With the convergence of stills- and videocameras comes the convergence of the job of photographer and cameraman. And both will start exploring the “other” medium in new, creative ways. For example making movie posters, that suddenly come to life.

Professional stills photographer Alexx Henry has put together a nice clip showing how this is done, also thanks to RED.

(via)

Here is something that is beautifully shot, perfect way of saying: a happy, healthy & creative 2009 to all of you.

One of the things I love about the Internets is how they change media, and especially advertising. In TV the advertiser has to spend a lot of money to get fixed slots of say 10, 15 or 30 seconds. Excepts for a few notable exceptions, stories have to be very simple, quickly told.

Now, with Internet and broadband, stories are no longer restricted by length – they just have to be good, so that people do want to watch them. More money can be spend on the actual film, rather than its distribution. “Get out of the Doghouse” is an excellent example of one of those. Observe:

(via Doug Karr)

Hungry Man/Grey London has made this new commercial for Toshiba, employing 200 hidef cameras.

20.000 gigabyte of data. 2 1/2 million individually renamed frames. $4.7 million dollar.

Some background footage:

Some facts

• The TV ad was shot using 200 Toshiba Gigashot Cameras: the highest number of moving image cameras ever used in a film sequence
• This particular technique, viewing looping action in 360 degrees, has never been done before
• The rig was custom built weighing approximately half a tonne, including 200 cameras and electronics
• The rig measures 14m diameter circle and 1.8m high
• The 200 cameras were all triggered using a single remote control
• Once the rig was built, four focus pullers spent three days focusing and aligning all 200 cameras
• The time spent processing footage from 200 cameras was over four weeks – 24 hours a day seven days a week!
• New offline and online editing software had to be specifically built for the job
• In terms of data, this is one of the biggest jobs a post-production house has ever taken on – 20TB of data

Credits

Production Company: Hungry Man LTD
Director: Mitch Stratton
Editor and editing company: The Whitehouse / Christophe Williams
Post-production company: The Mill
Music: Crystal Castles – Air War
Voice-over: Kira Lauren

(from the Press Release)

Lovely ad from PepsiCo:

(via)

The first documentary I worked on was about a deaf actress. On one shooting day we were invited to a birthday party. It was so beautiful seeing all these faces and movings hands full of expression.

As part of prepping for that project, I read about deafness, and learned many interesting things. For one there are many different sign languages. Babies that are taught basic sign language can start interacting with their parents much earlier than speaking babies. Sign language is much better for expressing feelings than words are.

Recommended movie: Jenseits der Stille

Enjoy:

Edited by Merritt Duff. Hooked up by Arrow Kruse.

Peter Miser writes:

The long story is this, I got an iPhone about two weeks after they came out. I’m not the type to get all mushy about a piece of technology but it done changed my life. (If you don’t know, then you better borrow your cousin’s and check it out. I’m not gonna go on a whole tangent but messing around with an iPhone is like reaching into the future and hanging out with super attractive aliens at a hot party…or something.) About a month after I got it, I was asked to fly to L.A. to actually be in an iPhone commercial. You know, the ones with the “regular” person standing in front of the black background? Right! Well, I was getting all excited to go out there and this real stupid song popped into my head. As you may know, I’m a hip hop artist so of course I think, “why not record the thing?” about a day later it’s recorded. Then I think, “why not recut the iPhone guy lipsyncing my song?” That’s where Arrow and Merritt hooked me up. Arrow’s like the Wolf from Pulp Fiction. If George Bush knew Arrow, this whole Iraq business would be sewn up by now. Anyway, Arrow made some calls, tracked down Merritt and Merritt worked his delicate fingers to the bone crafting this exquisite piece of art. We’re pretty sure we have about two weeks before Apple threatens to break our kneecaps so enjoy it while it lasts.

LG will soon start selling some uniquely shaped flat screens, featuring a screen ratio of approximately 16:5.

Now, this should be fun to make a film for (unless the client asks you to protect for 4:3 as well). The screens will be sold from April, and cost from slightly above €1.000. Target for these displays are marketeers for now. Press release. If you don’t mind the disappointingly low resulution (at 1366 by 398 pixels that is a mere half megapixel) you can finally watch Ben Hur without any major black bars.

LG will first come out with two flavours of these screens, one with 1366×480 pixels, giving an aspect ratio of 1:2.8 and a bigger screen with a lower vertical resolution of 1366×398, resulting in a 1:3.4 aspect ratio. (via [norwegian])

The past months I have noticed a rise in the use of video on corporate and software developer websites. This trend is probably led by Apple, who now produces instructional videos alongside any major hardware and software release. Many other companies have followed suit, but all too often poorly executed. They often seem to be produced internally and done without (much) thought about script, sound, light or even white balance. Those reflect poorly on the advertised product/service. Either get it produced professionally, or save yourself the bandwidth and your customers the time.

And then there are some that manage to make a short, different presentation, that give you the gist of their offering without telling too much. LifeShaker from Funky Cloud is a prime example.

Great Irish campaign, showing the printed ads still do reach an audience.

Even though it is for the ‘wrong’ company, here is a lovely tv commercial.
(via Mason)