the background from light leaking through the closed windows. That created nice color separation. But his face was now too dark. I fixed that by filling  strongly with my LiteGear LiteMat2 placed camera left, through 1/2 grid cloth. Next, I gave a little blue kick to his shoulder with my lovely new Dedolight DLED7 through Hampshire frost. Then I just set the aperture on my Zeiss 50mm with Speedbooster to f/2.0, and boom! Done.

B-Roll

B-roll was all shot very quickly, handheld with Zeiss primes and a 100mm Canon macro for the tight stuff. When I got to cutting the piece, I was reminded why my Canon 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens is usually my go-go b-roll lens: because it is image stabilized! My FS5 is so ergonomically awesome, that I find myself shooting handheld more than ever. But when doing so, a lens with IS really is nice to smooth things out. Nevertheless, I sure do love that full-frame look of those Speedboostered Zeiss primes.

Sidebar: I am taking another look at Canon’s 24-70 f/4 IS lens, not because of its optics, but because of its image stabilization. In theory, with a Speedbooster it should look virtually identical to and be just as fast as my Canon EF 17-55 f/2.8, only with much better handholding because of it’s 4-stop hybrid IS. Will be experimenting with that combo on my Sony FS5 on an upcoming shoot and look forward to sharing the results.

Thoughts on 4K

I’m finally coming around to shooting my interviews in 4K. It really is nice to have the option to punch in for a tight shot pulled from a medium shot. But the drawback is focus. Focus is really, REALLY important to nail when shooting 4K. And on both the FS5’s LCD and my SmallHD 502 monitor, it’s harder to gauge focus in 4K, because the image looks a little smudged compared to HD. So it really does require careful monitoring during a shoot, especially when you do what I do, which is shoot damn near wide open all the time to visually separate the subject from their background.

I’ve shot with both the internally recorded 4K and with external recorders, and I gotta say, for the type of work I’m using it for (well lit interviews), the drawbacks of external recording outweigh the benefits of internal. Smaller file size counts for a LOT.

Many thanks to my crew – producer Sara Finkelstein, camera assistant Kollin O’Dannel (who took one for the team when he nearly fainted as the doctor described a surgery), and intern Alexandra Watkins who rolled sound.

A life-and-death decision

A Life and Death Decision

My most recent project, for UW Medicine, explains palliative care through the eyes of Mark and Alice Beaty, who faced a life-and-death decision when their son Adam was in a terrible accident.

Working on this video, I was reminded why story is king. Palliative care is a pretty dry topic to talk about, but listening to Mark and Alice tell their story is arresting. And by breaking up their story into several parts, we were able to get the client’s required background into the piece (who their largest donors are, etc.) without it becoming overwhelmingly boring.

This piece was shot over three and a half days of interviews, with b-roll comprised of stock footage, family photos and drone footage shot with my Phantom 2.

If there’s one thing I learned on this project, it’s that  a 2-person crew just doesn’t cut it for projects of this kind. My assistant Ryan Schwalm and I were physically overextended by having to push a huge cart of equipment around to the many locations. And a two-camera shoot really needs an operator for each camera – it’s not possible for me as director to do a great job interviewing AND maintaining focus.

I just finished another shoot for a different client in which I had a 5-person crew, including myself (gaffer/dp, grip, camera assistant, and sound recordist). That was a revelation to me: everything ran smooth, nobody was stressed out, the client was thrilled, and I actually enjoyed myself. Wow.

I will be planning for more crew on just about everything I do from here on out.

Total Inclusion: UW's Experimental Education Unit

The Experimental Education Unit is a school, located on the north side of the Montlake Cut just inside the University of Washington campus, that does impossible things every day by putting special needs students into classrooms with their typically developing peers.

This video, which Lisa Cooper and I produced for the University of Washington, was shown at a fundraising auction this weekend. It features founding director Dr. Norris Haring reflecting on his dream for the program, which is today a reality.

This is the second video I’ve made for EEU (the first one you can see here). I wanted to get as close as possible to the amazing faces of the kids, so we shot with 100mm macro and 80-200mm zoom for much of the production. I also shot quite a bit of 60p, which at times I conformed to 24 for some lovely slow motion.

"Add IndieFlix" campaign launches

Today our client IndieFlix, a Seattle movie streaming service, released a 30-second spot we produced for them, with some amazingly talented people.

IndieFlix CEO Scilla Andreen provided the location for the shoot: her living room, which we converted into a studio for a day. Her son Ian (home on winter break from college), and daughter Natalie both make brief appearances in the video, and worked as PAs on set.

Ruben Rodriguez is a young documentary filmmaker we have worked with in the past, and for this project we brought him on as PA. Ruben ended up on the other side of the lens too, playing a young filmmaker musing on how much he likes getting paid. Say it for all of us, Ruben!

Randall Dai, Telissa Steen and Victoria Kieburtz are in the picture, all of whom we met from short narratives we worked on last summer for the 48-hour film project and The Last Light. Jeff Hedgepeth, one of our main characters in Beyond Naked, pitched in, as did some of Lisa’s dance community friends including Susan Rubens, Leslie Rosen, and Dennis Richards.

Thank you to everyone for bringing your talents to the project and we look forward to working with you again soon.