Rutherford Falls season 2 inserts

I suppose they must have liked what I did in season 1, as I got brought back to do some insert shots for episode 3 of season 2, as the first unit must have ran out of time or they decided to add some shots when they got into the edit. This was a pretty simple one, with some handheld shots of preparing food in a kitchen. They were all closeups, so the set was literally 8 feet wide and only a couple feet deep, so basically just the stove, counter top, and some walls behind those.

We shot on the RED Gemini with Zeiss Super Speeds and I built it on my handheld shoulder rig. Lighting was matched to the first unit shots (recreating a big window with daylight behind and overhead tungsten lights). After completing that, we finished up the day by shooting some afternoon and evening car drive-by shots on sticks.

If you watch the opening scene of episode 3, almost every single "cooking" shot was our second unit shoot. We shot with doubles since you don't see their faces.

And then a few simple car drive-by shots for episodes 6 and 7, such as this one.

Raven's Home establishing shots

For season 5, the show shifts from Chicago to San Francisco, so Raven will be attending a new school, Bayside High. With the new school location, new establishing shots were needed, so we spent a day shooting new exteriors with students coming and going, that can be dropped in whenever they want to establish the school location.

This was a fairly simple shoot, with a few specific angles and then just a bunch of different timings of the background actors coming and going to school in both the afternoon and into late evening after the sun went down. We shot on the RED Gemini using an Angenieux Optimo 24-290mm.

We shot a few angles to use over the course of the show, both with and without students and at different times of day so they can be used as establishing shots over many episodes and scenarios.

They also had us go out to Santa Barbara to film the face of a building that would serve as The Chill Grill, a restaurant the characters often visit. Again, we shot a lot of version with varying times of day as well as with pedestrians and without. The restaurant sign was added in post.

Westworld season 4

I can't believe it was just over a year ago that we were out shooting plates for Westworld. For the new season, they knew they would have scenes on a train and that the train car would be a standing set. Rather than shoot green screen and composite in later, they had us shoot the train plates ahead of time so they could do LED walls for interactive lighting.

Seeing as how they would be train height and potentially see out of multiple windows on any given side of the train car, we shot with 3 RED Komodos on Ronins (for smoothness) with 14mm Sigma Art primes, which would cover a 180° field of view with enough overlap to stitch the cameras together. These were all built on a truck at train window height with the run/stop synchronized via a Tilta Nucleus. By setting the Nucleus motor on each camera to the same channel, a single handset could control the iris (which we wanted to match between cameras) and run/stop on all three units.

We shot a few locations for the show, some in the desert, some on the freeway between Glendale and Eagle Rock, and a bit near downtown.

We did discover that the Komodos don't like having their exhaust vent facing upwind, as the incoming air would fight against the fan blowing the opposite direction and create a sort of air-pressure stalemate, causing them to overheat quickly. We solved the issue by taking a small piece of foam board, folding it into a "V", and taping the "tent" over the the exhaust port, effectively keeping the upwind air from pushing against the fan, but letting the hot air vent out the top and bottom of the tents. After that, we had no temperature issues at all.

I haven't seen all of the new season, so haven't found where the downtown footage we shot has been used yet, but we did the desert background plates for these shots:

As well as the arrival of the train to the city, shot on the 134 going up and down the hill between Glendale and Eagle Rock, as seen in these shots:

It was a pretty fun shoot and interesting in that we shot these before the main unit had even started filming the show, whereas I'm used to us shooting either concurrent with the main unit or, for a lot of the network TV shows that shoot their cars on green screen, well after they've shot their episode.

DJI Ronin 2 owner

Well, after years of renting the Ronin 2 for all these jobs I do, I went out and bought one. I wish I had gotten one years ago, as I would have paid it off already, but since I had a 3 week shoot not long ago that needed one, I figured it was a good time to buy as that job would make a nice dent in the price.

It's a pretty useful tool, as I came from a Mōvi background (after initially starting with the original Ronin) as it was lighter weight and therefore the tool of choice for handheld operation. When I got into car plates, the Mōvi Pro just wasn't cutting it and the Mōvi Pro XL was way out of budget, so I switched over to using the Ronin 2. Weight aside, I prefer the Ronin 2 in so many ways: built in SDI cabling; axis locks; more powerful motors; Steadicam style screw adjustments; great aftermarket part support (Cinemilled); superior native power system; and dedicated car mode.

While it was car work that got me into the Ronin 2, I also use it a lot for remote head operation on jibs and dollies. The integration with wheel controls, joystick, or even accelerometer based Force Pro control gives all sorts of operating options. I'm looking forward to putting it to work and excited to see the things we shoot with it!

Pivoting plates

We shot a car stunt scene for the Fox television show Pivoting last year and the episode (episode 2) has aired, so I can finally share some behind the scenes with you. While we normally use a larger camera vehicle (you can see pictures in many of my past posts), this one required some precision driving as there was traffic and a car stunt, so we rigged up a Porsche with three Komodos, two on hard mounts with Zeiss CP2 25mm lenses and one on a Ronin 2 in the center with a Sigma Cine 14mm. Because there was a hard u-turn, which caused the Ronin to swing to the side, we had to be conscientious of our placement so we wouldn't crash the moving camera into the stationary one to the side.

The local PD closed down a few blocks of street for us and we had a stunt coordinator making sure all the picture vehicles were correctly timed. This was nice as it takes some of the load off of our driver, who typically coordinates directly with the PD for our smaller, non-stunt driven shoots. This is also one of the few times we shot with the main unit, as most of the time we are shooting completely separate from 1st unit.

The best part is that the main feature of the stunt (a car skidding to a stop as they cut it off during the u-turn) didn't even make the edit since it would have been visible out the side or rear windows, but they cut to a forward facing shot instead! Oh well. At least the background plates we shot got used for when they're talking inside the moving car.

Please excuse the mediocre quality of my screenshots, as I had to take them off my computer screen with my phone, so they aren't as high of quality as I usually get.

Hacks season 2

Having shot some VFX driving plates as well as some establishing shots for Hacks season 1, we were hired to do some shooting for the second season as well. While season 1 focused on the Las Vegas residency, at the end of the season the characters decide to take the show on the road, which brings us to season 2. For this, production wanted shots of the tour bus driving all over America. So we rigged up a camera car and set out with the tour bus, starting in New Mexico and traveling up through northern Texas and Oklahoma, then over to Tennessee before heading north through Minnesota and eventually ending in Illinois.

It was a lot of driving and, shooting the end of January into February, got extremely cold as we made our way north to Chicago. This introduced some technical challenges that I don't encounter in Los Angeles, mainly that the vibration isolator for the Ronin 2 uses rubber rings that get progressively stiffer as it gets colder, which makes it so they don't remove the road vibration anymore. We ended up buying a bunch of hand warmers that we could strap to the rings and wrap up with insulation to get the rubber flexible again (being careful to keep the rings clear enough that they wouldn't be impeded by the fix). Working in freezing temps always reminds me to appreciate the typically warm weather I enjoy back home.

For gear, we used a new prototype hitch mounted hydraulic arm for attaching the Flowcine Black Arm. The hydraulic arm let us raise the camera from just off the ground to about 9' in the air with a simple remote control. On the Black Arm, we had RED's new V-Raptor flying on a DJI Ronin 2. Lenses were some customized-just-for-the-show Panavision Primo 70 Series primes (we mostly used the 35mm).

You can check out the trailer below:

Hacks - Latitude Talent Agency establishing shots

Edit: While watching Hacks season 2 I finally saw the establishing shots we did. I had originally thought they were for Hacks, as we shot them soon after the Las Vegas driving plates for season 1. I don't recall them getting used in that season, so I thought maybe the plates were for one of the other shows we shoot for. But then there they were, being used as establishing shots for the talent agency where Jimmy works. You can see the symmetrical buildings I took the BTS photo of in the background.

Sometimes I'm tasked with shooting a couple establishing shots for a TV show. The strange thing about the work I do is sometimes I have no idea what show I'm shooting for and I have no clue if this show ever came out, and if it did, what shots they used (it's been long enough that the show would have aired already). This shoot consisted of just some simple building establishing shots. We opted for the Sigma Art Cine 14mm and a couple of Zeiss Super Speeds (25mm and 35mm) to capture the large scale of the buildings.

The client had pulled some stills that they really liked so we were mostly matching the reference angles, though one was particularly challenging. Construction had started since the reference photos were taken and one of the shots would have put us smack in the middle of a huge work zone. So, with a little creativity, and tucking the camera right up against the barrier wall, we managed to get a shot that was very similar.

Since we were hiking around with our hands full of camera gear, I didn't get my usual BTS photos, other than taking a bonus shot of one of the buildings, but I like the symmetry.