Here is what is possible when three really great event filmmakers get together and collaborate. Joe Simon, from Texas, invited myself and Kevin Shahinian, from the OC, to help him with a Same Day Edit. Here is the result:
david robin | films is pleased to announce that we will be returning to document the 2010 Oscar® Governors Ball. This will be our fourth year recording the event. The Governors Ball will be held at the Grand Ballroom on the top level of the Hollywood & Highland Center in downtown Hollywood. The theme this year will boast 1930’s club with a modern twist. Academy Award winners will be invited to enter a specially designed area where Academy technicians will affix the personalized nameplates to each Oscar. In the past, winners had to bring their Oscars to the Academy in the weeks following the ceremony to have their nameplates affixed to the statuettes.
My first wedding at the fabulous Montage, Beverly Hills. Shaun Brown did a phenomenal job along with Carol Rosen. Photographs were taken by Vernon Williams. Great night and two wonderful families.
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:
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!
Held from October 19-22, 2009, I was invited to speak at Re:Frame San Francisco, which is described as “4 days of intense shooting technique, business management, HD workflow, branding & marketing, creative storytelling techniques, social media and much more!” and it did not disappoint. My Seminar was entitled “Secrets to Staying Relevant”. Here is a review from Cameratown!
My Workshop
This being a conference primarily for wedding “filmmakers”, was a phenomenal opportunity to learn from each other in an intimate environment, made up of filmmakers new to the industry, as well as long time veterans.
Aside from the intense education, we had a blast partying every night way into wee hours of the morning. The Clift Hotel, downtown San Francisco, was beyond AWESOME! I finally got to meet and hang with fellow Event DV Top 25 recipient Joe Simon, as well as Moscow’s Oleg Kalyan. So much talent oozed from the Clift’s walls. Jason Magbanua, Kevin Shahinian, Kristen*, Alex & Julie Hill, Bruce Patterson, Loyd Calomay, Philip Bloome=OMG! The best of the best.
Made so many new friends. Cant wait until the next one. A big thank you to the Collective and all who came to my workshop. I had a blast!
We were honored to win two Creative Excellence Awards. One for Concept Video Production (Entourage Spoof) and one for Photo Montage (Beatles “Love” inspired Montage). We also gave a seminar on the subject of the Concept Video, sharing the stage with my friend Kevin Shahinian.
So great to FINALLY meet JMag, Ray Roman, Konrad, MichaelW, Matt Davis, Scott Strimple, Jerome Cloninger, John Hyland, Philip Bloom, Steve Weiss, John Moon, Brian B and Steve Zugelter!
And of course, such an honor sharing the stage with the amazing, one-of-a-kind Kevin Shahinian.
Lastly seeing peeps Adam Forgione (thanks for having me introduce you), Ron & Tasra, J. Goolsby, Moses’s, Keith Anderson, Bruce H, Sue Lawson, Pixel Monkeys, Christine Moore (i love you), Ryan Koral, Sylvia & Nels, David Perry, Josua Smith, Ryan Brodie,The Kuritas, Jenny Lehman, The Bacon’s, Natalie Neal, Tony Cucci, The Scheman’s, Hal Slifer, Fred Klein, Brian Peterson, The Argenes’s, The Ritondo’s, The Bertolami’s, Jerry Cleveland, Steve Fowler, The Hoenthaner’s & the Von Lankens, was always beyond simply a pleasure.
A huge thank you to the one and only Mr. Roy Chapman!
