Wedding season is full-on, and June kicked off with a fine mountaintop wedding in the North Georgia Mountains, near Helen, Georgia.
Helen is a quirky little Germanic alpine town about 1.5 hours north of Atlanta. Mountain bikers know it for awesome trails like the NORBA race courses at Unicoi, and climbers might pass through Helen en route to Yonah Mountain or Tallulah Gorge.
The more adventurous do what the locals do for fun: monster truck rides, a dip in the river, beer and putt-putt... A huge downpour signaled good luck and cleared the skies for the beautiful ceremony, which was held at Lucille's Mountaintop Inn
Congrats to Vanthan & Adrian, June 5, 2010:
Crew:
My indefatigable assistant Sharif Hassan and my intern Brett May. I try not to leave home without them.
Here's one reason why: shooting at the reception, my Nikon SB800 flash started doing unholy things to the exposure, so I grabbed Brett's brand new SB900 and shot away. It worked, the SB800 did not.
I'm pretty sure the critical difference here was that the SB800 shoots TTL at a maximum ISO of 1000, where the SB900 will work up to 6400. The controls on the 900 are way more intuitive. These together mean better performance in the trenches. I bought one immediately.
Your crew should all shoot the same gear and have it ready to go. It also helps if they can assemble a grease a new racing bike with a multi-tool and a can of mustache wax.
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North Georgia Mountain Wedding
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Brock Scott is an artist and musician who I met through a mutual friend at the Savannah College of Art and Design. He's fronted several bands over the years, including the Brock Scott Quartet, Dreamer Boy Dan, and now his latest, Little Tybee.
Progressive rock played on real instruments - violins, piano, acoustic guitar - by real musicians. Intelligent lyrics filled with stories and historical allusions. You'll be humming it at work.
I've used a few of Brock's tracks before, most recently a Little Tybee track called "Spellcheck His Eulogy" for a my stillmotion piece Inline.
For Little Tybee's upcoming album "Humorous to Bees", Brock and I got together to create a music video for "Nero", a ditty on the tyrannical Roman Emperor who famously "fiddled while Rome burned"
(Suetonius actually says he played the lyre)
We came up with the idea of having another SCAD graduate, Mark Montgomery throwing yo-yo as the centerpiece of the video, focused on his craft while all around him the spectacle explodes.
Terrence Green (left) with Mark Montgomery
We did this as a single, in-camera take, which required two things: a skilled Steadicam operator and great talent. Chris Campbell, a veteran of feature films and music videos, was psyched on the project, and manned the Steadicam. You can get in touch with Chris at chriscrooked@gmail.com
Clockwise from upper left: Brock Scott, me, assistant Sharif Hassan, Chris Campbell and Mark Montgomery
Between myself, Chris and Brock, we pulled in a great group of talent including bboy and hiphop dancers, Falcons cheerleaders, singers, musicians, pinup girls, and photographers. Each "scene" was pulled from a past shoot or funny shoot experience, and it was all shot on a single evening in my studio here at Encyclomedia.
Rehearsing, Mark Campbell on right
We used a Panasonic HPX170 P2 video camera, which allows you to shoot progressive material at variable frame rates. So we could overcrank to 36 fps, with the music playing at 150%, then slow the final footage down to 24fps and sync it with the original track. The 170 also portable enough to easily work with on a Steadicam, or in tight spaces, running around the woods, or lashed to the side of a cliff, so its been my main camera for most of the video work I've been doing lately.
Chris Campbell, left and I go over the game plan with the crew
It turned out everyone had either worked together before or knew each other. One dancer was Mark's neighbor, and there was something about a noise complaint. Hatchet buried. That's the great thing about the performance community in Atlanta. Tons of talent, very little drama or attitude.
Some of Atlantas finest talent going over the steps
Nearing the end of a take
It was more like a live performance than a video shoot. We pulled it off after only 18 takes (and with only one open bloody wound). Chalk it up to the awesome talent we had in the room
Here is the official Nero video. The album will be out in early Fall 2010, complete with Brock's hand-drawn album artwork.
Nero - Music Video from Andrew Kornylak on Vimeo.
If you have more questions about the video, steadicam or monitoring gear or just want to see the latest awesome camera toys, stop by Showcase Camera. Whenever I have video or audio equipment problem to solve I talk to Frank or Kenny in the video department.
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Nero - Behind the Scenes
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"I love these!!
...Is it normal to take so many shots?"
I had to think about how to answer that one. I delivered about 60 shots of 5 different locations with 3 different outfits for an engagement portrait session.
This happened last week with Aimee and Shu, two lovebirds whose Maui wedding I will have the pleasure of shooting this fall. Both are world travelers - Aimee just got back from New Zealand - and we wanted to shoot an engagement session loosely themed around travel.
When we started, we all had some ideas in our head, but by the end we followed some different threads. We hit a half dozen great spots in Atlanta, many of which were new to me.
I love it when a simple shoot turns into a little adventure for everyone, where things don't go exactly as planned. It's risky, but, as I answered Aimee, "I'm not a normal photographer."
Behind the Scenes:
I'm pretty sure that when they built the MARTA line, Atlanta gathered the best lighting engineers in the city, brought them down to the underground rail tunnels, and buried them alive. Only that can explain the hideous lighting in the stations. The extreme mix of color temperatures will drive you nuts, but the scale and spaceship-like architecture of Peachtree Station is too cool to pass up.
Below: Assistant Sharif Hassan (in red) and intern Brett May lighting it up.
I pack the Westcott Octabank on almost every location shoot but this time we used the Strip Banks a lot more, sometimes with egg crate grids, for even more control over light.
Recently I've been shooting the Zeiss T* manual focus primes a lot, for stills and video. The edge-to-edge sharpness and lack of vignetting is unmatched, and especially superior for use as a video lens, on a 35mm video adapter like the RedRock M2 for example - more on that later.
In the Lowepro Bags:
Westcott Strip banks and Octabank modifiers
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Where We Ended Up: Aimee and Shu Get Engaged
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Last fall I wrote about a project called Pimp My Wall, where a group of friends, in the spirit of an HGTV Extreme Makeover type show, built a surprise climbing wall for Greg Kottkamp, a climber and med student sweating it out in Augusta, Georgia.
Here is the video from that project, which I showed at the Dirty South Climbing Film Festival in Atlanta last week. Enjoy!
Pimp My Wall from Andrew Kornylak on Vimeo.
Ian Harding:
Pretty awesome video, and idea. I've been climbing a lot myself lately and am constantly trying to think about how I can incorporate it into my home. Also, love your photographic work. I'm hoping to attempt some climbing photography later this season. Keep it come'n!
(05.20.10 @ 10:22 AM)
BrianR:
Sweet video and really cool wall!
(07.05.10 @ 12:09 PM)
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Pimp My Wall: The Video
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Since I started doing "Stillmotion" pieces a couple years ago - creating video using short, high-speed bursts of still photographs - a lot of people ask me for a step-by-step roadmap to the technique so they can do it themselves.
Here are a couple of the more popular examples:
In Line from Andrew Kornylak on Vimeo.
The Beta - Six Feet Under from Andrew Kornylak on Vimeo.
You can see most of the ones I've done at my Stillmotion album on my Vimeo Page
It's something I've talked about in detail in a Guest Blog for Scott Kelby, on Robert Benson's blog, on the NikonRumors website, and as a speaker at the 2009 Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar, but I've never really put it all down step-by-step.
Recently Digital Photo Pro Magazine interviewed me about it, and they did just that, spelling out in gory detail exactly how to do it. So stop bugging me about it.
Seriously though, It looks like a ton of steps but really, its hella simple. You just need to make sure you have the right tools. I happen to use Nikon DLSRs for capture and sequence everything in Final Cut Pro.
One thing DPP did not ask was, "Why the hell would you do it?" It does look pretty cool, and it's novel. That's probably enough for me. But maybe the benefits versus video (extreme resolution, access to unique lighting and shutter effects) do not outweigh the pain-in-the-asses (difficult frame rates, extreme workflow challenges, no sound). It's a question I ask myself, especially given that there are so many amazing video capture tools out there today - most of which I use daily for other productions.
So here's something: I believe that in the future, there will be full motion-capture technology that is very similar physically to what I am doing with a high-speed still camera. I want to be first in line for that, and I'll know exactly what I'm doing.
Chew on that, try it out yourself, tell me if I am full of shit, and enjoy the article:
Constantin:
Oh Boy oh boy!
Thanks!
I lack the tools but I'm always hungry fro video tutorials. :-)
Cheers!
(05.06.10 @ 12:35 PM)
Michael:
Hi Andrew
I have enjoyed my brief look at your work. I would like to understand where the benefit of high resolution fits in as with the exception of 4K projectors I can't see where I can view the clips in all their glory.
Kind Regards
Michael
(06.09.10 @ 08:12 PM)
akornylak:
Hey Michael - thanks. There are some resolution benefits even with relatively low-resolution output. There is a lot more image information per frame to work with, and even when scaled, the difference is there (consider for example how large format photography looks on a postcard versus 35mm, or how cinema film looks better than standard definition even on a television) There is also the ability to crop and zoom. More interesting to me is that any frame could potentially be used in full (or nearly full-)resolution print.
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Stillmotion Explained, Other Stuff Not Explained.
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Thanks for all the info Andrew! Absolutely love the concept and execution on this project. Amazing!
(07.26.10 @ 03:30 PM)