Hard Drives and Internet

I'm on the road right now. In Joplin, MO and talking to people about the community rebuilding efforts since the tornado that came through the town last year. It's been a total consciousness shifting experience. One big thing that I wish we had more of was hard drive space and internet connection. I am shooting an easy 30GB every day. Maybe half of my footage is backed up in two places and half of it is sitting precariously on only one hard drive. Following conventional wisdom of file storage, I don't have any footage yet. This drive could fail at any time and I would be fucked. Not an unlikely scenario for a dude who is currently camping in a tent.

We've been tossing around the idea of picking up a wireless modem. We would like to either upload our archived footage to the cloud or shoot the footage directly to our editors using bit-torrent.
We've been spending a lot of time at Starbucks.  I've been making the mistake of asking about natural beef at sports bars.   I've been struggling to drink enough water.  And I think I've seen more variety of bugs on this trip than I have in my entire life.  More on that later.

Jesus is so prevalent in all corners of life here.  There was a bible reading from The Book Of Job at the high school.  A middle school principal shared with us her experience in witnessing the hand of god comforting people through these hard times.  Many people recount stories about white butterflies or angels in black suits literally guiding people to safety.  To these people, the personal relationship with Christ is not an abstract or intellectual thing.  Its real.  They feel it almost on a primal level.  More on that later.

Shooting Live Bands

The Now & Forevers are an exceptionally watchable band, especially for a wedding band whose purpose is not so much to look pretty as sit back and create an ambiance for comfortable mingling. I had a lot of fun filming them and I would like to film them again.

Conspicuously missing from this video is the mingling. If I were to film them again, I would like to film them at an outdoor lawn party or some sort of well lit event where I can film people gettin' jiggy to their sweet jams.



Off the top of my head, I can think of three things that can help a live band video.

Picking an interesting location is probably the easiest thing you can do. It doesn't have to be a rooftop but that isn't a bad idea. A a jet hanger or cluttered film studio are some other ideas that work.

Finding a good on camera audience is another good option. I did this with my buddy Brody Willis for our Battle Of The Buskers videos. This is probably my favorite kind of live band video because it shows that music doesn't happen in a vacuum.

Lastly, you can find a band that just has a talent for sharing their love for music. Many otherwise amazing artists don't have this quality. The visual presentation of the music is generally an after thought. Materialistically so for indie bands. My favorite example is Tommy Dean.

Shooting live bands can be fun. A long time ago, I shot some stuff with KEXP. They do some great stuff with the tiny studio space they have so check it out.

The White Background

This is my first time working on my own as Gaffer. I've lit for scenarios like this before but always with an experienced Director of Photography looking over my shoulder, telling me what works and what doesn't.

And of course, I didn't have all the tools in my tool kit that I would like. No frosties or gels to soften the light. No flags or silks, either. No waveform monitors or histograms. Not even a light meter.



The result is a strange graduated background. And the skin tones are a bit warmer than I would like.

The narrative came together very nicely. Its a great mix of voices. And I like how the little light in everybody's eyes makes them look like they're on the verge of tears. I think I successful captured the honesty and earnestness of these women. So I'm pretty happy with that bit.

As soon as I get a chance, I'd like to find out the ISO rating of my camera. Then I'd like to get a light meter. I don't do a whole lot of interview scenarios where I would need lights and everything but I want to be ready for when that job comes in.

Emma Panda at Z-Rant

I tried some new things with editing here. In my previous bartender profile videos, I tried my best to maintain some continuity to convey the story of crafting a single cocktail. for this video, I tried to see just how little continuity I could maintain while still producing a video that felt natural. The result is a bit bouncy and flirty.



Do you think it worked?

Whitney Pallend at Cuchi Cuchi

Whitney Pallend at Cuchi Cuchi from Joshua Guerci on Vimeo.

From now on, I'm going to swallow my pride and use auto focus in these tight situations where I am having trouble focusing. In these low light scenes, I have to open up all the way to get a descent exposure and often sacrifice some depth of field. It makes it hard to focus, escpecially when running off the flip out screen and not the eye piece.

I use the Sony NEX-VG10. I am not afraid to push the gain all the way up because the noise doesn't bother me so much. The important thing is to tell a story and I believe this video gives us a good feeling for Whitney's personality.

I could have gone for a little bit more ambiance shots.