I had no idea “The Battle: Cinco de Mayo” had it’s own little website. While going through the production stills (most was unit photography I did) I came across this screenshot of the actual scene where I appear. The movie was supposedly released in September but I can’t find it anywhere.
Produced for my friend Alyssa who was taking a directing class and asked me to DP, It Happened One Night is a collection of scenes adapted from the 1934 Frank Capra classic written by Robert Riskin. Check it out here.
Captive Films swept the Cinesol 4th Annual 36 Hour Film Race event with “Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores” which won a total of five awards including Best Writing, Best Ensemble, Best Credits Sequence, Audience Favorite and Best Film.
The members of Orange Media, which was unable to participate this year, are thrilled to have joined forces with Captive Films to take home such a prestigious set of awards. And also congratulations to all the teams who competed and we’ll see you at the starting line next year!
Pictured (left to right): Rommel Garza, Sergio Tovar, Jay Juarez, Jose Lomas, Hernan Cortez, Jason R. Johnston, Ivan Buenrostro, Bertha Gonzalez, Gabriel Ramirez, Erick Treviño, Alyssa Salas, Gerardo Salinas, Mark Rodriguez and Edward Cordero.
Due to a miss-communication, Orange Media was late to the registration period for the Cinesol 4th Annual 36 Hour Film Race this weekend and opted not to participate. Erick Treviño, president of Orange Media, and the voluntary members of the defunct team voted to continue participation by assisting another team. All of the ex-Orange team members were excited to help Captive Films (Jose Lomas, Aisa Showery and Gerardo Salinas) with the production of their motion picture “Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores”, a fun action-adventure short film about a Mexican A-Team hired to rescue a man’s kidnapped daughter from a dangerous cartel.
With every Cinesol film race comes script variables which must be included in any production to ensure legal participation. This year’s requirements were: genre (action-adventure), character (mariachi), location (bakery), prop (cape) and dialogue (“this is going on my blog”).
Principal photography began after 4am Saturday and wrapped after 5pm. Second unit photography happened after 6pm and wrapped before 8pm. Foley was captured around 2am Sunday morning as the final edit sweetening and music production and recording was happening. I came on board the show as cinematographer (credited as director of photography) with 1st AC Rob Liendo who rocked the joint consistently well throughout principal photography. Rob’s professionalism and awesomeness kept the shooting efficient and we got the show done on time and on budget. I’ve had camera assistants and grips and volunteers who were happy to help, but I’ve never had a “1st AC” before and Rob was a pro and kicked ass so a big thanks to him for coming down from Pennsylvania to volunteer his time.
Also a big thanks to Sergio Tovar, Ivan Buenrostro, Mark Rodriguez and Pepe Revilla who are always happy to help camera and electrical but were also able to break out and have roles in the cast this year, while still managing to find time to help Rob roll cables, set up lights and dolly. I’m thankful for all these guys volunteering their time to play these dual roles as efficiently and gracefully as they always do.
“Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores” is directed by Jose Lomas and written by Bertha Gonzalez. Produced by Aisa Showery and Gerardo Salinas. Executive Producers are Erick Treviño and Edward Cordero. Gibby Ramirez is the editor with assistant George Garcia. The killer original music score was written and performed by Jay Juarez, Rommel Garza and Erick Treviño who let me peter around with the MIDI accordion. “Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores” stars Pedro Garcia, Ivan Buenrostro, George Magee, Gerardo Salinas, Sergio Tovar, Jorge Damm, Erick Treviño, Alyssa Salas and Hernan Cortez.
“Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores” is intended to premier at the 4th Annual 36 Hour Film Race results program during the Cinesol Film Festival September 13, 2009 at the TSTC Student Theater in Harlingen, TX. “Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores” would probably be rated R for language and violence.
I will post the film here with HD links to Vimeo and YouTube after the results of the film race next week.
I’ve written about The Battle before, and casually checking Laguna Production’s website, I finally found it listed! Check it out: this link will take you to the movie that I was in.
Playing from a tiny preview on an iPod Touch, screen grabbed and emailed to myself. Such a low quality solution but, an effective tease for our ambitious PSA for the Cinesol Film Festival.
We wrapped shooting for “What Can You Do?”, the ambitious television spot for local film festival CineSol’s 36 Hour Film Race event, this morning at about 12:15am.
The final scene shot will be the first scene in the spot: the drama sequence. The director wanted the scene to take place during the day, but I wanted complete control of the light so we opted to shoot at night and blast a 2k through the window and white curtains to double for the sun. On the master shot (which included a dolly move), I used a 1k for a rim light on the woman and another 1k for the man’s face. For later shots I would use just the 2k through the curtains with a 1k fill (scrimmed 2 stops down) and another 1k for accent, using the falloff as slit through barndoors. A stage fog machine was used to create an atmosphere that would show the beams of “sunlight” coming from the window.
The footage looks great and I’m very proud of the results. I can’t wait to see the final spot.
Below are two behind the scenes videos from Orange’s most recent project: a non-profit public service announcement for the CineSol Film Festival that has no title (so I’m calling it “What Can You Do?” from a piece of its dialogue). The first video shows us working on a Vietnam War action sequence, and the second video is the horror sequence. Fun!
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[flashvideo filename=http://www.impossiblefx.com/video/cinesol-bts-horror.flv image=http://www.impossiblefx.com/video/cinesol-bts-horror.jpg volume=100 /]
I’m using the new Panasonic AJ-HPX300 recording on 16GB E-series P2 cards with the AVC-Intra 100 codec at 24PN. Lighting is two Arri babies and a vintage Mole junior on a regular gas generator. All the gear worked flawlessly and I am very, very pleased with the HPX300. The location shown in the videos was a good 200 feet from where we could bring our trucks so we had to haul our gear the rest of the way. We arrived at 4pm and left at 3am. I also did all the zombie makeup. All the footage on the BTS videos above was shot with my little Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS.
I’m the cinematographer for a television commercial that’s been scheduled for four days at several locations. Our first shoot was at our studio last Tuesday, we then broke until this weekend and will finally wrap tomorrow evening. Saturday, we shot two scenes at a ranch that doubled for a horror sequence (shot at night) and a Vietnam war sequence (at magic hour). Both came out spectacularly. Sunday, we shot the romance and comedy segments on South Padre Island and I…am…sunburned. As I write this my legs and arms feel like they’ve been under a hot lamp for seven hours and…well, I guess that’s exactly what they were doing. I need to clean the camera and charge the batteries this evening because tomorrow we shoot the drama sequence.
The project is a 30 second spot for the CineSol Film Festival’s 36 Hour Film Race. It is the most complex local spot I’ve ever produced. Once production has wrapped I will supervise the color timing process, write the original music score, add special visual effects and animation and mix the sound effects to the spot before it’s ultimately finished. It’s a big spot and should be pretty funny when it finally airs later this month…long before the effects of the sunburn have peeled away.
For some reason, sunburns (particularly the peeling part) makes me hungry for fried chicken.
We shot more of Street Sertified’s Gucci Shades music video over the weekend: the studio recording scene, the shoebox scene, the auto tire and rim scene and the “Mr. Big” scene. The majority of the scenes were shot at Orange Studios with the exception of the tire and rim scene which was done on location. This is the first stuff we’ve shot for Gucci Shades since the pool party scene back in March and officially marks days 4 and 5 of the total shoot.
This shoot also mark the maiden voyage of our flagship camera, the Panasonic AG-HPX300, which was used both with and without an RNG35 DOF adapter with a Zeiss 50mm 1:1.4 lens. I was shooting 1080i at 24PN, 1/48 shutter in broad daylight as well as in the studio with two Arri 1K fresnels either direct or bouncing off white foam core. The footage is great and it looks like it’ll cut well together.
I’ve always wanted to be on the Internet Movie Database and now I am; rather, my new short film The Bench is. I’ve chosen to premiere The Bench, a silent romantic fantasy film, at the CineSol Film Festival in September which accepts submissions through Withoutabox.com owned by IMDB. The only other festival I’ve submitted work to was one hosted by a local community college which, suffice to say, was not recognized by IMDB though I did win best director for my short film Files. But that is soooo 2008.
Gibby was the first on IMDB with his work in 2007 on a horrendous little movie that must not be named. I actually was the one that submitted his info since the film company neglected to do so. When The Bench information began to trickle in. As of this writing most of the cast is up as well as Gibby, Edward and Erick, the producers. I’m pretty much the only one left to be added but as soon as I am it will be complete: the dudes from Orange Media will all be on I-M-D-Fucking-B. Awww, yeah! Holla!
Update (July 16, 2009): I’m on IMDB! Right here, baby!
I found this list of common frames and formats at the Panavision New Zealand website. Interesting stuff. I made this Photoshop file to help me with my 2.4:1 stuff and you can use it, too.
Erick pointed out some Mole-Richardson 2K fresnels on eBay and I snatched them up. Turns out that when it was all over I bought a Junior, a Baby Junior and a Midget (it’s called an Inbetweenie in the real world) with two Mathews heavy duty location stands for the price on one Junior brand new at B&H. The Junior comes with a bunch of scrims, the Baby Junior comes with scrims and an 8-leaf barndoor and all of them come with at least two appropriate globes (4×2K, 2×200w). The Mathews light stands look awesome and the Midget will work with one of my light weight stands. The seller messaged me yesterday to let me know she’d ship them this weekend. Also, Erick just bought some gear from B&H and it should be arriving on Friday. Looks like Christmas came early this year!
Orange Media Filmworks’ Twisted Date: winner of four awards at the First Annual Cinesol 24 Hour Film Dash, May 2 and 3, 2009, including Best Sound (Rigo Montenegro), Best Original Music (Jason R. Johnston), Honorable Mention: Cinematography (Jason R. Johnston) and Second Place Overall. The nine total competing films were screened before the awards ceremony held May 8, 2009.
Teams had from noon Saturday to noon Sunday to create a five minute short film from scratch with the following requirements:
Prop: umbrella
Character: nerd
Dialogue: “You had me at hello.”
Action: spilled drink
Theme: twist of fate
Shot on a Panasonic AJ-SPX800P with an RNG35 v3.1 DOF adapter, with Nikon 50mm f/1.4 prime, mounted onto an AJ-D610WBP zoom. Recorded in standard def 1.78:1 (16×9) on P2, but composed and later flipped and matted for 2.39:1. Lowell tungsten lamps used, none brighter than 250W.
Director: Edward Cordero
Producer: Ivan Buenrostro
Writer: Bertha Gonzalez
Executive Producer: Erick Treviño
Cinematographer, Music: Jason R. Johnston
Editor: Gabriel Ramirez
Sound: Rigo Montenegro
Grips: Belit Martinez, Amanda Ramirez
Donald: George Magee
Gaby: Gabriella Gutierrez
Amy: Bianca Cantu
Drunk: Ivan Buenrostro
Waitress: Binky Cantu
Behind the scenes on location at Speakeasy in McAllen, TX for Orange Media’s "Twisted Date" (working title). I was DP on this short film submission to the Cinesol Film Festival’s first annual 24 Hour Film Dash competition, held this weekend, where teams had one day to create a five minute short film from scratch.
Shot on a Panasonic AJ-SPX800P with an RNG35 v3.1 DOF adapter, with Nikon 50mm f/1.4 prime, mounted onto an AJ-D610WBP zoom. Recorded in standard def 1.78:1 (16×9) on P2, but composed and later flipped and matted for 2.39:1. Lowell tungsten lamps used, none brighter than 250W.
The production was plagued with problems from the beginning which stemmed from fragile egos behind the scenes. The director and crew tried to quell any hostility but in the end, the show suffered. I think there were a lot of great things that happened on set with our actors and there were some wonderful technical achievements for the team, but as a whole the film was too ambitious and deliberate to have been told well in 5 minutes. This project was a definite learning experience for everyone involved.
Originally titled "Twisted Date", which may change due to a naming conflict with another team, the show’s premiere will be held at Cinesol’s 24 Hour Film Dash screening and awards ceremony this Friday, May 8, 2009. I will post the finished film here after the premiere.