Yung Nitti "Ima go get it" - Offical Music Video

Yung Nitti
"Ima go get it"
directed by Tha Razor
Shot on the Canon 7D

Napalm, Erruption "In San Francisco" - Offical Music Video

I have a great idea lets go to Church and Dolores at 7am, start doing doughnuts in the street and see if the police take 5 or 10 minutes to show up! All most had my camera confiscated = Awesome ;-)

Napalm
Erruption
featuring
Goldtoes
"In San Francisco"
directed by Tha Razor

Jacka, Berner "Trafficking" - Offical Music Video

This is my second video with Tha Razor. Filmed on the Canon 7D.

Jacka
Berner
featuring:
Fed X
Lee Majors
"Trafficking"
directed by Tha Razor

Jacka "they don't know" - Offical Music Video

This is my first Gangsta rap video. I just started working with Tha Razor, he's a very cool guy, great with the talent. I know we are going to end up working a lot together :-) Shot on the Canon 5D.

Jacka
featuring
Philly Freeway
"they don't know"
directed by tha razor

Finding The Right Camera: Con't ... Finally

Last post I talked at length about using the Grass Valley Infinity, which we were going to be using inside San Quentin prison. But production is a fluid thing, and the model we got for the shoot went down the first weekend we had it. There was a problem with the line level inputs on the camera, which needed to be handled at the factory. Grass Valley was great once I alerted them to the issue, but I needed another camera that day so I picked up a HPX2000 from VMI and kept that for the rest of the shoot. The panasonic handled everything beautifully and it became our go to camera for those long days walking around the prison. The HPX turned out to be a better fit for our production; even though it is a lower resolution camera than the Infinity, I found the greater dynamic range and highlight handling, coupled with the P2 workflow, which is so seemless in FCP to be the deciding factors. In a studio I may have come to a different choice, but hey San Quentin is far from a studio.

Jesse
--
DP/Producer - The Trust

"Parallels" Short Film Trailer

Here is the trailer for the short film, Parallels, we shot super16 vision3 500T. I rated the film at a 1000asa and did a full bleach bypass on the negative. Frank Door of Element 151 directed.

Emmy Nominated :-) Commercial

Last month I filmed a series of head shots to lead in to and out of the news promos for KPIX the local CBS affiliate in town. Everything went really well, so they brought me back to film a straight promo spot for Roberta Gonzales and their high-def doppler weather radar. We shot for two days on a Red in 2k, which we rented from Chater Camera. Rob Genolio directed

*Edit*
I received a Local Emmy nomination for my cinematography on this spot!! :-)

Two Music Videos for Port O'Brien in one wet weekend

Jason Mann and my self DP'd two videos for Port O'Brien both Directed by Joey Izzo. We shot super8 with a small crew in Morro Bay over two days in the pouring rain and a poison oak infested forest. We were all pretty beat at the end of the shoot, but I think Joey put together two really great videos.

Finding The Right Camera:Part One of ?

Finding the right camera for a job is a big part of my job as a Documentary Cinematographer; just as picking a certain film stock and processing is important to a narrative story, a particular video camera can go along way to defining the look of a doc. Of course there are still a few people with the luxury of shooting docs on film, but on a project with the scope and time line of The Trust it just doesn't make sense to go that route.

My background is in narrative film production, which initially lead me to use something I'd use on an indie film. From the beginning Tamara and I have wanted to create a look that gave the audience enough distance from the men to view them objectively, for us that meant shallower depth of field and a generally more cinematic look then you normally see on a doc. Over the last year or so that line of thought took me from a JVC GY-HD110 with a Brevis35 lens adapter all the way to the RED Camera in search of the right balance between look and functionality.

Unfortunately none of the cameras I considered were up to the task; the JVC's HDV footage just doesn't hold up in post if you don't nail the settings in camera, and that doesn't always happen when you are run and gun through a prison with mixed sodium vapor lighting! And the RED, despite being a great studio camera for the money, is still not ready for the mission critical doc environment. Other small-camera-with-adapter solutions like the HVX-200 or EX1 paired with a Letus Ultimate are just not realistic for hand held shooting over long periods of time, which is definitely the reality of shooting inside San Quentin.

I initially stayed away from ENG cameras because the price point was out of our reach and I was married to shooting 24p to help the audience see the men of the trust with a perspective not achievable in 30i. I'd toyed with the idea of an HDX-900 but the cost of tape stock and Deck over the course of a two year production was just too much.

Then Panasonic released their new HPX line and I thought I'd found the answer, but the 3000 is just too far outside our current budget and the 2000 doesn't deliver the full raster 1080p I need to insure we are ready for theatrical distribution. On top of that the cost per gb of the P2 media is still steep for an independent film, at least in the quantity necessary to shoot all day in San Quentin without a data wrangler.

That brings us up to last month. Trying to squeeze an HPX-2000 into our budget and settling for 720p. When I stumbled upon the Thompson Grass Valley Infinity DMC 1000/20. The camera hasn't had a lot of press and had flown completely under my radar. I called Joe Pettit at Snader and Associates in San Rafael to set up a demo; I was surprised how well it handled. The infinity is competitive with the HPX-3000 for about $20k less, and the Rev Pro media is way more affordable, a 35gb disc is only $50!

After spending an hour running through the menus with a chip chart I took the camera outside into some hard sun and torched the JPEG2000 codec. Shooting a dark shadow cut through a patch of bright sun light I was able to hold clean detail across the image. I took the footage home and pushed it around in after effects; the image held up well to color correction and I was able to pull up the mids quite a bit before any grain became apparent. I'll post some screen grabs as soon as I can make them.

The real test will come later this week when I take the Infinity inside San Quentin and see how it holds up during the heat of production. I'll post an update when that happens to let you know my thoughts.

Jesse
Cinematographer | Producer