"Utopía" videoclip getting close

Now as the day for the Alter Ego videoclip shooting comes close, I'm making visual examples to aid on the look style I want for it so I show my gaffers and crew. I always loved medieval, ancient, castle-like structures kinda like in the gothic arquictecture and for interiors the classy candle light ambiences. The song "Utopía" is dark and heavy so this bloomy and contrasty light/dark atmospehere need to resemble it. From wardrobe to make up, from scenography to lighting. All needs to be thought of well Tomorrow I'm checking for the type of cloth each band member fits to.


Here are some pics that exposes in a way the look I want to achieve for the clip.

The widescreen pictures are from Aaron Hobson that I happened to stumble on the net. Excellent work he does.

Nikon zoom fixed again

I took the Nikon zoom lens for repair and the guy did well. He dismantled the whole lens in parts and found that the problem was the the Manual/Automatic switch: it wasn't clamping well enough and it became loose, leaving the focus ring to spin freely without engaging the focusing internal motors.
This was the ofending part: The switch that didn't clamp well.
I have another Canon 35mm f/2.0 Prime lens that the focus ring didn't work as well. Dismantled the whole thing also.
It seems that it has the internal spining mechanism broken. I bought it refurbished in the US and I still have the warranty but it's too much hassle having it sent there, paying shipping and waiting for weeks to have it fixed, so just went ahead and took care of business myself. The guy sure seems to know what he's doing. Gotta pick it tomorrow though.
I just hope the Nikon lens doesn't become broken again and this time its fixed for good.

UPDATE: Went to pick up my Canon 35mm Prime and it works fine at last. The Nikon zoom lens is not giving me any problems either. Hope it stays that way.

Got the Nikon zoom lens

Finally...the Letus Nikon Lens Mount has arrived. Customs agents gave it clearance today but it was to be delivered tomorrow. I couldn't wait so I drove like 60km to Fedex's main office to pick it up. Then, off to get the Nikon lens. The guy was just finishing cleaning it up for the sell and it looked good. Now the focus barrel was better (but not smooth yet). I tried it a couple of times on the camera kit with the Letus Extreme and it worked pretty well: no vignetting on wide apertures, nice beautiful bokeh at 2.8, sharp, no scrathes and good contrast. But the focus ring got stuck once so the dealer gave it to me for some days to test it without buying it yet to see if it worked for me. So far, already installed with my HVX200 kit at home, the focus ring got stuck and doesn't move.
Tomorrow I'm taking it back for repair. This time it has to work. It is the best bargain ever and this Nikon zoom is quite solid and rigid and together with the Tamron 28-75mm, I really have a good range from wide to tele. I really dont want to let this lens go.

Found a bargain Nikon zoom lens

I bought a Tamron SP AF 28-75mm f/2.8 XR lens a month ago. I guess it was second hand but it looked like new. The quality of the picture is quite good and decided to buy it after reading some reviews. But Im kinda short on the far end of the zoom range. I cant get tight shots from far away as 75mm isnt enough so I need to go shopping.

Some days ago, while searching for weeks for fast zoom lenses on a local market (cant go higher than 2.8, the Letus eats up 1/2 of a stop) I found a nice little (big actually) Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8D ED AF lens. It looks amazing! It's condition was quite abused (the focus ring was loose, the zoom ring was jerky and it stuck often) but it looked repairable. Besides, the price was tempting (less than 1/4 of its actual price new) and it seemed repairable. So I told the guy if he could have it repaired and if done well I'll take it. He agreed.

That lens is really huge. Almost the size of the Canon XL 16x II, and the good news it can keep a 2.8 stop in all it's range. It can also go down to 22. I checked the glass under bright light and I didn't see any scratches and dont detect any aberrations either.

I called the guy yesterday and he has it repaired. Im just waiting for the Nikon Lens Mount from Letus to arrive tomorrow to have that huge lens installed on my cam rig!

It's quite a bargain...I just hope the repair is not just a momentary "make-up" and down the road in some days it starts falling apart again. The place doesn't offer a warranty.

Edward Gorey

I have always been a fan of Tim Burton films.

Starting young as an animator in Disney projects, he quickly made a name of himself by concetrating on his style that ranges between the dark, kinda film noir and gothic.

There has been an author and illustrator that I stumbled upon researching art galleries and odd concepts like Salvador Dalí's beautiful paintings and what Im talking about are the drawings of Edward Gorey. His visual style resembles much or at least transports me to the turn-of-the-century british era in the streets of London. When one sees his work Im sure that many have (and defintely any shrink that likes to analize anything) guessed he was a british or he was into death stuff or something. When I read his bio it was quite interesting to learn that he never ever stepped on english soil nor he had an adiction for that kind of stuff. In fact, many of his books were children's books....yes!! Children's books (ok, If I had a kid that loved that type of drawings and was attracted to all that dark stuff...im sure I'd send him off to the school counselor!).

His topics always inpired macabre, cemetery, dark and contrasty looks that revolved around the goth and the surrealist. He was into "literary nonsense"...much like Lewis Caroll.

Anyway, Im sure Tim Burton has come with ideas of his own watching his drawings as inspiration for The Corpse Bride, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman, Sweeny Todd and others in the same horror/gothic type of gloomy atmospheric films.

I'd like to give the Utopia videoclip that look and air. Keep it dark, contrasty, lury, gothic....yes, that Gorey type of look. The lens I'll use together with the HVX200 will help to give it that tight flat sensation. Definetly, a lot of post work will be done in grading it to a darker picture. Plan to hue it toward the dark blues and greens.

Let's see how it develops. The day for principal shooting is getting closer.

Another option

Still searching for a good location for the video and another option has come up in my mind: The Posada del Angel pub/bar. They keep in place antique old stuff that with precise lightning can look rather spooky or gothic and that's the look I want. The AAA is quite nice too but it comes with little light and no props that'd help achieve what we need.

The problem comes in the fact that saturday is a day chosen as everyone is free and in the city, but it's also a busy day for any pub/bar too....so let's see what we can come up with.
If we lock that place for us it would be awesome but we must be quick as the owner is a bit dodgy but I talked to him and I just need to know how much he is gonna charge me. The shooting day is getting closer!


UPDATE: We got the place!! I talked with the owner and we have the place. Now, off to keep the pre-prodcution going fast. Not all memebers are here in Lima or available at the same day or at the same hours. Wardrobe will be needed.

Alter Ego new video

The band....our band....

We had pretty good times back then playing concerts and the peruvian musical circuit.
I still meet and talk with some fellow members and some months ago, because of my new adquisition (the HD camera), we came up with the idea of shooting another videoclip for a song we wanted to have one for, so we chose "Utopia".

So far, Rodolfo Carreño, Toño valero, Israel Beltran "Putre" and Israel "Doom" Medina are on board. We tried to contact Miguel Flores but he is lost somewhere not returning calls. He doesnt even know why he is called so I don't think it's personal. He is just into his own stuff.

Not only "Utopia" has that dark/gothic sound to it but it is very majestic and gives a lot of imaginery to my mind. Besides testing the HD camera, getting back together for the day at least would be a very good thing to do and to remember.

Letus Extreme 35mm adapter

So now, this thing is quite heavy!

Weighing like a medium size rock, Hyen from Letus sure made this thing quite solid and professional: Sharp look, black matte finish, battery compartment inside with a magnet door (very clever), vibrating Ground Glass, rotating interchangeable lens mount (for Canon, Nikon, Minolta, Olympus and even Zeiss PL mounts for 35mm lens), allen screws for tightening parts and included is an achromat for your specific camera, so I ordered the HVX200 Optimization Kit.

The HVX200 is known for sometimes not having a truly dead-center CCD chip so in some units, the ground glass screen will not be totally centered when attached to the camera. Mine has that small issue as I noticed, so I called Hyen at Letus Corp. He was very helpful in telling me the options (which included sending the camera back to Panasonic for fixing that which of course I declined....to much time), so I came back with my own solution: rotating the adapter 180* so it would be on the upper side (the Letus has this L-shaped kinda form) and then....the focusing screen was sharp center and framed! But that also arouse other problems: the adapter was now a bit high for the bracket support that holds the Letus in place with the rods, so I had to make my own in a metal workshop. Aluminum of course not to put more weigh on the already heavy kit. I had it the next day and problem solved!

Now, once the adapter was attached to the camera, the next step is to achieve sharp focus on the ground glass inside the Letus. This is achieved by zooming out all the way to the "wide" position (Z00 in the HVX200). What we get to see is the focusing screen way far inside a "dark room" and to the sides we can notice the prism system mirrors. Then zoom in more until we fill up all the viewfinder screen (and a little bit more to avoid vignetting depending on the lens used). We point at something bright and we focus until we get to see the grain in the ground glass. When that is achieved it's a good idea to write down the focus number and never touch the focusing ring again. Mine is at focus 0.95 and the screen is filled up by Z22.7 but it could differ a bit on some other camera units. You can see that sharp focus is achieved when you get to see the grain in the ground glass. In the picture to the left you can see the grain in the ground glass. The overexposed white spot top right is a bright lamp that I turned down with the dimmer after the pic. The Letus needs to be off by the way. Only turn it on when fully focused to make the grain go away but leave it off for now. Now attach the lens. For this test I used a two lenses: the Canon AF 22-55 f/4.0 and the Canon EF 35mm f/2.0 Prime lens. I chose those two different lens because of the difference in speed and see how the Letus handled range of apertures. Now, the focus chart helps to detect unevenness in sharpness or any fall-off on the sides. So far, so good. I don't see any side blurriness too much and it seems fine .

A Day at the Park

I love Nebraska!
Besides being the home of my beloved gorgeous woman, the wide vast plains and landscapes offer such a cornucopia of views for the filmmaker or any director of photography. I've seen online work of others in Oregon and Washington and really their landscapes help a lot with such a beautiful scenery (not to mention their great eye for beauty of course!).

I took the cam out in one of my free days to a park near Chalco in Omaha. The day couldn't be more perfect than it was. It started with a sunny warm-toned day, turning to a blueish cold cast as sunset approached and then the sky turned bright red (as the Atlanta sky in "Gone with the Wind") and....boom!! thunderstorms, lightning and rain. Being a tornado area it wasn't a good idea to be outside as those little-big fuckers could happen in any moment as it did those weeks I was there.

I just took some shots and played a little role in it to improvise a simple story of me in the park.

I used the HVX200, the Letus Extreme, Canon EF 35mm f/2.0 Prime lens and Canon EF 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM lens for the tight long shots.
Shot it in 1080 at 24p, used Premiere CS3 to edit it, color graded in After Effects and finished with our Proceso Cinematico Digital.
And below is what came out.
Enjoy!

An Evening at the Park


AN EVENING AT THE PARK from Juan Carlos Oganes on Vimeo.

IndiSystem and cam rails

I had the good fortune of using a couple of rail and follow focus systems around and most of them have been on the pro range as the Chrosziel and others for cinema and big Zeiss lenses. When shooting Super 16mm my sweet film cam of choice was the silent Arri 16 BL. I used it with two videos I did with some clients years ago and also with my band when shooting the "Sirenia" and "What's the Fire" videos. You can click here
to watch the behind the scenes.

Usually, in situation that required more control, a follow focus came in handy but the need for a separate focus assistant was necessary, specially for hand-held camera moves. But to do be doing that around is quite a hassle itself so not only the follow focus needs to be good or decent but also the shoulder support for it to be comfortable.

Like I said, there are many rails and FF around but for the rest of us, a good and not-so-expensive one is for the call. I researched a bit and stumbled on the Indisystem company. Not only was I pleased with the price which compared to many around is a bit less but also the tech support si quite friendly. Tim Ovel runs the show there and he is a person you can call a nice "human being" or a friend. He is a very welcoming easy going guy who always goes out of his way to help customers and offer a helping hand. Not to complain about other companies but I had my share of odd moments with tech support, specially with big software companies who decided since some time ago to hire (or maybe outsource) it's client-dealing department with Hindu's. India has not only populated the motel or hotel business in the US but also many companies consider a cheaper option to use Indian people for those affairs. Me, your regular average-english-speaking-or-understanding person has sometimes a bit of trouble understanding some fast words of any american joe around, so, if you add an Indian person talking english with a heavy "bollywood" accent then....Houston, we have a problem! I have nothing against other nationalities (I'm not an american myself), but there's something going on there that needs some attention I think...but thats another topic that doesn't belong here.

Back to Tim Ovel. His IndiRail system is quite appealing and serves a lot of indie filmmakers with a budget and what made me happy with the purchase was not only the options of bettering the configurations but his helpfulness...things you really don't get around here lately. Whats the use of purchasing an expensive piece of equipment that when you find is not getting along with your camera accessories nobody is REALLY there to assist you?

Once it was all set and coupled with the Letus, the IndiMatte and the HVX200 this was the result: now this thing is all dressed up like the big boys and ready to dance.

Guerrilla shooting

I loved the results!
The HVX200 is awesome. I checked the video on the LCD widescreen at my editing bay and its looks sharp and clear. The only thing lacking is the so fought-after depth of field. Im almost clear that the 35mm adapter that I'm purchasing now is the Letus Extreme. I had worked with the other brands before (Redrock M2, Brevis) but the flipped image is the issue there. I find very annoying having to turn the image in post or turn the monitor upside-down while shooting.

Doesn't work for me that...but I'll cover that in another post.

I did another "test drive" a while back and now in a more "guerrilla" way, more "run-and-gun" scenario to see the 24p motion in action. This time I used the 720p resolution but on NATIVE mode to have more room in the 16GB P2 card that came with the camera.
Those little cards fill up fast! Im waiting for the market prices to drop on those (almost $900 the 16GB, $1500 the 32GB) as paying almost a grand for 17 minutes on 1080 resolution is way too little. Now with 720p in Native mode I get 40 minutes apart from being able to shoot slow-mo too. It's also a good thing that the camera has two P2 slots so one one fills up completly it automatically jumps to the other and continues recording without gaps or losing frames.



Too bad I cant do "speed ramping" like on film cams but...I dont want to be too exquisite. Im happy with what I got.
Here below is a video of quads in action. The shooting of this was so fun.
Loved the fast-paced results and I loved to see them so happy doing what they love. It was such a great day!

HVX200 test drive

Today I took the HVX200 out for a "test drive".
I have always been keen about film motion. The characteristic move of 24fps transfered to 30fps (or 60i) is very unique. When I was shopping around months back I happened to read all articles about the new 24p cameras out there....some were convincing and some weren't.


Like the film veteran Scott Billups said once in his book Digital Moviemaking 3.0, many of those articles are written by people who have little or no real world experience and who are simply "transcribing" or reformatting in their own words what the manufacturers give them in a press-release, and of course, much of that is just hype, commercially motivated fibbing. You only know the performance of something on the field, on a real project who's main finale is the big screen or prime time TV where all quality is tested. No question asked.

So, just for starters, I took the cam out and shot simple stuff around the neighborhood, streets, cars passing by, the sun thru the trees (to see how it manages high-contrast light) , slow motion in-camera and finally its time-lapse capability with a beautiful sunset.

The excuse to do it was to have a motive and chose to make video for my lovely girl that I wanted to make so bad since time ago.
And here is the result.

Solace of a Statue - a Video Poem

SD to HD test

I was doing some tests of turning Standard Definition video to High Definition. There are many ways to do this thing but most of them aren't acurate and the video turns out looking pixelated or jagged.

For this one I used After Effects and also PhotoZoom Pro 2 (the professional one). There is another plug-in that works in After and I'm checking it right now. So far the results are awesome!

Used a short clip of me here warming up for a music videoclip I did last year.
I'm playing "My Melancholy Blues" by Queen.


SD to HD test from Juan Carlos Oganes on Vimeo.

The waiting is over....the HVX200 is here.

The new HVX200 has now arrived. After doing research thoroughly for months which HD cam to purchase, the Panasonic one won by far my votes.

The JVC ProHD was a close contender together with the Canon XL-H1 (despite its steep price). In fact this last one was a strong choice for me in the beggining as I have not only owned but worked for the past eight years with the XL-1 and it's following models. The interchangeable lenses is definetly a plus for film work.

The JVC GY-HD110E has that same feature, but both latter models are just HDV which to my taste (and many) has proven not quite good to handle in post (the long GOP makes it diffuclt to edit)....so that left me with HV200.

But the HVX200 didnt just win because of price. It makes a filmmaker reluctant to choose a camera with no interchangeable lens but its has other premium features that is the non-plus-ultra of any person coming from a film background: more than a dozen frame rates, four video formats (SD and HD), 24p, 30p, 1080i/p, the pristine DVCPRO-HD codec (not the faulty HDV one) solid-state P2 memory card recording option and of course... being the big brother of the popular DVX100 it comes loaded with those beautiful gamma curves that simulates film latitude very well as it's big brother: the VARICAM.

It will be a true complement to our Cinematic Digital Process, saving us one step in post of simulating 24fps.

I was happy to notice that in the box came the excellent HVX BOOK written by the well-known Barry Green. We happened to email back and forth about some workflow topics with this cam and also ordered his popular HVX Bootcamp DVD which explains in detail what the book shows also.

Im happy with this investment.

After buying the XL-1 years back I felt the same and was happy to see that that cam was so good, all manufacturers began making accesories for it....now, the same is happening with this little-big cam.

The HVX200 is here to make history.

Cubano, the videoclip

Shooting the videoclip has been awesome. Great people and hilarious Cheito Quiñones. Also the Arturo and Patty Lavalle, mexican producers and professional people I loved working with.
I also met Alain Pastrana, author and mastermind of all these. Great gentle guy. He wrote that song as a tribute to his fellow cuban countrymen. His new single called "Cubano" talks about the struggle cubans go thru in search for a new and better life outside the island. The shooting was very curious as we were form many different countries all together in one single production.
We all know Miami is more latin than american (actually, we are americans too...I personally don't know who decided to call citizens of the United States americans when americans are all who live in the American continent, all inlcuding central and south america....but well, that's another topic). The different accents all around was the funny thing: light technicians and the gaffer were mexicans, the grip was from Dominican Republic, the producers were from Mexico, the drummer and guitarists were from Cuba and Cheito is from Puerto Rico.

We got to shoot three versions in the end (came out as a surprise for me actually): the salsa version, the reggaeton one making a duo with Joselito and a rap version with Knight. The official one is the salsa version to be promoted as a single.

I then took the material to Nebraska for editing and finished the post-production back in Lima applying our Proceso Cinemático Digital.

Here is the final video and below the behind-the-scenes.

Alain Band - "Cubano"


ALAIN BAND - "Cubano" from Juan Carlos Oganes on Vimeo.




Cubano - Behind the scenes