This is part two of a five part adventure that involves Geoffrey Gilmore, the Director of the Sundance Film Festival, driving around Tallahassee, Diet Cokes, private jets, The Visitor, tea, a 4 am flight, and of course, coffee. Part one.

For the mode of transportation, the school decided to rent an SUV. This proved to be [...]

Geoffrey Gilmore is actually more of a tea drinker. While his name probably doesn’t sound very familiar (unless you’re thinking of Happy), Mr. Gilmore has had a hand in launching the careers and films of practically every famous independent film and filmmaker that has emerged in the past 20 years. Reservoir Dogs, El Mariachi, Sex [...]

It’s back to producing mode, so here’s one of my favorite and least expensive tools: the Ikea Big Blue Bag.
About a year or so ago, Ikea started charging five cents for plastic bags. So I picked up three of these for 59 cents each (and snuck one of the yellow shopping bags in there, too). [...]

In a perfect film set world (real world), you shoot for the day, send the film to the lab that night to be processed, return the next day, shoot some more, and then during lunch (or beginning/end of the day), you watch what you shot the previous day. These are called dailies, because you do [...]

Since I’ve been sound mixing for the past three days, with three more to go (a double show), I thought it would be appropriate to post some tips on getting the best audio possible from Christian Dwiggins, Master Engineer and owner of Engine Room Studios, a sound production facility.
Here they are, from Christian:

Good sound starts [...]

Here’s a collection of links I’ve been hording relating to still photography. Some things to gain from photography: mastering composition, lighting, quick shooting, and using what’s available. Enjoy!
Strobist Preliminaries - Gear and Jargon Basics [Pduncan]

This video finally made all the off camera lighting options click and lead to my purchase of the Nikon SB-800 flash. [...]

Imagine this - you stop by a big studio, maybe to try to get a few minutes with an exec to pitch your next idea. As you get back on the elevator to leave (with the no scheduled meeting), the door opens to reveal the Head of the Studio already riding down. “Great Zeus, this [...]

Yes, we got 91 set-ups1 in 3 days. That’s about 30 a day. The 6 day show had 106 set-ups. Bottom line is we got a shit-ton of shots.
And this was despite company moves, lots of extras, a tired crew, and broken/missing equipment. The odd thing is no one brought up any objections or said [...]

I’m in the Movies section on Alltop. What’s Alltop? A new feed aggregator site from VC Guy Kawasaki that tries to bring the power of RSS feeds1 to the masses. His thought is that the majority of web users don’t use RSS readers, so like a magazine rack that you can quickly and easily browse, [...]

As I get ready to DP this Sunday by box building (for lights) and color temperature fretting, I decided to stop by one of the other sets that was filming today.
I knew they were shooting in a park near downtown. What I didn’t know was this little park had a lost forest.
As I walked in [...]