Great polaroid news!
The impossible project recently announced the development of three products
- an instant lab
- a pinhole camera
- a viewfinder camera
- Turned ON: The film is exposed but no film is ejected.
- Turned OFF: The film is exposed and the film is ejected.
Here a two behind the scenes pictures of the Porsche Holding shoot taken with my iPhone.
We had plenty of little cars (what a delight for the small boy inside of me! :) ), which obviously had to be the brands and latest models represented by the Porsche Holding.
skoobe goes cinema!!
Almost a year after its first the release the commercial for skoobe - the first ebook flat rate - can be seen in a shortened version nationwide on the screens in cinemaxx movie theaters!
The app is a great success offering the most books available among the competition.
If you want the have a look you can test it for 2 weeks for free here.
You can find all skoobe related posts here
Project: Porsche Holding
Some of you might have noticed the sexy car shot on my front page a while ago, which I had to take offline later.
Here’s a little explanation:
In May + June this year I directed two mixed-media spots for Porsche Holding for their main convention in Salzburg this year. Produced by KG media factory, and with the multi-talented and great-to-work-with DP Florian Hassler (yes, we team up quite a lot), we shot two 90sec pieces covering Porsche Holding’s history as well as creatively visualizing their current challenges.
I’m not allowed to share any more details about the content (or the video itself), but it was a very interesting shooting process, producing a 3:1 aspect ratio video (let’s call it über-cinemascope) to be projected up on a gigantic 21m x 7m video wall.
For me it was also the first time shooting in a spacious studio in Munich, but with 15+ crew members, 6 cast members and 4 additional hand models it was rather a necessity than luxury.
I might be able to post some behind the scenes pictures later on.
So stay tuned! :)
Dear blog-readers,
I have been a little silent on here, part of the reason for this is I had been on a extended vacation. Incidentally one of my polaroid shots of our trip was voted shot of the day on polanoid.net
While waiting for a little news round-up you can go and check this one out :)
And thanks to everyone who voted for it, it really made my day!
My friend and DP Florian Hassler just put online his new reel. Take a look! :)
My brand new 2012 reel is finally finished. Thanks to Felix Schneidewind for editing it.
http://florianhassler.com/26617/279307/film/showreel-florian-hassler
For quite some time I had been thinking about this:
Polaroid cameras are awesome, but I already have a bag full of old batteries, most of them containing still so much voltage in order to fuel another 2-3 cartridges (depending on your camera). Yes, there is a battery return program by the impossible project (which I highly recommend supporting though there are currently no free return envelopes…) taking care and eventually reusing some of the returned batteries (great!).
But I wanted to try a different approach. The idea is quite simple, but might also go against some part of the original polaroid concept.
Instead of having the battery coming with every cartridge of film (with the battery landing in trash rather sooner than later), why not power the camera externally with a standard rechargeable battery.
So this is what I did (and you can do this as well, if you are willing to take some irreversible modification to your camera):
- Drill two holes in the bottom of your camera, right at the point where usual the cartridge battery connects with the camera.
- Stick to cables through the holes (I used a piece of the audio cable from my stereo system).
- Connect the other ends to a rechargeable battery with the right voltage (mine is 6 V, 750 mAH, I used this
That’s it.
Costs of modification: About 15 Euro (for battery and charger)
Time of modification: less than 5 minutes.
Now here’s the catch:
For using the camera this way with a new cartridge you need a changing bag in order to remove the fresh battery from the cartridge. Then you are ready to go.
Taking this further, I can see some advantages and possibilities:
- Less battery waste
- More efficient use of power.
- Battery outlasts even the most energy hungry photo sessions (I’m thinking of using my Polaroid ImagePro with multiple exposures and flash on each exposure)
- No battery in the cartridge means: More space for film!
What needs to be done now?
First of all, I’d like you to weigh in. What are your thoughts on that concept? Does it make sense to you? And if you are from impossible, I really would like to talk to you about this in-depth. Please use Twitter or mail.
Second, please share this idea with your polaroid friends on- and offline, so I can find out what others are thinking about it.
Last but not least: This is a prototype, meaning I’m testing the concept. In a next step some cool looking and efficient product design would need to happen ;)
Above I put together a short video showing different stages of the skoobe project, from storyboard to final spot, side by side.
Step 1 - Storyboarding
What you see here is not the shooting board, but the initial scribbles of the idea 2 weeks in the project.
Step 2 - Previz / Onion Skin
After the go, almost the complete spot was preanimated by Moritz Vordermeier of RedHotMagma in AfterEffects for both: Nailing down the timing of the spot, as well as using it as an Onion skin for the stop motion animation.
This required main stop motion animator Adrian Marhoffer (also RedHotMagma) to do a couple of animation tests, for figuring out movement timings, and distances.
He also broke down the spot mathematically into cm to achieve smooth motion and ease ins and outs as perfectly as possible.
Timing was key here, since the concept required it the whole spot to be one sequence shot, with no possibilities to intercut.
For the previz zo be as accurate as possible, a digital replica of out set had to be rebuilt in AfterEffects with accurate lens settings and distances, in order to get as close to the final framing as possible and by this having an almost exact timing before shooting.
Step 3 - Shooting stop motion
We shot everything in stop-motion at 12 fps. For a more organic feeling the hand was not shot separately, but together with the stop motion animation.
For capturing we used the newly released stop motion software Dragonframe, which made everything really easy to handle.
Along with Dragonframe, we used the internal DMX lighting control system with which DP Florian Hassler could easily control and adjust the light animation. He also hung 5D Mark II with a Arri CP 2 lens with wireless remote focus control upside down from a secure rig. By this, our hand model Lisa could (more or less comfortably) sit in front of the set. Also the movement of camera (be it by accident or by adjusting focus) was reduced to a minimum.
The shooting frame naturally differed slightly from the prevized frame, so distances were a tiny bit longer in “real life” than in the prevized image. That’s why the timing of the stop motion animation differs from the previz. Being aware of that shooting was a mixture of using the onion skin and shooting according to calculated distances.
Step 4 - Making it final
Besides some VFX and digital animation another retiming step was applied to the footage, to make timing perfect. But how to retime a sequence shot?
During shooting we also shot some “repeatable” frames meaning frames that could be duplicated for adjusting timing with no visible disruption. Basically this meant for example that we shot - in the crime scene - two frames with the blue light on and one with the blue light off. With these 3 frames we could add another (or two) cycles of emergency lights.
Possibilities of retiming by this method were somehow limited, but a very nice tool.
Again, you can watch the final spot here:
The last two months of work in 2011 I’ve been working as author and director together with spotentwicklung on a promotional video accompanying the launch of skoobe, an ebook app for iOS.
We came up with the concept to rebuild the app’s world with real objects through which a hand navigates using iOS hand moves.
This concept beautifully connected the digital world of ebooks (hint: read skoobe backwards!) with the haptic world of “analog” books.
Aboth are some behind the scenes pictures of our 3-day-shoot.
Please click them for full-sized view and some captions.
You can watch the final spot here:
It already feels like a long time ago that we wrapped this project, now the product has officially launched.
I proudly present: skoobe
Make sure to comment, share and come back and check out some behind the scenes stuff (will post this shortly) here:
