By way of Paris first! Couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit one of my favorite cities in the world. My wife and I will be staying in a beautiful apartment across the street from Cathédrale Notre Dame. We wanted to live like Parisians for a week, hanging out at the local Brasserie, rather than doing all the typical tourist activities.

Then its off on the Eurostar Train, through the Chunnel and back to London.

Nicole and Ben get married on December 12th at the Park Lane Hotel, Piccadilly. Helping me film the event are none other than Sylvia and Niels from Ever After Video Productions, the best event filmmakers in the UK! I am honored to have them aboard.

I am very much looking forward to spending time with all my old friends and family.

UPDATE 12/15/09
Getting ready to leave London. Very sad to say goodbye, as I had such an amazing time. My family were so much fun to be around and treated my wife and I like celebrities. Nicole and Ben’s wedding was stunning, and although I worked really hard capturing the magic, i had a wonderful time. It was a bit of a surreal experience shooting, as 1/2 of the guests were my close relatives and friends. Thank god I had the amazing team of Sylvia and Niels from Ever After to help out. They did such a great job, and worked so hard, driving all the way down from Sheffield in the ‘orrible English traffic.

Special surprise was visit from Andre Foster. I looked up and saw him shooting on the dance floor. He had come straight from his own wedding in Croydon to help out. Pleasure to see him and honored he would do such a thing. The photos were taken by my lovely sweet friend Sharon Green and then Jamie Gordon. It was also a pleasure to meet and work with Jamie. He was so gracious and obliging, as I knew four event filmmakers on the dance floor at one time must have been really hard for him to get around and shoot. Here are some random images from the London trip:

Held at the Beverly Wilshire, this wonderful event was produced by Sequoia Productions. It was a fantastic star studded affair, where Jack La Lanne unveiled a new program in which a percentage of the sale of his Jack La Lanne’s Power Juicer will benefit the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance.

The birthday celebration included bodybuilders-turned-TV/movie stars Lou Ferrigno and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California.

“At 95 years old, Jack LaLanne is an extraordinary portrait of strength, character and determination,” Gov. Schwarzenegger said. “He has inspired me and millions of others around the world by the way he lives his life every day and is the perfect example of what staying active, eating right and working out can do for a person. Jack is a great friend who truly embodies the fountain of youth.”

I was honored to be there capturing these memories.

This blog post is intended not only for event filmmakers and photographers, but all industry vendors and clients, who are interested in the current revolutionary changes in our world of photo and video.

The walls are tumbling down. The lines are becoming blurred. More and more photographers are adding video services to their line of products, and more and more videographers (filmmakers) are adding photography. What does this all mean?

The rush to do this accelerated when the Canon 5D MkII was introduced.

This is a 35mm DSLR that also shoots beautiful video images, better than any other videocamera on the market. Photographers started to salivate, thinking they could now add an additional revenue stream and become millionaires. Not to mention, if they sold video, then they would not have to work alongside a filmmaker who was vying for the same shot. Win-win!

On the other side of the fence, filmmakers (videographers), now shaking in their boots because photographers typically see the client first, were scrambling to see if they could exclusively team up with a photographer, or started to think about offering photography as a service.

So this seems to be the state of the industry as I write this. Here are my thoughts on this matter…

What photographers did not realize, or, are just now realizing, is that making movies is just not that easy. It is not simply an add on! It takes years of perfecting, and requires passion of the medium and 100% focus of your artistry. Just because you understand composition and light does not mean you can tell a compelling story manipulating moving images. One of the top photographers in the world proved this point when he proudly displayed a video he shot, on his blog. It was really poorly done, and instantly became a huge joke within the filmmaking community. Meanwhile his still images were simply outstanding!

I attended the WPPI (Wedding Photographers International) convention earlier this year and there was an enormous buzz amongst photographers, eager to add filmmaking services. Since then I have seen the initial excitement die off, as soon as these already busy photographers, discovered the workflow involved in making an event film. It’s not just filming moving images, but it also involves processing, editing, color grading and outputting (authoring) to a delivery medium (DVD). Hours and hours of post-production. That definitely scared a few people off! I would suggest photographers look to established filmmakers for collaboration, and not try to do everything themselves, or at least get educated by attending conventions like WEVA, ReFrame and InFocus, or independent workshops put on by the creme of the crop event filmmakers such as Joshua Smith, Still Motion ,The Von Lanken’s, Jeff Wright, to name a few. I might even put one together again if i can just find the time!

On the other side of the fence I recently attended a couple of those filmmaking conventions, WEVA & ReFrame. Filmmakers were abuzz about taking a still image from video and printing it, thus ultimately eliminating the need for photographers at events. The results look really good, and are getting better with every new camera release. In fact recently, a national publication (Maxim?) printed their cover from a video still taken from the Red camera.

So, what I can perhaps foresee in the future is less and less photography will be needed at the event party. I don’t think a still image from video can replace a gifted photographer composing a family portrait, manipulated with just the right amount of light… just yet. However, I can see a photo album of exciting candid moments all taken from the filmmaker (videographer), sitting on the client’s coffee table.

Interesting times. I love photography. I love taking stills, non professionally though. I think I am pretty decent. See below (pro photographers are probably laughing at me now). However the thought of actually posing images at an event and dealing with the photography workflow is simply something I have no desire to do.

Some early adopters of Convergence (fusion) have done it very well. My friend Robert Evans springs to mind. He had the foresight to collaborate with a very gifted filmmaker, Curt Apanovich, thus promoting and combining two legitimate art forms for their clients. This for me was the winning combination. Something I would like to do, if I could find the right photographer who might be interested in collaboration.

So at some point in the future I would love to offer photography to my clients, I just have not figured out the best way yet. But as convergence continues to become part of our reality…I will!

So while at the Re:Frame Convention, I attended a seminar given by superstar photographer and blogging Goddess, Jasmine Star.

Amongst some great advice, she emphasized the point of not putting your on-line bio (written) in the third person. So I took a look at mine only to be horrified as to how impersonal it was, and written in the third person. Yikes!.

I almost immediately went about re-writing it, to try and let my potential clients know the human, vulnerable side of david robin. So here is my attempt. I would LOVE some feedback as to whether it is too over the top? Not funny? Too long? Too short? Semi-Perfect? Perfect? Thanks!

ABOUT ME

“My name is david robin. My company is called david robin | films. I love what I do”.

I was born with a piece of Harrods stainless steel flatware in my mouth, and I scratched and clawed my way out of upper middle class Jewish suburbia of North London, England, to become the feared yet loved pariah that I am today. I produce award-winning event videos and travel the country educating my audience. It is not true that I performed covert operations for the MI6, and I think Phil Collins was a brilliant artist until he went solo”.

“I now play drums in a Steely Dan tribute band. I was the original drummer of Toyah. We were really big in England. I raise prize-winning terriers. I wrote, produced, shot and edited a documentary entitled “ProgFilm” which took me two years and led me all over the world, which I did for no money, financed by a lot of awesome brides and bar mitzvah moms. I pay my bills on time. I don’t perspire. I think smooth jazz is dishonest but sometimes necessary. I once hid from my parents in a pillar of the Acropolis”.

”I am a semi-accomplished speaker, a master collector, and an obsessed facebook junkie. I once spoke to an audience of 3000 and could not sleep the night before. I own many of Burt Bacharach’s instrumental recordings and periodically annoy the family by playing them at a high volume. I am awed by contemporary art, an investor in the hearts and minds of my clients, a rabble-rousing innovator, and an inspiration for freedom fighters everywhere. Children and animals trust me”.

”But I have never directed a feature, although I will”.
-david robin.