As a huge fan of the cancelled Firefly series (and the subsequent movie, Serenity), I was thrilled to learn last year that an independent fan film made for charity, "Browncoats: Redemption" was in production. I was hopping up and down when I volunteered to make "anything you need" to Steve Fisher, the Co-Creator and Producer.

Imagine how excited I got when Steve told me last week that he and Mike Dougherty (Co-Creator and Director/Writer) did indeed have something they needed and that I could help! Apparently, during filming, Steve has been making "behind the scenes" videos. He had a pile of footage that needed to be made into a video for the site, www.browncoatsmovie.com, and I could do it. Steve and I met in a Panera (I had the infamously wonderful black bean soup!) and I walked off with two DVDs of high-def flip cam footage that Steve had shot.

Once home, I took the already created intro and outro, and put together two minutes of my first attempt, which I handed back to Steve via an FTP upload. It's always kind of hard to take someone else's video and try to determine what it is they're trying to do with it and make THAT. I sat there gnawing on my left knuckle until he wrote back, telling me that I'd pretty much got it! Yay!

After making two new versions with Steve's requested tweaks, I was squishing the redone video to a superbly pixelated 1.3MB version and emailing it back to him each time so he could verify I'd done what he and Mike liked.

Finally, version three was just right. I passed the full 500MB version to Steve by an FTP upload, and he put it on their YouTube channel. Here it is, the behind the scenes video of the cargo bay build:

Aaron Brazell, of Technosailor.com, organized and orchestrated the WordCamp MidAtlantic event held on May 16, 2009 in Baltimore, MD. I was tagged as the “official photographer” of the event, and therefore was tromping around the conference rooms of the University of Baltimore's School of Business for about eight hours. Right before lunch, I managed to catch Aaron as he ran around, and made him sit down on the stairs for his official photo. I took six of them, trying to get the one with his best smile. It was helpful that about six people were standing behind me, calling him a goober and all sorts of things- it was making him laugh.

Events are extraordinarily difficult to photograph. For hours, people are (a) sitting and staring at a speaker (b) talking to each other (c) poking their computers and (d) looking really, really boring. It is the challenge of the photographer at this point to take hundreds of photos... and not put everyone to sleep when they’re reviewed later!

The first keynote speaker at WordCampMidAtl was Anil Dash. Anil is the VP of Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox.

Of course, the entire room was crammed full of the 170+ attendees. As for me, I’m fortunately never star struck, and I walked right up to Anil and told him that as the official photographer, I got to make sure I got a great photo of him... and that would definitely, most positively, include holding my TravelMonkey Jacques. Anil cracked up, held the monkey, and beamed at me. Voila! Personality overload.

A major, massive challenge are two things: the lighting is sure to be terrible, and, photographing a room THIS BIG is sure to create all sorts of eyeball aches (look at all those laptops!):

So, what to do? Well, looking at massive crowd shots is not exciting. Oh certainly, I took quite a few of those. But I went roving throughout that huge room in every session, hunting for people’s personalities, ready in a split second with my camera to catch people acting interesting.

Essentially, I never sat down all day. I think I probably did sit down, but my eyes were scanning the crowd, watching for the moment when I could snatch a moment of people-being-people.

That really large conference room, by the way, did indeed cause light problems. Some evil designer of the building decided that the recessed lighting would be *awesome* if it had neat-o lampie things- that were orange. As in, I had to compensate for everyone having a really nice looking tan later. Everything was seriously the wrong shade! When you are actually standing in the room, your brain will adjust and you won’t really notice the color. But the camera doesn’t lie to you: the speakers were blue (from the white screen behind them), the audience was orange, and the photographer was muttering the entire time (as I constantly adjusted for the wrong color). Oh! And flash? Oh, no no no. (I've actually been called a "flash nazi!" to my face, LOL) I did whip it out occasionally, but that was for the initial shot of the speaker showing up. During the sessions, I decided that a constant flashbulb would be extremely distracting, and therefore I didn’t use it.

In the smaller room, there was a whole lot less light. The lights were OFF, actually, because you were supposed to be looking at the speaker and their slides. Er- that’s great for THEM, but for me?! Well. I adjusted for exposure, and overexposed the entire room. Problem solved. All but for the “boring room full of people” part:

What are you supposed to do with THAT?! Ah, the dilemma. Actually, that’s the usual dilemma, as I pointed out. After a couple hours (and six more to go!) you could start wondering what to do with yourself.

My solution, of course, is to start doing people studies. I sat in the room for (obviously) hours, watching people. I do that anyway-I’m a natural people watcher-and so I wait until I see the person looking especially portrait style delicious, and then I snap away.

At the end of the day, the hope is that the flavor of the place was caught. In this case, it was crammed full of people and their laptops, so I definitely went for the shots that reflected that. For the laptops-on-table shot, I politely walked up to the table, stood on a chair, and took the picture. The people at the table found this entertaining, for sure.

Quite a few times I was asked “what I normally photograph.” Well, I normally photograph events, actually, just like this one. A wedding is an event. A tech conference is an event. A party is an event. A congressional hearing is an event. Anything where you’re trying to show the star AND the attendees in the photographs and get the overall ambience = event. (Portraiture is definitely very, very different!)

To see all the photos of the event, visit the set on Flickr!

Anyone who was tired afterward, raise your hand!

On Friday night we were given the genre. On Sunday night, we gave back the movie we made.

Ah, the 48 hour film project! A fun nightmare, really. At 7pm Friday night, the DC groups showed up to choose their genres out of a hat. The group I was with, Bad Media Productions, chose "Historical Fiction." The writers sat down immediately and started writing out their story. Shooting was supposed to start at 3 am Saturday morning.

Notice I said, "was supposed to." Here's the hitch. The 48HR Film Project has this nifty way to make sure that you really only use 48 hours to make your movie: three elements must be included and you don't know what they are until they announce it at 7pm on Friday! The rules this time:

Character: Eve or Ivan Pagoda

Prop: ID Card

Line of Dialogue: "We're hoping things will change."

These three elements have to appear in the submissions of every group's 4-7 minute film. So the writers furiously pounded away until they were done... which wasn't until 8 am. Er- now we were five hours behind schedule!

Those five hours were made up by myself and Wil Kristin, the editors. Wil and I stayed up all night on Saturday and edited until we felt sort of half dead and our fingers had gone numb- we were awake for almost forty hours straight.

Trammell Hudson shot the entire movie on his Canon 5d Mark II, a seriously awesome still camera that has 1080p high def video recording capability. Unfortunately, the audio isn't so great, so, they rented a sound mixer and put a fat boom mic on the end, which Wil then synced to the video.

Um, just a minor glitch, that. Actually it was terrible, and we had to convert the original footage down into 720p because it would crash our laptops otherwise. One of the downsides of editing on a MacBook is the smaller processor. Wil and I worked on different scenes at the same time, and toward the end we combined them all into one coherent sequence that we were going to turn in.

When there was only 20 minutes left before submission time, Wil's laptop was still chugging away on the compression (in order to put it on a DVD). Wil, Trammell, and the two producers (Robert and Moses) were standing in line... with the laptop.... which was still chugging away!

Actually there were a few other teams standing in line, looking nervously at their own laptops, which were also merrily chugging away. I find that pretty darn funny :)

The movies were screened on different nights at a theater in Silver Spring. May 5 was Group A, so Bad Media Productions and ten others were all shown at 7pm. Based upon laughter, I'm guessing that we're going to win "best use of prop."

Without further ado, I present Bad Media Productions' 48HR Film, "Nowhere, Man."

From ZERO to DONE in less than twelve hours- what, exactly, does that mean and why would I do it?

Well, on the weekend of May 1-3, there is the 48 hour filmfest. That means from beginning to end of the writing/filming/editing process, you've got forty-eight hours to have a completed 4-7 minute project to turn in to the competition. So, today I participated in a twelve hour dry run so that we could see what worked, didn't work, and what just went plain wrong.

We had this test run set up exactly like it was the real thing. When the timer starts, you're handed the genre and you take off running because you've got to finish by the time the buzzer goes DING. We got handed "horror." WOW! The writers sat down and furiously pounded out a respectable script in two hours, which was their allotted time.

Then the talent arrived, and shooting began. The cinematographer, Trammell, shot some beautiful high-def footage on his Canon 5D Mark II, and then it was handed off to the editors: me, and Wil.

Wil and I put together the rough cut (I put together the exterior shots, and Wil put together the interior shots) and then after we'd given a mini version to the music composer so he could figure out what he was going to do with his magic music thingie, the group sat around and I did the fine trimming.

This involved having four people trying to give directions to me at the same time. Fortunately, I'm really used to having to sort through piles of directions being shouted at the same time, and I calmly sat there and tweaked and poked the footage (and occasionally made faces at Wil).

I had only met Wil about an hour before we sat down to edit, and fortunately we immediately got along. When both people have good editing skills, it comes down to figuring out who is better at what, so that the project goes as smoothly as possible. After about an hour of working together it turns out that Wil will be making the original rough cut (taking the incoming video and putting it together into something that resembles a movie!) and I will be taking his work and then doing the excruciating task of poking it to perfection.

Nearly four hours after we'd started, I'd made sure everyone was happy with the edit, tucked the scary music track into our timeline, had Wil plug in a second set of headphones and give opinions on levels while I argued with the audio mixer, and prepared the final output to put live on the web.

That's where it went wrong.

Me and the Compressor. We have issues. We go way back... the compressor is evil and I think it hates me. Fortunately, Trammell is also a primo computer geek. He poked it till it worked, and third time is the charm: compressed enough to put on the web, high quality enough that his gorgeous footage was still evident.

And so, without further ado, I present THE HOE KILLER: