Different Mediums to Tell a Story

I have always had the opportunity to be part of projects that use different methodologies to tell the story. Early on I was obsessed with traditional animation and became an animator, then CG came in and opened up even more possibilities. I like live action because it gives you a chance to capture a moment that was unplanned and better than anything you could have dreamed up. I have always been a big fan of the hybrid of both animation-- or these days VFX, and live action because there is nothing you can't do with todays technology. Your imagination is the only limit.

Early on in my career I was part of a puppet show on KCET. I only did the storyboards but loved hanging out on set and watch talented puppeteers use their art to bring characters to life. I love puppets and have always been a big fan of anything Jim Henson did.  I worked with his kids Brian and Lisa for a while and it was always a privilege to be at their studio and see all the famous puppets and props. I recently revisited the possibility of working with puppets when I did a test to see if we could pull of a Menehune movie done with puppets.

When I was in film school we spent an entire year on stop motion. I loved it. There's is something special to see real objects and puppets, lit and photographed and come to life. Thanks to Tim Burton, Henry Selick and Laika stop motion has reached new heights. I introduced the technique to my daughter over the Holiday break and we made a short stop motion film for a contest. It was great fun to work on small scale characters and sets. I'll post the film in April, when we are allowed to release it. For now I can only share a few photographs.

A Menehune puppet.

Our makeshift stop motion set.

Donkey Tales

When I was fortunate enough to make movies in the Hollywood studio system, I was immediately typecast as the 'animal guy' and that gave me a chance to tell stories in the age old tradition of using animals as characters. Both racing Stripes and Underdog used a lot of live animals to tell those tales. I loved it. I also love working with actors but there's something magical when you can make people believe that animals are thinking and talking. Especially a kids audience.

Now that I do a lot of corporate gigs, there's not a lot of opportunities to work with animals, so together with a couple of friends we shot a little test about miniature donkeys who have adventures on a small farm in Central California.

We did not use any CG to replace the mouths but told the story in the same way Homeward Bound worked by hearing the animals talk but we did not see their lips or beaks move. It's as if we're inside their heads. We noticed this worked really well when the film Racing Stripes was tested before the VFX were applied and audiences loved it. Moving mouths are nice to have but don't make or break the movie -- great scripts do.

The challenge was to put together scenes with untrained animals while still following a script. This was quite the awakening and makes you appreciate all the work the animal trainers do. Ultimately we got something together which we will pitch around town to see what comes of it. Check it out under the projects. It's called Donkz and I am sure your kids will love it.

back in the day when we shot on film.

It took two units and multiple cameras six weeks to shoot the track scenes in Racing Stripes.

One of the stars of Donkz.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

I just finished my first virtual reality project. What a ride. The fun part was that everything had to be invented or designed. The frustrating part was that everything had to be invented and designed. A great opportunity came up when Global Heritage Fund, a non-profit that helps take care of world heritage sites was looking to show their donors the amazing places that they are supporting all over the world. Sometimes these places are extremely hard to access and virtual reality is a great way to fully immerse someone in another location from the comfort of their home.

The chosen location was Ciudad Perdida, a series of terraces on a mountain deep in the Colombian jungle, once inhabited by the Tayrona, who mysteriously disappeared at the end of the 16th century.

While preparations for our trip took place we started testing cameras and building rigs to capture virtual reality. This took a couple of months to research everything from GoPros to Blackmagic 4K minis, to all the 360 camera that are out there. We tried any amount of cameras from 2 all the way up to 12. We tried them in pairs to create the 3D effect and any other configuration you can imagine. There were lots of failures and near misses but we learned a lot. Ultimately for the budget we had and the quality today's smartphones can process we settled on a rig with 8 Kodak Pixpro SP360s 4K in a circle. The cameras come with 235 degree wide angle lenses and while they are consumer grade, they allow for some white balance and light settings. They can be synced by one remote control that keep eight cameras within a one frame sync. The cameras were not genlocked. The rig was first build out of foam core and when everything was working, a local machine shop laser-cut two camera plates out of aluminum, based on a CAD drawing done at Allied, the VFX company at Beast that was going to take care of the post part. The stitching of the VR.

We tested the rig and the post process for a couple of weeks until Michael Lester, Evan Ryan and Gordon Whittmann got it to work even when the cameras where moving. VR in 3D with auto stitching and minimal cleanup to get rid of the tripod. What they achieved is beyond impressive.

The plan was to not only deliver a VR experience in 3D but to augment it with elements in CG to lead the eye and to recreate what the location would have looked like a thousand years ago. Specifically we added butterflies and we added the huts that the Tayrona used to live in. This was a complication that the team at Allied executed beautifully.

The trip itself was pretty tough. A two day hike by foot up one of the highest coastal mountains in the world, through the jungle, with 300 lbs of equipment. We had an expert archeologist, three park rangers, mule drivers and their mules, a cook, as well as a local filmmaker and a platoon of the Colombian army helping us get up the more than fifteen hundred moss-covered steps to get to the site. I have never been so tired in my life. By the end of the journey, I was only doing fifteen steps at a time, with a five minute break in between.

We spent a week up there during which we shot 60 VR scenes in all types of light conditions. We would wake up at 4.30am and go scout to figure out where the most beautiful light would be -- the light in the jungle changes rapidly -- we also figured out where we could hide from the camera. When you shoot in 360, you have to get out of the way, or there's extra 'crew clean up' in post, which we wanted to avoid. Easy in the jungle, but not so easy on a white sand virgin beach.

At night we would download and organize the footage. Data management is huge in VR, and when done properly sets you up for a smooth post production process. We would also spend hours recharging the batteries and getting the cameras ready for the next day. There wouldn't always be electricity so we took tons of batteries.

After two week being bitten by millions of mosquitos, other bugs, nearly stepping on snakes, running through torrential rain to make it past the swelling rivers and being covered in mud from head to toe for days, we came back to do post.

While editorial was done in Premiere to put together the chosen scenes, which were stitched in 2D in Autopano, the team at Allied would take that frame count and do the same using their proprietary software and do the final stitch in 3D. All editorial choices as well as rough temp sound was done in Premiere and shared with the client. Later on all the visuals would be replaced with the stitched scenes from Allied, augmented with VFX and matte paintings. The whole process took a few weeks which was mainly rendering time.  All final sound was done Binaurally by Christopher Forest at Handsome Sound.

In the end, we delivered a VR experience that takes viewers on the same path as the Conquistadors in the 15th century, all the way from a white sand beach in the Caribbean, crossing jungle rivers and up to Ciudad Perdida. It was a trip I will never forget and a fun way to test new technology. The client and Oculus like the results and there's more to come.

Some of our phone clips and left overs cut together in a making of.

Early tests with just 2 Pixpros and a foam core plate.

What we carried up the mountain. With the help of a few mules.

On the journey. We hiked some of it at night through a dense jungle with only our headlights on. Pretty spooky. 

The main terraces.

The camera rig we ultimately shot with.

Home for the beach part of the shoot.

A friend who almost got me because I was dumb enough to try and get a close up on him.

ZENEFITS

When FDC-Creative was asked to help rebrand Zenefits, a company that offers small businesses a cloud-based all-in-one solution for managing human resources, I immediately went to Clint Goldman and the excellent team at Bodega to produce a series of videos ranging from customer testimonials to instructional videos as well as sizzle reels and video wall ads to kick off the company’s Z2 event which was designed to turn around the brand. The videos, created and directed by Frederic Du Chau, marked a new look for Zenefits and were conceived in a way that allowed for maximum flexibility and use through social media.

Key to success was Michelle Powers and her team's flawless production plan since we had only 8 weeks from conception to delivery. Ultimately production itself was only a six week period to deliver 16 videos. Needles to say we did not sleep much. 4 editors and post production support worked around the clock while the production crew went around and shot across the country from San Francisco to LA to NY, both staged and customer testimonial based scenes. Steven Condiotti and his kick-ass team gave the videos a great look with additional cinematography from Joe Gabriel in NY and Carlos Vernon in LA. All post was done at Northern Lights in NY under Robin Hall's experienced supervision.

It was a fun adrenaline-fueled couple of months and we delivered everything on time for Z2, the client's big rebrand kickoff event. This campaign was an example of how much you can accomplish when you have a great support team.

Studio work in San francisco for the explainer videos. I had never worked on an all white background but loved the challenge of reducing everything to the essence of what we needed to communicate just with actors, wardrobe and props.

Getting up early to shoot gives you the opportunity to see the world wake up.

Always nice to return home.

New York production has its own unique challenges but I loved spending a few weeks there. Check out the stunning view from the Northern lights editorial room.

I spent many hours on this couch watching the editors do their magic.

Fun opportunity

Once and a while a real opportunity comes up to do something different. I was asked by Protiviti, a financial company that help startups go public, to provide visuals for the rebranding of their 'guide to going public'. This could easily have been a run of the mill corporate job, but the executives involved had a daring vision. They were open to a complete change from the previous guide which was nicely done, but used stock photos that didn't leave an impression.  

For companies that want to go public, this guide is a must read and every word is important. The text is dense and is pure gold to the readers. The challenge was to also make the visuals pop and memorable. During an initial meeting I presented every possible style in photography, mixed media as well as illustration. The team quickly went down a path of using illustrations that had a retro feel, even a touch of comic book style. It needed to feel hand painted and not digitally perfect. Something that might be used in an editorial piece in a magazine. Several meetings were spent on narrowing down the style and especially the color scheme. Since, it was requested from the beginning that only the six corporate brand colors would be used. This was something that was not a constraint but an opportunity to do something more unique.

Another really fresh idea from the team was that they embraced the fact that the process of going public is rather complicated and abstract and to use that in the illustrations' narrative. The concepts became surreal, which was a lot of fun to do and was only possible because the clients had the guts to go for it. Lots of thumbnails were generated, then a sample illustration was put together and once all the notes were incorporated, we went ahead and made nine illustrations that told the story of 'going public'.

This was one of the best experiences and creatively most rewarding jobs I have done and it is all thanks to a team of openminded people who were not afraid to take risks.

Meet Me in St Louis

Photograph courtesy of David Brittain.

One of the things I love about this job is going to a new city and exploring it as a location for a spot.  In this case it was a customer testimonial for the app store's highest rated mobile sketching app, Concepts, in which we did a day in the life of Evan Bronstein, a local architect and teacher who uses the app.

There was not enough budget to go on a pre-scout, so the trip was both scouting, shooting and adapting on the fly.  The client came along and was part of the creative process. We had a rough script, with places to visit and questions to ask, but it's always a surprise to arrive in a new place and see the reality of what you researched Online. From my experience it's all about carefully taking in your surroundings and how you apply it to what's expected from the video. When doing this you don't reject anything.  Just follow the slightest gut feeling you may have and keep exploring. 

Watching the sun rise over the Gateway Arch, visiting the St Louis zoo and following our generous host around in the class room and his home gave us plenty of usable footage.  Evan was very articulate and ultimately the client had multiple choices of how to put their narrative together. Till next time...

And so it begins...

Welcome to my blog. I will be talking about all the crazy things that come up when you try and tell a story through visuals. What at first seems easy to do, usually turns out to be very complicated to achieve, and sometimes the most powerful ideas are the easiest to execute. 

I will be talking about current projects and I will share anecdotes from the the past. Having worked with both animals and kids, there's lots of funny stories.

For now I'll leave you with a picture of my latest scout down the river Ganges in Varanasi.

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