Plants vs. Zombies 2

This past March I was lucky enough to be asked to shoot the background plates of the official trailer for Plants vs Zombies 2.

PvZ is a popular mobile game (for those who don’t know about it) where you play as a gardener of sorts who has the ability to fight off the zombie hordes with various plants you’ve cultivated (each with their own special skill or power). 

Wolf and Crow acted as production company, and their in house animation team Matt Berenty & David Bokser were the directors of the spot. (and are total creative geniuses as you will see in the trailer). 

The level of pre-vis on this project was amazing. The spot had already been timed out and rough animated before I even arrived in LA. This meant we could figure out the exact camera moves to do on set, and how long the meat of each shot needed to cover, down to the frame. 

We shot on Alexa with Marc Wircioch as 1st AC and Andrew Cho as 2nd. This job presented some challenges for camera dept. and Marc handled them with ease… For example, we needed to be able to always know where our nodal point was at various focal lengths of our Cabrio zoom as well as our 14mm Ultra Prime. We also needed to take copious notes to better help the post team when they were trying to discern how the camera was moving in space relative to where we knew hero animated elements would end up. 

Enjoying some righteous iced coffee, post lunch, with Andrew (left) and Marc (right) 

Wolf and Crow utilized a robotic wide angle camera to photograph 360 degrees of HDR lighting information in every lighting setup so that the animators would have a very detailed road map of the lighting that was created on set. 

Michael Handley (who road tripped out to LA for the shoot with Joe Gallup) gaffed and Cynthia Bystrak was our Key Grip. 

It was an honor to be a part of such a fun project and I really enjoyed the collaboration!

Here is a nice link to the final trailer (good quality version of the clip and credits): 
http://www.wolfandcrow.com/project/plants_vs_zombies_2

And here is the YouTube link:

http://youtu.be/HKJIZ5Qlwhs

 

 

Cheers!

 

Hawaii

This past holiday season I had the great pleasure of going to celebrate Christmas with my parents and my sister on Oahu. My sister, Siri, moved back to Oahu this past year and so it made sense. I spent New Years on Kauai with my good friend Aaron. Then flew to the Big Island for a few days with my parents and sister at a vacation rental there. It was a blast. Here is a gallery of photos from that trip and a video I threw together for giggles. Cheers!

Flickr Gallery Here!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bohakala/sets/72157633790794188/

Summer 2012

Forgive me for I have sinned… It has been 4 months since my last blog post… 

 

That’s because I’ve been busy as heck! In June I began shooting a TV series for Committee Films titled America Unearthed. The program will premiere sometime in Decemeber (I believe…) on H2, History Channel’s second service. It stars Scott Wolter, a forensic geologist as he uncovers clues and artifacts that point to pre-columbian contact with the new world. We will wrap photography on this program sometime in December or January. 

Here are three highlights for me from the past few months. 

I had the pleasure of collaborating with my friend Kerry Riley of Needle and Black, shooting some photos for her new designs:

Thanks on the photos to Crist Ballast and Deanna Johnson for their makeup artistry and Saumer Kinsey and Dean Brewington of Mezzanine Salon for their hair engineering. Ben Hipley assisted me and Phil and Dave at the Schmidt Brewery in Saint Paul provided the location. 

I photographed a spot for Park Nicollet with director Josh Thacker and producer Jodi Nelson:

We shot on Cinemechanic’s RED EPIC, at 5k. Assisted by Steve Speers himself. Gaffed by Chris Hultgren and Key Gripped by the indominable Peter Clemence. 

And a music video I shot and directed (and edited, guh!) for Doomtree was released on MTV. 

This video was made possible by donations of time, labor and equipment by too many people to name. Produced by Sergio Rapu and Carrie Bush, Production Design by Mark Wojahn, Wardrobe by Cerah Tymoshuk and Makeup by Crist… there are really WAY too many folks to list here… a full credit list will be published at some point. 

Along the way I shot a short film for my dear friend Todd Cobery, titled Eden. An apolapyptic prequil to a post apolcalyptic feature he is developing… And most recently I just wrapped a feature for director Shelli Ainsworth and producer Christine Walker titled Stay Then Go. Stay tuned for more on that! 

Hopefully it won’t be as long between posts next time

Cheers for now

Unless You Speak From the Heart

I had the great pleasure of concepting, directing and photographing a hybrid live performance/music video for producer Dan Huiting (City of Music). The video was for Porcelain Raft’s song “Unless You Speak From the Heart”. The video premiered yesterday on Pitchfork.tv

http://pitchfork.com/tv/city-of-music/1904-porcelain-raft/3107-unless-you-spe…

We used roughly 30 channels on a dimmer board to light the main close-up which gave us a nearly infinite variety of lighting styles and colors to play with… I wish I could have take the concept even further… some day. I had a blast making this and the crew was amazing. 

Extra shout out to Crist Ballas and his amazing makeup team for helping create the wonderful faces we see, Gaffer Dave Underhill and his team of awesome guys, editor Jason Ho and colorist Josh Allard at Pixel Farm. 

 Some behind the scenes stuff:

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Mauro entertains the crew with a rendition of Eye of the Tiger. 

 

 

 

New York Times selects Stuck Between Stations as a “Critic’s Pick”

This is old news, but I wanted to post something. I wish I had blogged this earlier. Back at the beginning of this month, Stuck Between Stations, a feature that I shot, opened its theatrical run in New York. The New York Times ran a piece about the film. Here it is.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/movies/stuck-between-stations-by-brady-k…

and the trailer, for those who have not seen it.

The movie will play in Minneapolis starting on December 16th at Saint Anthony Main.

Beatbox

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Ben Krueger from Committee Films steps up with Shock from The Electric Company. Featuring Abby Cadabby from Sesame Street!

Best Buy Spots – Summer/Fall 2011

Over the last year or so, I have had the great fortune of working with Andy Awes (director) on a number of projects for Best Buy. These are the two most recent spots we shot.

The first commercial was for the X-Box release of Gears of War 3. It was interesting because the entire spot consists of two shots. This was nice as we were allowed to spend a good amount of time lighting the shots and making sure things were just right. I think the spot plays well and am very pleased with how it looks. The lighting crew did a great job (Gaffed by Michael Handley and Key Gripped by Joe Gallup). Terri Gold made art department magic and first AC TJ Schwingle made my life super easy. We shot on Alexa with Ultra Primes. Michael Sandness at Slice Here was our colorist. 

The second spot (“Blue Monster”) also was shot on Alexa (provided again by Cinemechanics). This spot was a 3 day shoot, which is the longest I’ve ever had to put together a 30 second spot. This was necessitated by the number of practical locations and the sheer number of shots. Gaffer Michael Handley did a great job managing a large crew and Key Grip Peter Clemence built a number of impressive rigs with the help of his crew. One of these rigs involved suspending a pipe frame over the audience at the end of the spot that held two 6′ 2 bank Kino-Flos. This was done by attaching lines to 4 points and dodging a power line that ran over our location. He picked points off of the main house, a chimney next door, and two trees.The thing that blows my mind is how hard everyone worked for these shots and we only see them for a moment… if I did my job right, they should stick in your mind. (fingers crossed). 

I wish I had done a better job of documenting the lighting setups on “Blue Monster”, but I am including a sun-path I took to determine what time of day and from what angle to shoot our wide “farm house” exterior.

Here, you can see a couple of shots from behind the scenes of “Gears of War” that show how we lit our subjects.

 

Exterior of the Best Buy in Eden Prairie. We used the Extreme Crane from Picture Factory and a 12k and a pair of 4k’s in an arial lift to give the impression of sunshine, our cloudy day was later replaced with blue skies by Splice Here.

 

The exterior of the abandoned farm house that the “film crew” uses as the backdrop for their zombie movie. We lucked out and got an amazing sky. We lit the side of the house with a 12k bouncing into a 12×20 Ultrabounce and a 2ft single kino faking the light of the laptop on the parents and brother looking on in the right part of the frame. 

 

Master of the makeup arts Crist Ballas poses with his zombie. Crist expressed that this is his interpretation of what a young makeup artist would do to create a zombie, not his own interpretation of what a zombie could look like. Either way, I think it looks fantastic. 

 

Producer Dan Orozco and Director Andy Awes in front of the makeup trailer and 20k. Except for the grey skies, jackets and interstate 494 sign, this could almost pass for a Culver City backlot. 

 

Andy leans on the dolly to watch a monitor while shooting the in-store portion of “Gears of War”

 

Andy sits with Chris Barry, Creative Director of Best Buy, at a monitor during the office portion of the shoot for Gears of War. The offices were at Best Buy HQ in Richfield MN, where Andy was born and raised. 

 

Cheers!

Art Brut

 

Last year I shot a documentary with director Juan Antonio del Rosario. The subject was boxing. Going into the project, I didn’t have much appreciation for the sport… but through the process of making it, I came to appreciate and respect it. I think this film is great and I am fortunate to have been asked to work on it. The fights were photographed by multiple cameras and all the operators did a great job. Thanks to Eli Ljung, Bill Prouty, Matt Joyer and Andre Durand. Also thanks to Darin Spring for hooking some lighting gear for us to use to shoot our boxers in the Gym. I hope you enjoy this film as much as I do. 

Easter Island – June 2011

It’s been a crazy busy summer and I have been neglecting my blog (among other things). This past June I had the wonderful opportunity to travel to Easter Island to shoot a piece for Committee Films that will air as a co-production of Nova/National Geographic. The documentary will follow two archeologists, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo and showcase some of the research they did for their book “The Statues That Walked“.

One of my goals while on Easter Island was to shoot as many timelapse shots as I could. Including night-time timelapses. I had never done these before. I shot them on my Nikon D700 as still-image sequences. Below are some stills from the trip and a sneak-peak at some of the timelapse shots. I really wish I could spend a month on that island just shooting timelapse material and stills. 

NYC – Tribeca Film Festival with Stuck Between Stations

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April was so much fun! I spent a week of it in New York City with some good friends for the premiere of Stuck Between Stations (SBS) at the Tribeca Film Festival. SBS was directed by Brady Kiernan, produced by Spencer Kiernan and Todd Cobery, starring Sam Rosen and Zoe Lister-Jones. Sam Rosen also was a producer and co-writter with screenwriter Nat Bennet. Sam Heyn edited. We partied.

I also got to catch up with my old High School friend Emily Bauer and her Beau, Eamon, and spent some time with my old friend Kelly Mahoney (now 7 months preggers! so stoked!).

This was by FAR the most fun I’ve had in NYC.

The image below is a link to a full gallery on Flickr: