Filmmaker J.J. Abrams; Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness, Super 8, Lost, Revolution, Fringe, the upcoming Star Wars movie (the man is everywhere these days,) gives us a peek into his process during a recent sit down interview with the British Academy Of Film And Television Arts.
Abrams discusses the transitions between television to the big screen, balancing hyper-reality with intimacy, why television leaves room for surprises, the best advice he’s ever been given and what advice he would give to future filmmakers. [more]
Winners of the 4th International Earth and Sky Photo Contest, hosted by The World at Night (TWAN), were announced this week with some awe inspiring photographs.
TWAN is an international effort to photograph nightscape and time-lapse videos of the world’s landmarks. According to TWAN’s website “The contest was founded by TWAN and Dark Skies Awareness project in 2008 as a regional [more]
Here is a funny glimpse into the comic shenanigans that happened during a photo shoot for Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People with Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele.
In this video directed and produced by Casey Rodgers, the two improv comedians are on set riffing off the cuff with their hilarious [more]
Time and Google have created an astounding, multi-decade animated timelapse of the Earth. It is nothing short of amazing the amount of satellite photographs that has been collected and crunched. Trillions of pixels of satellite data which until now, have not been available to the public. Locations around the Earth can be searched and viewed through the latest project Timelapse: Landsat Satellite Images. [more]
In this amazing split second moment of time, Travis Roe captured a bolt of lighting striking the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
The once in a lifetime photograph was shot last year but recently surfaced after Roe submitted the image to the U.S. Department of the Interior. [more]
We have all witnessed it, practiced it, you might be doing it now while reading this post. Sadly, seeing someone staring down at a mobile device in public has become such a common sight, that we might walk right past without even thinking about it.
While on a recent visit to Taipei, Tao Lin created photographs of strangers interacting with their mobile devices. [more]
Ridley Scott is arguably one of the greatest movie directors of his time. Blade Runner, Legend, Alien, Black Hawk Down are just a sampling of his masterful works.
In the following sound clips, Ridley Scott shares his beginnings through art school, how directing television commercials for 15 years developed his lighting and editing skills and how making feature films for himself helped carry him to Hollywood. [more]
Pierre Carreau shot at high speeds to freeze the moving ocean waves, creating sculpturesque photographs of natures powerful movements.
Carreau works intensively on his project “AquaViva”, a study of wave shapes. ”I like the fact that this energy comes from far away to be revealed on our beaches.” His facination with the waves started at a young age. [more]
Eduard Zhikharev, lead motion designer at Transparent House in San Francisco, created a interesting conceptual series Shining, a body of work that depicts glowing figures from street scenes that his wife Olga Tsybulina had photographed one day. I reached out to Eduard after running across the work on Behance and asked him about the series. [more]
David Stephenson used multiple techniques to photograph the night sky in his series Star Drawings. The lines and shapes created by the earth’s rotation make for interesting views of the stars and dark sky above.
His technique is a blend of interval exposures and multiple long exposures giving each of the photographs in his series a unique look. Stephenson says he is drawn to the awesome vastness of time and space, referring to his practice as a search for a photographic sublime. [more]
Nikon recently opened up Nikon Cinema, a website dedicated to HD SLR motion projects that have been created with Nikon hardware. The website currently hosts 3 short motion projects that have been shot with the Nikon D4, D800, D600 and various Nikkor glass.
The three films include Joyride by Sandro, Why by Corey Rich and Chasing The Light by Florian and Salomon Schulz [more]
This week PhotoShelter released Creating A Successful Photography Portfolio, a free downloadable PDF filled with information from some of the top marketing consultants and photo editors in the industry.
The guide has great input from Neil Binkley of Wonderful Machine, photography consultant Amanda Sosa Stone, photo editor and marking consultant Jasmine DeFoore, Grover Sanschagrin of PhotoShelter and photo editor Stella Kramer. [more]
This post contains nudity.
Phillip Toledano’s series A New Kind of Beauty, is a harrowing look at individuals who go through an extreme amount of plastic surgery to modify their bodies.
“I’m interested in what we define as beauty, when we choose to create it ourselves. Beauty has always been a currency, and now that we finally have the technological means to mint our own, what choices do we make?” [more]
Firefly is a super slick skater video shot with a JamCopter, a remote controlled helicopter rigged with a camera, that follows a skater and his LED lit board around a city.
The birds eye perspective and high camera angle shots create some really nice movements and give scale to the skaters journey. The project was created by samadhiproduction.cz and utilizes the use of remote controlled helicopters from jamcopters.cz.
Very cool, very slick, very simple. [more]
Fire Flight is a promotional music video featuring the dancers from The Phoenix Dance Theatre in Leeds, England. The project was shot on the Phantom Flex camera at 1,000 frames per second. Director Greg Clarks’ idea was to shoot the dancers at a high frame rate and drop in CGI fire to give them the look of being set alight. The video features the Phoenix dancers, directed by the Uber Agency, produced by Ink Films and VFX & Fire from VTR North. [more]
