SET THE STAGE a short stop-motion film to promote the 17 DAYS Festival

   Early in June I received a phone call from my good friend Tom Philion, the CEO of United Arts Council for Greater Greensboro. Tom and I have worked on many projects over the last dozen years or so, always to good end. This call started a conversation about promotion ideas for the up-coming 17 Days arts event in Greensboro. After some thought, I came up with an idea for a stop-motion piece with a story of a stagehand who, after making a blunder, saves the day. Tom was intrigued enough to give me the go ahead, so I started assembling a team to produce the 30 second film "Set the Stage". 
   

   After a call to fellow filmmakers Stephen and Marie van Vuuren, I had the start of what would become a fantastic and enthusiastic team of stop-motionists (I think I may have coined a new term). The team was rounded out with Emma Hadley, an art student at VCU, Daniel Irons, a film student at SCAD, and Lynn Wagoner. I am grateful for all of their help, this project would not have come to life without them.

    With Marie as lead set designer helped by Lynn, Emma doing the design and construction of the props and figures, Stephen working out timing and technical issues during the shoot, and Daniel handling the camera and lights, we had all of the aspects of producing a lovely project. Now keep in mind - this is a lot of work for six people! We had a total of almost 30 days of work - from planning to editing - by the time it was completed.  

    My inspiration for the story comes from an experience that I had many years ago while working as a stagehand on a fashion show. The pre-set was for the front rag to be in the up postion, set parts in place and lighting set for the first scene. Perhaps five minutes before showtime, with a full house, I needed to be in position in the wings stage right, but I was in the wings stage left. The only way to get to where I was supposed to be was to walk right across the stage, in full view of the audience. I was halfway across when I realized maybe it would have been better to walk upstage behind the backdrop. I was mortified, but I kept going on with the confidence of a 23-year-old. Of course, I walked right into the director who was waiting in the wings. This experience contributed to my style of directing, which helps keep me calm, even when not all is perfect. Like our animated hero, a figure of notoriety that goes way beyond Greensboro, I went on to help save both the day and my respectability, and I am reminded that we often get a second chance to prove our value.

   The set features the number 17 as you would expect, a tip of the hat to our friend Harry Blair and the beautiful Greensboro Oak Leaf design he created around 1985 for the Carolina Theater, and many of the feature performers and art that will appear during the festival.

     We all had a hand in the animation. On the opening shot, we had the camera dollying, focus pulling from a chandelier moving up and out of frame, people in the audience sitting down, and the curtains opening. That was the shot with the most different movements, but perhaps not the hardest shot to pull off.  We have different answers for that depending on who was the main animator for a given set-up. While on there can always be a bit of tension with the difficulty of some of these shots, everyone had fun is ready to produce another stop-motion soon, well, maybe in a few weeks, or perhaps a month.

The Making of "esperanza"

"esperanza"

This little project started with an invitation to shoot at my friend Mark Hewett's store, Area. Lynn and I shop there, and we have rented and bought props from Mark for years for the studio. We even shot a print project there once, back when there was money spent on hosiery advertising (that seems like another lifetime!) I knew I wanted to shoot something that took advantage of the great windows upstairs, and had an element of a fashion and lifestyle look to it, but it had to have a story. I did not want to shoot just a collection of pretty pictures.

I was talking to Kelly Swanson from Ink Photography Productions about this, and she was excited to help. We spent a few phone calls and a lunch talking about cast, props, crew, time of day, everything except the lost subject, the story. After a few months of ruminating on this subject, it suddenly became clear in a moment - as these things often do. A story about longing for what might be, or what might have been. It would be the woman's story with the guy in the supporting, but perhaps not supportive, role.

Also going on at the same time over this past winter was a brewing battle of two new cameras, the Red Scarlett and the Canon C300. Both were announced to much fanfare on November 3rd, 2011, but with no exact delivery time. I was in the market to make a change, and I went back and forth with my excitement and decision. I worked on this every night, reading every test and comment I could find. Finally by mid-February, I had made a decision to buy the Canon C300, and as predicted, this has proved to be the correct move on my part. It shoots a wonderful image, with tons of latitude, and it is great in low light. We have already shot more than a dozen projects with this camera.

I have been thinking about a technique for manipulating the image on a motion picture camera that would feel very real, as in not done in post, and has a emotional feeling associated with it. I have tested many filters, lenses, mirrors and various objects to achieve what I saw happening in the head upon my shoulders, but nothing seemed to work. At last this camera plus some very old lenses gave me the combination to make this imagined image come to life. I am really excited about this look, and what's more, I can achieve it with still photography, too. A few clients have already asked me to create stills and video using this look.

(Please call me to find out more or how we can use this look for your project!)

So, back to the story of the story, longing is a theme that appears in many artistic forms, perhaps I am most knowledgeable with the subject from the writing of the Sufi poet Rumi. I decided, (after much mental tennis), that the film should end the way life often does, with some degree of uncertainty. Endings do not always end like the movies, I doubt I'm the only one who feels this. The way you see the ending may have to do with how you look at life, or then perhaps not. I go back and forth less now than i did during the edit, but even I still have mixed feelings about it.

Kudos to everyone who helped make this a reality, Kelly and Lauren at Ink, Mark at Area, Cheri Osterholt and Kent Chilton for opening themselves up for a great performance, Stephan Weed for all the hard work on shoot day, Stephen van Vuuren of SV2 Studio for help on set and on story building, Jill Davis for tons of post production support, and to Lynn for listening to me talk about this for months and her support on getting out and shooting it.

Hope you enjoy it.
Mark

Telly Time 2012

We are so excited and humbled to announce that Mark received four Telly Awards for his work as a Director and DP during the last year! You can see the award winning spots by clicking the links below:

Charitable / Not For Profit, "Go Out For A Run"
      for the GO FAR Club with Watts Communications

Cinematography, "Sam the Flim Flam Man"
      with G-Force Marketing Solutions

Cinematography, "Taniya Nayak - Mohawk Flooring"
      with ASV Productions

Cinematography, "Santa Letters"
      with G-Force Marketing Solutions

We want to thank our good friends and colleagues who worked with us on these projects. They were all team efforts!

New Showreel for 2012

Come view our new showreel on Vimeo! It's an exciting collection of the wide variety of work we've been up to recently. Then browse our website for more in depth samples.

Holiday Memories & Giveaway Winner

In our last post, we offered a giveaway of 2 lbs of coffee from Carolina Coffee Roasting, and a delicious tin of cookies from Simply Scrumptious. And now, we announce our winner... chosen by a random number generator...  Chris Ferguson, Art Director at Pace Communications! Congratulations!
Thank you to everyone who entered! We enjoyed reading about your holiday traditions & memories so much, we just had to share them with everyone. Here are a few of our favorites.

Happy Holidays & Best Wishes for the New Year!
- Mark

From our winner, Chris Ferguson:

One of my favorite holiday treats is something my wife makes (passed down from her mother): Crème de Menthe bars!

 

From Banu Valladares:

I don’t drink coffee or eat cookies (I have dairy and gluten allergies) but love the smells of those two, particularly in the holiday season. In Venezuela, we didn’t bake. I was introduced to the joy of holiday cookie eating and later baking after I married Jay. His mom made a fantastic “monkey bread” – carrot bread that she’d bake in a tin can…. It was the most fantastic thing in the world – moist, sweet…. And then, a stay-at-home neighbor who baked and gifted sparked the spirit in me.

In Venezuela, we make a traditional meal starting in early December – hallacas. They’re like tamales, but wrapped in banana tree leaves and stuffed with a stew made with chicken, pork and beef, as well as raisins, almonds, pickled veggies, bacon…. We made hundreds of these that we’d eat throughout the month until the day the kings arrived (Epiphany in January).

Making hallacas was a family affair. The elders took care of the guizo (stew) and making the dough. These required huge bats. I remember my grandma sticking her arm all the way to her elbow in a bat to knead the white corn dough mixed with annatto and oil for these. The youngest kids were responsible for “curing” the banana tree leaves – using the same combination of annatto and oil to clean and soften them so they could be pliable enough to wrap. The grown ups would then add a bit of dough to each cured leaf, flatten it and add the stew. The little ones could then add little bits of all the other ingredients and, as they got older, wrap the hallaca, reinforce it with a faja (a thin strip of leaf  where there might be a tear to keep the stuffing from falling out) and tie them the way you wrap a Christmas gift except crossing over twice. Then, the elders would boil them twice and stuff the bottom shelves of our refrigerator as well as the drawers until they were all gone.

We never tired of eating hallacas, maybe because of the time we spent together making them, maybe because we only ate them in December while the gaitas and aguinaldos played all day and the fireworks lit up the nights.

From Terri Beam:

Every year since I can remember, my family has attended the Moravian Love Feast service in the afternoon around 4:00 on Christmas Eve. We have visited more than one particular Moravian Church over the years. Many times our church selection was driven by friends or family that may help serve and present the unique services of the Love Feast or by those that sing in the choir, as my only surviving Aunt does now. The service is beautiful, touching and invites much congregation involvement.

Regardless of your religious preferences, everyone is invited to attend these worship services all over the city of Winston-Salem, in what seems like every Moravian church (of which there are many.)  Yes, the minister/pastor delivers a sermon, the choir sings Christmas anthems, but the congregation practically guides the service in their participation in sharing and receiving a cup of hot coffee in a hefty mug, a delicious Moravian Love Feast bun (baked by Old Salem, Dewey's or local food artisans) and a lighted candle to be held high in exultation of Jesus Christ's' birth at the very end of the service. There is an adult choir, a hand bell choir and a children's choir, all of which deliver sweet hymns that bring Christmas into my heart every year.  There is something very special about entering that church, sitting with my family, waving to friends, trying to get my aunt to laugh out loud while she sits and faces the entire congregation that brings merriment to my heart.
 
It is usually tough to stifle a laugh more than once as my Mother and I sing "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" since we have our own way of raising our voices at offbeat times. When the buns and coffee are received by all the congregation and choir, we must all sit quietly and wait until the minister takes his first bite or sip and then we may begin our Love feast portion of food. Several people choose to balance their bun on top of their coffee mug to keep their coffee warm prior to partaking of the tasty meal.  My boys and I always smile as we wait for buns to topple down the aisle with one sneeze or cough! Miss Mannerly, that my Mother is, usually comments on how one or another person is eating their bun "incorrectly" or started eating prior to the minister's signal to begin.  Oh my gosh, another opportunity for me and my sister to laugh and shake the row of seats in doing so. Mother's will be Mother's but church will never be church without a little bit of laughter from MY family!

I have lived out of state several times, once in Boston and another in Chicago, but I always came home for Christmas and attend the Love Feast service with my family as Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without the Moravian Love Feast and I will cherish all my memories there for the rest of my life.

Home for the Holidays... in the Studio

One of the things we love about preparing for the holidays is the opportunity to bring the comforts of home into the studio. Freshly baked cookies, a cup of hot coffee on a cold winter morning, having these delights as subjects for our still photography take us to a happy place this time of year.

We've been especially fortunate recently to have two of our studio neighbors work with us on some delicious projects.  Julie Watson of Simply Scrumptious created a variety of Christmas and classic cookies for us to photograph. Julie makes amazing cakes, cookies, cheesecakes, truffles, etc. for any occasion, and from locally sourced ingredients. Candy Azarcon at the Carolina Coffee Roasting Company has provided fresh and roasted coffee beans for shoots, but also keeps the studio caffeinated with our own special studio blend that she helped create. Their coffee is roasted in small batches and freshly ground in their shop just around the corner. Sometimes we can even smell the coffee roasting from our front door!

We love being able to work with and support our small business neighbors and friends, so we'd like to share their talents with you by having a giveaway! The winner will receive 1 lb. of the MWP Studio Blend (a lovely mix of Columbian and Guatemalan organic coffees) and 1 lb. of Jamaican Blue Mountain from Carolina Coffee Roasting, plus a delicious tin of cookies from Simply Scrumptious.  Just reply to this email to enter, or leave a comment on our blog! The winner will be selected at random from the replies. (Tell us a really good story about a favorite holiday treat, and we'll give you 2 entries! ;)

Wishing you and yours holidays that runneth over with all that is wonderful!

Time, something to toy with.

Our new Time Showreel

Time affects us in many ways, we run our life by it, music is based on time, we mark its passage with rites and ceremonies, and yet the main way that we tend to think about time is based on divisions interpreted by people. It is amazing to me that something that is so abstract and untouchable can be used by us all each day, divided up, possessed by us, then bought and sold.

I became interested in using time as a way to express emotion with photography while still in high school. My friends and I were doing these large, hours-long exposures with flares, big flashlights, boats... well, needless to say they were big productions for a bunch of high schoolers. This experimentation continued in college with things like running a roll of 35mm film all the way to the end, then opening the shutter and rewinding the film to expose it, then contact printing the result.

One of my first experiments with long exposures. 

This is 2 o'clock in the morning at Reidsville Senior High.

Believe it or not but the photo guys had a key to the school.

Since those days I have worked with time-lapse, fast motion, stop motion, frozen moments in time, and motion blur to change how we think about time. My interest has three facets:

1. The technical challenge of getting all the gear dialed in just right, and planning the performance or action. This is the fun of the moment.

2. The visual appeal of how the image looks. If done well, we go beyond a gimmick to something that holds up over time.

3. The emotion - when used in the right context, time is a meaningful story telling element. You have to use the right technique at the right time to make it effective.

All three of these elements take years to learn how to use correctly, and getting them to work together can be difficult. Sometimes it just does not work, but other times when you place one into an edit and add the music, it can seem magical. That is when you forget about sitting in the cold for five hours, the dead battery at the wrong time, and the never ending purchase of hard drives!

I don't understand time, I just hope I have some more of it to play with!