2012 Demo Reel

I was lucky enough to be a part of a lot of great projects this year.  They were so diverse in format that it was really refreshing.  My heart will always lie with narrative work, but music videos and commercials are so much fun and extremely rewarding creatively too.  Hope 2013 is even better.

VISIBLE PROOF teaser

I recently finished shooting VISIBLE PROOF, a historical drama that my good friend Gabil Sultanov directed.  I am very excited to present a teaser trailer for the film and absolutely cannot wait to see the film finished.  Gabil is a fantastic director and cast this movie so well.  Just watching our actors work on set was a great opportunity.  This film has been a passion project for all the filmmakers since Gabil first pitched us the story.  I remember when he first told me about it in a bar one night at a wrap party from another shoot.  I loved the idea right away and here we are more than a year later we've finally shot the film and are now editing.

A big thank you to Panavision Hollywood for working with me in creating a customized Sony F3 package that let me keep a pretty hefty Primo 4:1 (18-75mm) zoom on the front while working almost entirely handheld for the entire shoot.  Here, 1st AC Ryan Hogue keeps the camera close-by while the actors rehearse the scene.

Shoot the Sax Player

This past July I shot another USC thesis film, this one was for my friend Mike Tounian.  SHOOT THE SAX PLAYER is a 1930's Prohibition Era Chicago gangster story about a stash of missing whiskey and the men searching for it.  It's guns, booze, women, and jazz!

I had the great pleasure to shoot this short on 35mm with the Panavision Millenium.  We shot on Kodak Vision3 5219 film stock which has incredible contrast and color rendition right out of the box.  For me, I envisioned the film as looking something like a cross between Sam Mendes' ROAD TO PERDITION crossed with a little of Spike Lee's MO' BETTER BLUES plus the gratuitous gunfire of John McTiernan's PREDATOR.

Our production design team built us some amazing set pieces including an underground nightclub on a group of sound stages.  Once filled with our actors in period garb, the set felt like a real place, serving real Prohibition Era hootch and playing big band music.

This was a fun shoot. We were able to bring out quite a few toys to play with.  Big toys too, as the Millenium with a 1000' mag on it ain't no 5D.

Due to the generosity of the good people over at Fotokem we were able to get printed dailies to watch every couple days.  In the digital age, not only is shooting film a rare thing, but to actually see your dailies projected on film is entirely another.  Sad to say, but that might be the last time I get to do that...

Here's a gallery of stills I was able to get from the director while he finished cutting the film.  I can't wait to see this film on the big screen!

Two screenings

Two films I shot over the past year or so are screening at separate events this coming Saturday.

THE CASE OF THE MISSING GARDEN GNOME is screening at the LA Comedy Shorts Festival at the Downtown Independent Theater at 3pm Saturday and GIVE UP THE GHOST is screening at USC's Norris Theater at 7pm that same evening.  I am overjoyed at the prospect of seeing both of these films on the Big Screen.


It can take such a long time to see your work come to fruition that sometimes when you see something you did a year+ ago, you think, "wow, that seems like so long ago".  I suppose it's just a sign of how far you've come since then that you feel that way.  Regardless, screening you work is always a bit nervewracking, at least it is for me, because no matter how you feel about the work, you always want the audience to like it. And it's a risk putting yourself out there like that, but so rewarding.

VISIBLE PROOF shooting next month

For the past month I have been in pre-production for a short I am extremely excited to be the cinematographer on. 


VISIBLE PROOF is based on one of the most infamous murder cases in history.  The film takes place in the coastal village of Necochea in turn-of-the-century Argentina.  Two small children are stabbed to death in their beds.  No one sees the crime and interrogations yield contradictory evidence. Amid the horrow was a single bloody fingerprint.  It would be the first fingerprint ever used to solve a crime.


Another of my good friends Gabil Sultanov is directing and we are both anxious to get into production.  Our producers have put together a great Kickstarter campaign to help raise funding to supplement the film grant Gabil won from the Sloan Foundation.


We are currently planning on building nine different interior sets on the sound stages we'll be shooting on.  Almost all of our sets have multiple scenes that take place in them so I'm going to have to find ways of lighting them differently each time we return.  Here's a diagram of our basic layout and camera blocking.  I'm hoping to be able to get in ahead of our start day and pre-light as many of these sets as possible, but that all depends on how quickly construction happens.  Either way, it's a lot of sets to light.

We were lucky enough to get the Panavision New Filmmakers Grant for this short film.  I've decided to shoot on Sony F3 (S-log) again, but this time we'll be recording to a Ki Pro Mini onto CF cards in 10-bit 422 DNxHD to ingest directly into the Avid with out any transcoding necessary for editorial.  


Because it's coming from Panavision, it'll be a completely Panavised F3 meaning we'll not only have access to proper camera accessories, but to Panavision's famous lenses from 30+ year ago.  I've decided to work primarily with a Cooke 20-60 T3.1 zoom lens (although we'll also carry a set of Panavision Ultra Speed primes as well).  Gabil and I both really wanted to use zooms on this film and to shoot handheld as well.  We both like the documentary feel: searching for new frames within the shoot, following the actors through a scene, and being able to slowly zoom into a CU mid-shot.  


Gabil and I are heading over to Panavision on friday to do a complete camera and lens test.  Fun fact: the Cooke 20-60 T3.1 zoom was introduced in 1981, making it only a little older than I am!

IMPULSE CONTROL teasers

I recently shot two teasers trailers for an upcoming feature film my good friend Matt Breault is directing.  Matt and I first worked together on his short film EFRAIN that I shot back in 2010.  He is a very talented storyteller and this film is going to be a fantastic feature debut for him.  It's an awesome story with a great director.

From their Kickstarter page:
IMPULSE CONTROL is a groundbreaking suspense thriller about a husband and father faced with a harrowing reality - a family struggling to survive the outside world and each other in an utterly transformed time.  It is an adventure that never loses touch with the human story beneath, unabashedly exploring one of the most fundamental human themes: in life you can't control what happens to you; the only thing you can control is how you respond to it.

Hoehn Motors - "Reverse Sales" spot

Back in March I shot this 30 second spot for HOEHN Motors down in Carlsbad, CA for director Alex Graham and producer Mike Hoagland.  We had to push the shoot back a week because of poor weather, but even when we did shoot we had to move fast because the clouds were rolling in.  The wind picked up making it impossible to fly anything overhead, but we were more or less able to keep the sun behind the actors when it wasn't behind the clouds.  It's a good spot and I'm proud of it - timely too as I'm in the market for a new car.  Maybe they'll give me a good deal?