Guest post by Stewart Copeland:

One year ago, I came across a picture of Roger Smith, showing him towering over his diorama of a baseball stadium. Spectators lined the balsa wood bleachers and players covered the felt field. Each person – there were more than a hundred in all – was meticulously carved from the pit of a peach. I was at the opening of an exhibit showing portraits of rural and traditional artists by photographer Dean Dixon. My previous film Let Your Feet Do The Talkin’ was playing alongside it and while I was waiting for the screening to start I became mesmerized by Roger’s picture.

His work was quirky without being kitsch; the characters were lighthearted and playful yet each seemed to have a personality as if they had lived an entire life before they walked in to the stadium. The carvings were astonishing, the craftsmanship flawless, the subject matter brilliant, but what made me want to learn more about Roger was his face. He was absolutely lovely. I looked up Roger in the phonebook the next day and the following weekend we began making the film.

Roger Smith with one of his creations

The first couple of times I met with Roger we would sit at his dining room table and just talk. Occasionally we would talk about his art and inspiration, but mostly we talked about his cows and the weather. As Roger and I became more comfortable with each other I brought over a Zoom H4n and a Canon 7D and recorded some of our talks and eventually started directing our conversations towards topics pertinent to the film. Over the course of three months I had done four one-hour interviews and shot about 11 hours of footage mostly on weekends and intermittent week nights. I had gathered enough material to cut a trailer. This is an essential step for me for a few reasons: A) Cutting a trailer lets me develop the look of the project and helps convey the overall aesthetic of the film to whatever crew may come aboard during production; B) The trailer is essential to fundraising, in our case, a small crowd sourcing campaign that financed the entire project; C) Making a trailer early in production lets me see how a subject reads on camera and helps me direct more efficiently as I get deeper in to production. Thanks to the trailer, we were able to round up $3,500 which afforded me the opportunity to take off for a week, hire a sound person and cameraman, and spend seven days shooting to complete the movie.
 

On location

In one of our early conversations Roger said, “When I’m carving I turn a seed over and over and look at it for a long time to see what would be right to carve from it.” This stuck with me and when my dear friend and fantastic photographer, Cody Stokes, came to shoot for a week we tried to apply the same technique to our filming. Instead of chasing around action we would set up a frame and let the camera run longer than normal. The result was magical. The subtlest things became significant; a change in the wind or a shift in the light felt dramatic. I believe that emulating Roger’s process gave me a deeper understanding of how he perceives the world and the pace, tone, and feel of the film reflect that revelation. 
 

Shooting with the 7D

Mr. Smith’s Peach Seeds is my first documentary using a DSLR. I ran into all the familiar problems associated with video-capable SLR cameras i.e. capturing sound, shooting handheld, recording time limits, etc. But the strangest hurdle I faced was overcoming the seduction of the DSLR image quality. I’m not a gear nerd. I never have been. But there was a moment during the shoot when I found myself using a slider and I realized I was in danger of drifting wildly off course. DSLRs and their seemingly endless arsenal of lenses and accessories provided a creative freedom that I had never experienced in video. However, I got dangerously close to falling down the rabbit hole of tilt-shift lenses and time-lapse b-roll. DSLRs are incredible cameras that can produce fantastic and wonderful images, but I had to take a step back a couple of times and remind myself what I was doing: I was there to tell Roger’s story and be respectful of his reality, not contort and distort his universe to make it look “cooler” on screen.

Marshall monitor on the 7D

After we wrapped production I let the footage sit for about a month before I started editing. It took about two months to edit and when I finished I sent it to a friend in Nashville, David Poag, to color it. My father, Kyle Copeland, did the score. I don’t like my subjects to see any footage while I’m still shooting. I feel it alters the way they behave on camera, but I always watch a rough with them before it’s finished just to make sure there isn’t anything embarrassing or uncomfortable for them in the piece. When Roger first saw the film he teared up and said, “I wish my mother could have seen this.”

 
Equipment:
Canon 7D (2)
Canon 50mm f1.4
Tokina 11-16mm f2.8*
Canon 24-70mm f2.8*
Canon 70-300mm f4-5.6
Redrockmicro Follow Focus*
Marshall 7” LCD Monitor
Cavision Shoulder Rig
Manfrotto 055XB Tripod
Manfrotto 501HDV Head
Zoom H4n audio recorder
Sennheiser G3 Wireless Lavalier
Audio-Technica AT875R Short Shotgun Mic
 
*The equipment marked with asterisks I rented from Lensrental.com. They are an incredibly helpful company.
 
Stewart Copeland is a documentary filmmaker from Tennessee. His films have played nationally and internationally and broadcast on POV and The Documentary Channel. Stewart is also the recipient of the prestigious Individual Artist Fellowship through the Tennessee Arts Commission. His last two documentaries were Jennifer and Let Your Feet Do The Talkin’, both films are available through the Grammy Award Winning label Dust-To-Digital. See his work at www.stewstew.com or follow him on twitter @stew_stew

Guest post by Mark Tipple:

Ocean : West Away from Mark Tipple on Vimeo.

The idea behind West Away:
A number of years ago I used to meet up with my friends Mike and Luke in various remote parts of the country to spend a week surfing, camping in the dirt and telling stories; then part ways with plans to meet for the next swell or favorable wind pattern. As the years passed I left that lifestyle behind but for some time now I have been itching to get back into it. As I enter my thirties I still have the drive to search and explore – I wanted to discover what motivates me to do this.

So last year we reunited for a week and drove more than 6,000 kilometres. On the way we found some super fun waves and explored places we had previously researched on the map but had never reached before. We left knowing that December isn’t the best time for waves out there, but hoping the swell and wind would align and make the effort worthwhile.

‘West Away’ is a short about the passion behind the endless kilometres travelled to the places we want to explore, which I hope will resound with people who either live that lifestyle or, like me, can relate to the effort we used to go to just to get a few waves.

Shooting West Away:
I was somewhat of a newcomer to the Canon 5D mkII for filming. In late 2009 I was working on a shoot for a shark diving film where we were looking at HDSLRs to put in an underwater housing – helping us get physically closer to the sharks than our housed Sony EX-3 camcorders could. I ended up choosing the Canon 7D to utilize its 60P function. I had been looking at and using the 5D mkII and loved the image, but the 60P mode on the 7D outweighed this and 8fps for stills meant it was a very practical cam for underwater and sports.

Since filming Shark Diver I’ve used the 7D primarily for stills, with a bit of filming in-between for other projects. I’d used a friend’s 5D mkII sporadically for photo assignments, but it was always as a backup to my regular 1DS mkII, my workhorse for above-water stills shooting.

Then I used the 5D mkII on a short film in the middle of last year and was surprised at the difference in quality from the 7D. After some number juggling I decided to make the switch from the 1DsII to the 5D mkII for everything above water.

When I was planning for ‘West Away’ I spent some time thinking about camera format and each logistical challenge, as well as the actual feel I wanted to convey to the audience. Did I want to shoot everything at 60p to have the option of slow motion, or did I want the realism of 25p even though it’s not as smooth as 60p? Would the 5D mkII full frame sensor cause more problems than it was worth or would the 7D 1.6x crop work better for the style I wanted?

I knew we’d be bouncing over dirt roads and scaling down cliffs for most of the trip, and with sand, dust and salt spray I wondered if something like the Sony EX-1 would be better than a DSLR (inbuilt neutral density filters and sound recording options would be appreciated and would avoid accessories dangling off the side of a DSLR). But I knew the water footage would be on the housed 7D, so I settled on the 5D mkII for the land footage as I had previous experience of switching between formats on my previous Shark Diver filming – I wasn’t keen to repeat this again.

I wanted the viewer to feel as if they were in the car and on the cliffs journeying with Mike and Luke. I planned to shoot the exploration mostly handheld – but use tripod for locked off shots and smooth pans for the land-based surfing footage.

The format I wanted was footage of searching and surfing, overlaid with them talking about the trip and why they choose to take a path less travelled. I’d get this narration from a sit down interview. I also wanted to let the surfing footage run longer than just the start and finish of the wave, to give a better sense of the whole experience. This alone would be different to what’s been done before in the surf scene, and would let us see their reaction to a failed move or a blown barrel.

This all seemed like a good idea until the fifth hour ticked over on a 38 degree windswept beach, hiding under a towel to swap cards and digging my buried backpack out of the piled-up sand.

At times when we were running over sand dunes I knew that the footage I was shooting would be shaky and possibly not even usable; but since the trip was all about exploration and the journey I’d be able to reference this in the sit down interview. Later in the edit I was surprised at how the shaky footage fitted and helped bring the viewer along for the ride.

In the middle of the trip we were bunked down in the dirt for a few days, miles from town for a few days. I was thankful that at the start of the trip I had completely overstocked with six 32GB memory cards and eight batteries – a few days of surfing and exploring took up most of my available storage. I also had a small HyperDrive Colorspace with me for emergency backup. After the third day of camping we packed up and drove 90 minutes to a pub for a well deserved meal and data transfer. While eating and downloading footage I got online through my tethered iPhone – we found the live stream of the Fronton surfing competition in the Canary Islands which gave us a mid-trip amp. We must have confused the heck out of the local farmers looking at three punk kids with computers, cords and cables running everywhere.

I chose the kit Canon 24-105mm f4L lens for the shots of us searching. I’m not usually the biggest fan of an f4 aperture lens but the image stabilizer was a godsend for hours of handheld shooting whilst running over sharp rocks. I also brought the Canon 100-400mm along for the land surfing footage.

Traditional surf photography that’s shot straight ahead, closely cropped on the wave and surfer, has never really interested me. When we found a beach with rock protrusions and steep cliffs in the background I was stoked to put something in the foreground and utilize wider apertures. It also meant I could sit in the sand and take the pressure off my old weary back. ND faders were on each lens at all times; however, I found wide open on the 100-400mm the image wasn’t exactly sharp and had to stop the lens down instead.

I didn’t want the added bulk of a shoulder rig, but also didn’t want to shoot handheld. I looked at the Zacuto Target Shooter and other similar rigs. I eventually went with a DIY rig made of a cut-down curtain rod and two umbrella flash swivel brackets for chest support and a point of contact on the face with an LCDVF loupe. It worked, but I kicked myself on the first day as the way I’d attached the wireless lav receiver and Zoom recorder to the rig – with cable ties – fell apart.

Luckily, the format I wanted would rely heavily on the interviews to provide the dialogue for the film, and so I felt comfortable not worrying too much about the location sound. The on-board shotgun mic feeding camera audio would be fine. I didn’t end up using any of the location sound anyway.

We used both cameras for the interview; as an afterthought I asked Mike and Luke to use the 7D to shoot each other handheld for another angle to cut to from the locked off 5D mkII. In post I found the handheld style fit better with the cutaways for brief talking sync. In hindsight I wish we had used the 5D mkII for this as well – it would have made grading a little easier.

In the water I used a small SPL underwater housing and Tokina 10-17mm fisheye lens on the 7D shooting at 720/60p.

Style is subjective, but this is one that I’m drawn to and chose for the purpose of bringing the viewer along for the ride. It is also a style that is drawn from my photography background, the difference being that the final product is a 10 second clip vs a single frame.

Mark Tipple has emerged as a notable documentary photographer over the past 3 years.
As the principal photographer of The Underwater Project, an ongoing reportage showcasing Australia’s relationship with the ocean, he aims to bring light to stories traditional media shies away from.
Mark’s clients include Edify, The Salvation Army, World Vision, Christian Surfers, House With No Steps, Planet Ocean, Beyond Water, The Guarani Project, and 100Revs. His work has been seen in or on The Australian, The Telegraph, The BBC, G1.com, The Independent, National Geographic and Discovery Channel.

By Ahmed Elhusseiny

Every year, somewhere in the middle of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, a diverse and motley group of people from around the globe gather for the annual counterculture arts festival-cum-social experiment known as Burning Man.
 
I had heard stories about the festival and bits and pieces from friends and had seen enough images of the event to have some general idea of the aesthetic of the place. It was really that aesthetic rather than any kind of experiential or narrative aspect that was for me, the primary draw. Here was an entire city full of extravagant set pieces, whimsical vehicles, and fully costumed extras, set down in the middle of an almost otherworldly desert landscape that only magnified the surreal characteristics of the entire scene – all just waiting to be filmed.
 
When a chance arose to attend last year’s “Burn” the prospect was too good to pass up.
 
Technically it wasn’t the easiest shoot to plan. For starters, let’s talk about dust. Not just any dust, but the finest, highly alkaline powder that I have ever seen (and having grown up in Egypt, believe me I’ve seen my share of dust and sand). I knew that there was no way I would be changing lenses outdoors. The “playa dust” got absolutely everywhere, and I was already placing quite a bit of (well justified, it turns out) trust in my Canon 7D weather seals. What this meant was that I would usually choose a lens and use it all day. If I came across a shot that I felt required a different lens, I would take a mental note of it and hope that it was still there when I came back the next day. I did lose a few potentially good shots that way, but I was able to capture a great deal more and still have a functioning camera at the end of the trip to boot so I think it was a fair trade-off.

Shooting at night was another technical challenge. I love my 7D dearly but there were times when I was shooting at night that I would have sold an arm and a leg (preferably not my own) for a 5D mkII with better low-light performance. First to be sacrificed to the light sensitivity gods was the 60fps I had been shooting at. I needed every split second of shutter speed so it was down to 24fps. Next was going wide open when I could, and when I needed more than a few hairs’ width of depth of field I had to crank up the ISO all the way to 6400 on some shots. This obviously resulted in a lot of noise and a surprising amount of compression artifacting. I was able to use some of the most affected shots only after running them through Neat Video’s denoise plug-in for After Effects. I had never used an external denoise plug-in before but it was pretty phenomenal. Shots that I had completely given up on ended up becoming more than usable. One shot that was beyond salvage took place just before the Trojan horse burn and involved convincing the crew (all actual, real life fishermen) of a New England lobster boat turned mutant desert vehicle, to let me climb up the ship’s 60ft mast to film the scene from above. I’m afraid the violent swaying of the boat due to the all the revellers dancing on the decks below, coupled with the difficulty of filming with one hand while holding on for dear life with the other, meant that the resulting footage was a blurry, shaky, unsalvageable mess. I wonder if an IS lens along with generous cleaning up/stabilization in post could have saved the day? A question for another shoot I guess.
 

It turned out that the biggest challenges, however, were not technical at all but more a byproduct of the eclectic and unpredictable nature of the subject matter. This may seem elementary but context, exposition, pacing and framing the subject become even more critical when the subject matter is so surreal and disconnected from anything that we can easily associate with a cognitive benchmark. The temptation to try to match the exuberance of all the weird and wonderful structures, contraptions and costumes with “enthusiastic” camera motion and trick editing is a common pitfall that I recognized in a great deal of the videos I had seen of earlier Burns, and one that I made a conscious decision early on to avoid.

Both parts but “Day” in particular were very deliberately paced to allow the viewer to gradually settle into the atmosphere. Wide shots were used extensively to convey the sheer scale of the city within the desert before transitioning to tighter, more carefully composed compositions where careful layering of foreground and background along simple horizontal motion provided much of the visual interest. The ever-present cloud of dust at eye level also enabled a wonderful degree of separation between visual planes that added greatly to the sense of depth in many of the shots even when filmed with small aperture openings and a significant amount of depth of field.
 
I ended up with two very different videos for “Night” and “Day” and not just for the obvious reasons. “Day” was much more structured, controlled and restrained. In my view it has a more architectural quality to it that makes it the more successful of the two. Others have told me that they preferred “Night” and it is certainly the more vivid, warmer, and more familiarly “human”. Ultimately, I’m happy I had the chance to finally experience the event in person and come away with a short, personal document of my time there.
 
Ahmed Elhusseiny is a Brooklyn, New York based Designer, Architect, Photographer, and Filmmaker. You can find out more about his work on his website.

By Jonah Kessel

2012: The Year of the Dragon from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

The plan was simple: to one-up ourselves.

One year earlier friends and filmmakers Paul Morris, Kit Gillet and myself decided to make a short video documenting some of the fireworks in Beijing as China celebrated the Lunar New Year.

In fact, I even wrote about the experience on this blog here. Exactly one year later — we decided to do it again. However, this time — we wanted to go bigger. Much bigger.

This is a really interesting experiment: to come back to a video you made exactly one year later and reevaluate its strengths and weaknesses, and then try again. I believe this experience is a good check on your progress as a filmmaker and makes you step back and evaluate everything you do from shooting, to workflow to the art of story telling itself.

2011: The Year of the Rabbit from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

After we screened last year’s video we all agreed — it was kind of a stereotypical DSLR video with no real narrative. Pretty pictures, not enough of a story. There are a lot of these on the web.

This year, we wanted to tell the story of Chun Jie (Chinese New Year). However, we wanted to do it in such a way that would require very little dialogue. We wanted images to tell the story, but still have some voices in the piece — with the goal of keeping our own voices out of it. We wanted it to be cinematic but at the same time — real and unrehearsed. And while last year, we had no imposing deadlines, this year we would need to turn the video over in 36 hours to the New York Times. Now the experiment became — how to tell a story better than we had last year, shoot, process, translate and edit the footage — and transmit on China’s dodgy internet connections in less than 36 hours.

As we planned for the story and began to factor in the chaotic nature of China — we decided to bring in some more friends. Shooters Jim Fields and Keith Bedford would join our team, allowing us to be in multiple locations at once showing a wider variety of images from the celebration. We crafted a schedule, shot list and found an old man who via an interview we would setup as the story teller of Chun Jie, allowing us to dip out from narration.

To help to visually enforce the man as a story-teller and not just some old guy off the street, we put a pretty strong grade on his shots. We added about 15 points of sepia, added a vignette, desaturated, added contrast and sharpened a small bit. The hope was to visually represent the traditions that go along with this holiday for Chinese people by making him a bit more historic looking.

We encountered some of the same difficulties we did last year. The rolling shutter issue being a big and relatively unsolvable issue. While DSLRs are great for many things — for fireworks they are not. We did some tests and while we know we couldn’t stop it from happening, we did find ways to mitigate the effect. We found if fireworks were exploding at a fast enough pace to cause the rolling shutter, it would show up significantly less if the angle of the camera was in a relative perpendicular axes to the exploding object. Pulling further away from the object also helped a lot. However, in general, if you are using a DSLR and information is being recorded across the sensor in a horizontal motion as they do, and your subject happens to be exploding at an extremely high speed — you are simply using the wrong camera.

Nonetheless, we avoided it as much as possible and wrestled with the other innate problems of shooting fireworks such as exposing for something that (a) hasn’t happened yet and (b) you don’t know what will happen when it does explode. Dealing with quickly dying batteries in -15 C weather and trying to be setup in time to capture someone setting off a firework without telling them what to do is also an enormous challenge.

After 13 hours of shooting we all reported back to begin the editing process. We would have 23 hours left before deadline but there was much work ahead. Because of China’s slow web and long transmitting times for files the conversion files to Prores, translating, grading and creating the script would have be done with at least 2 hours to spare. This meant no sleeping, a lot of junk food, fast food and when things became painful, some beer. Days later, I made visual representation of this relatively comical 36 process to get this short film out.

ROLLING SHUTTER: 36 Hours in the Making of The Year of the Dragon from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

When we hit our deadline everyone was sleeping except me. Minutes before I was about to pass out, the video posted — and it posted front and center on the Times’ home page.

It was an amazing bit of timing and in one moment — the pain of the past day in half was gone and for just a brief moment, the world got a glimpse of an ancient Chinese tradition.

Happy New Year — 新年快乐

Jonah M. Kessel is a Beijing based freelance visual journalist working with the New York Times. Visit his web site here or follow him on Twitter here.