Matt Workman

Hey Guys! It's been a long time since I've been on this forum! I hopped back on recently and I'm glad everyone is still posting and sharing. Anyway, I wanted to share some of the work I've been doing lately. I've recently been shooting commercials and TV Promos and I've been using Google SketchUp to pre-visualize the blocking and camera angles. I learned about SketchUp from a production designer who was using it to lay out the set we were going to shoot. I spent about a week learning it and I've used it on about 10 jobs since. Here are two case studies I wrote about using it on real jobs. Toyota - Google SketchUp TV & Film Case Study http://mattworkman.com/v7/toyota-google-sketch-up-film-tv-case-study/ BlackBerry - Google SketchUp TV & Film Case Study http://mattworkman.com/v7/google-sketchup-tv-film-case-study-blackberry-challenge-council/ I worked on several visual effects commercials where the VFX company created 3D animatics and boards but there is usually some sort of disconnect between the director/DP/VFX Supervisor depending on everyone's level of comfort with 3D. I find that being the DP and making the boards it VERY beneficial. All departments have been happy with the results. The AD likes having very explicit shots, the ART dept. love knowing what we are going to see. And my G/E team like to know exactly what I'm thinking in terms of lighting setups. I also use it to make 3D lighting diagrams. Let me know if this is the right forum to post this in! Cheers, Matt

Video Link http://vimeo.com/10472544 Burger King Commercial "Spring Break 2010" Acapulco, Mexico. 2010 Director: E.J. McLeavey-Fisher http://www.ej-mf.com Director of Photography: Matt Workman http://www.mattworkman.com Shot on the Canon 7D with Canon L Series Zooms. Used a custom Arri, Redrock, Marshall, and Zacuto rig. Colored on Apple Color. Half of the shoot was run and gun chasing the King around and the other half we had time to set up. I think it's pretty obvious which parts are which. Cheers, Matt

The Kamio is nice and small but like any kino, the light shifts towards magenta very quickly. I prefer the litepanel mini ring-lite, much stronger ouput and way less color shift as you dim to lower levels. Both need to have the cables to power from the steadicam sled/battery, unless you plan on tethering, which sucks. They both can be configured for 15mm, 19mm or clip-on, it depends on what lenses, support, etc. your steadicam guy/gal has. Good luck, Matt

I only really hear about very well established DP's owning Master Primes or Cookes. I know a lot of people who own Zeiss SLR primes, less who own Standard Speeds, less who own Super Speeds, and only one person who owns a set of Ultra Primes. In LA, I know a DP who owns Master Primes and I know one DP in NYC who owns Cookes. These are not emerging cinematographers in anyway. :ph34r:

MK: most of the slow motion was just 720/60p cinematool'd to 24. Some of the bits at the end were done with twixtor ... a couple people who didn't know what the budget was thought it was the Phantom ... some day maybe :ph34r: RK: I believe that the larger then sensor the more shallow the depth of field of the system is. Just optics/physics/voodoo/astrology. And the 5D's sensor is something like 1.6x larger than the 7D's sensor. Though, I just did my first anamorphic project over the weekend and the focus on RED/LOMO-Anamorphics are incredibly shallow. We were doing dolly-in/dolly-out and the AC was cranking the follow focus around twice! Still waiting on the colored HD version of the video... Cheers, Matt

JR: pulling focus on the 5D would be harder than the 7D. TL: I think the general consensus with this song is that Ross kills it and Diddy made a great song. The vocalizer is a matter of taste, I think works on this song. I have almost nothing to do with the editorial, but I will be cutting a couple of the more dynamic camera-car/jib shots into my next reel. Permitting I'm not sure what the deal was with that, I'm just the DP. We didn't have any trouble with police and we had a crew of cars to keep bogie cars from coming into the shot or potentially crashing into anyone ... at least Diddy and the camera car anyway. Here is a little Behind the Scenes featurette ... shot with the Canon 5D and a Zeiss 50mm prime no less! Behind the Scenes - Angels Remix http://videos.onsmash.com/v/rmym8qgfULMK5WRL You'll see some of the garage performance with the jib and some chaotic street scenes we did. None of the car or helicopter, I think most people were sleeping when we shot that stuff. Cheers, Matt

SR: Thanks. Yeah it took me a while to catch up when I first heard about these cameras. Definitely new ground. JR: I think the RED is probably a better bet. It has more latitude and resolution and it allows for a preston and a wireless video tap. The 5D is terribly hard to pull focus on and its only a 30p system. However, these cameras really come into play when you can't afford a proper setup for the RED. Sometimes your shoot can afford a RED, but can't afford the infrastructure and crew for the RED. You end up getting some really nice shots, but perhaps not all the shots you planned on getting because you don't have a 2nd AC or you skimped on some accessories that would have saved time etc. Its a conversation the director, DP, producer, steadi-op and perhaps the label who can approve overages etc. Good luck. Cheers, Matt

The video premiered on 106&Park last night. Here is a flash version online. I'll try to post a better quality one soon. Diddy "Angels Remix" http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/vide...751TLNd8WUCbjvX RV: No indie slider on this one. It was either handheld or jimmy jib the whole video.

Here is the trailer for the video. Not colored but gives you a look at some of the stuff we shot. None of the good stuff though ;) http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/vide...pp69P0agb9ve31T Matt

TL: Hey. Any type of shaking pretty much brings out the CMOS wobble effect in the camera. I think the trick is to use a stabilized system like a Scorpio head etc. and turn the little shakes into smoother moves, where they are less perceivable. If you watch Nocturne and the BTS, they were using a steadicam mount on their pictures cars and steadicam in general and its was very smooth. I've heard we have one of the best colorists working on this video. I won't say names until its actually happened and the video is out. Cheers, Matt

SM: Thanks. The 7D is a good investment for now, until Panasonic/Canon/Sony/RED put the same sensor in a better body. I'd go with Zeiss ZS Primes or Canon L Primes if you can afford them and get them geared for a follow focus. Next best is Canon L Zooms or EFS Zooms. I've used all sorts of stuff on these camera and they all work fine its just preference. Nikon/Leica/Minolta etc. adapters don't work very well in my experience however, they get shaky over time and I'm sure the backfocus becomes an issue. TL: The 7D did surprisingly well on the jib/car rig. We didn't have the budget for a stabilized head but I think we made out fine. The bumps in the road were obviously an issue but the general vibrations of driving/jibbing didn't induce the jello effect to my eye. For a music video we only need a couple seconds here and there of smoothness. For a feature or long talking car shots we would have needed a stabilized head or just a very smooth stretch of road. Not sure when the video comes out, hopefully within the month, the song is already pretty popular online and the turn around for "viral" videos is usually shorter than the Network ones. I'll post a HQ Quicktime when its released. I think a lot of people will be interested in seeing what the 7D looks like in these situations. Cheers, Matt

Artist: Dirty Money, P Diddy feat. Rick Ross Song: Angels Remix Label: Bad Boy Director: Parris - www.goreela.com Director of Photography: Matt Workman - www.mattworkman.com Flickr Photostream Link http://www.flickr.com/photos/39961373@N07/...in/photostream/ Just got back from Miami from a 4 day shoot with P Diddy and Dirty Money. We shot on the Canon 7D and we did some pretty big setups with it. First we put the 7D with a 10-20mm on a 12' Jimmy Jib provided by Black Dog Jib www.blackdogjib.com on a insert camera car and did a few hood mounts, dolly tows, and free riding. The moves are pretty cool and the small form factor of the 7D allowed for some up interesting perspectives we probably wouldn't have been able to do with a RED and a 17-80mm Optimo. We did two night into sunrises with this rig. The images at night were pretty amazing, we tried to stay at 3200 iso when possible. When the sun came up we were able to capture some amazing subtle natural light that no other camera could really pick up on. Besides the camera car we used a fully built 30' Jimmy Jib and a 12' for more standard performance setups. I'll post the video when it comes out, should be an exciting one. :lol: Cheers, Matt

I just was the gaffer/lighting director on a shoot for fashion week in NYC. The still photographer had a 5DMKII and we shot with an HVX200/Letus35 and another 5DMKII for video as well. This was in a large white cyc studio and we were using 4ks and down to get the light level up. The HVX200 had to use ND it was so bright. At 100 ISO I was usually at a f5.6. Considering that renting a studio and getting talent / wardrobe / and the rest of the support crew for two days would be more expensive than just beefing up the lighting package I think this was definitely an economical way of getting both stills and video. Plus most of these designers are only in one place for a couple of hours during fashion week. FB Set Photos http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2088672&id=3702694 Just another example/story. Matt

Artist: Slaughterhouse Song: The One Director: Rik Cordero Production Company: Three21 Media - www.three21media.com DP: Matt Workman - www.mattworkman.com About 2 days after the manual exposure update, director Rik Cordero bought the 5DMKII and the day after he called me to DP a music video for him in Times Square for Slaughterhouse. I had been preparing for the new DLSR cameras and I purchased an Indie-Slider to test. This was the first video that I'd shot with the 5DMKII and the indie-slider. They both performed very well. The hotel stuff was pretty standard, iso300-500 with Dedo, Source4s, Kinos, etc. The outside roofdeck exteriors however blew us all away when we turned the iso to 5000 and shot with almost completely available lighting. For those scenes we lit the two adjacent buildings with 2x source4s and then keyed the artist with a 4x4 kino through two layers of diffusion about 10' back. Amazing. At this point we were using the Novatek Nikon adapter and I used a NIkon 50mm f1.8, Nikon 100mm f2.8, and a Nikon 28-70mm f2.8 zoom. This months issue of SPIN Magazine (September2009) features and article on the director and has a photo of us using the 5DMKII and indie slider. Articles http://www.mattworkman.com/v5/press/spin-200909-spread.jpg http://www.mattworkman.com/v5/press/spin-2...icle-blowup.jpg You can see the finished video online @ http://www.mattworkman.com/dp-v4/work/slau...house-360p.html Enjoy. :lol: Matt

Of course Anthony Mandler's Jay-Z feat. Kanye and Rihanna video drops right after this one <_< Heh. Chayse: Hey, Thanks I really appreciate it. I'm a big fan of your work and lighting style. The idea of black and white was always present in pre-production meetings but I was basically told that they didn't know which way the video would go. Most major record labels dislike black and white and dislike 2:35. I've done several videos thinking they would be cropped and that we framed for 2:35 only to have them cropped to 16:9 for TV/web. Rob: Making the footage black and white definitely helped gel the two cameras together. Like I mentioned the RED and 5DMKII handle color temperature much differently. The HVX200 hack I believe allows you to shoot at 1-12fps with a dropped shutter so you gain like 2-3 stops of light, making it great for static night establishing shots and the like. The specifics of how to accomplish this are on dvxuser.com somewhere I'm sure. I think that in the prison the green ambient with the orange jumpsuit would have looked great in color but in the interest of making the whole video feel like one piece black and white definitely helped. I was relying on some of the color contrast to make the shots work, so when you are only working in tones sometimes the shots came out a little flat/dark. We shot from 250iso all the way to 6400iso in a relatively seamless fashion. Several DP/Directors I've shown the video to have a hard time figuring out what was Red and what was 5D. Matt

Artist: Fabolous feat. Jay-Z Song: When the Money Goes Record Label: Island Def Jam Director: Parris - www.goreela.com DP: Matt Workman - www.mattworkman.com Photo/5DMKII: Diana Levine - www.dianalevine.com This is also posted on the REDUSER site but I thought it was also relavent here as well in that it compares the RED and 5DMKII under the same lighting situations. Production for this video was back in mid-July 2009 and it was just released and premiered on MTV Jams as "Jam of the Week" on Monday I believe. There are a couple low quality web versions floating around on the net but here is a link to a slightly better quicktime. Video Link - Quicktime www.mattworkman.com/dp-v4/work/fabolous-jayz.html Video Link - World Star Hip Hop http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/vide...CQUK7k54i3U2b40 Set Photos http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2084025&id=3702694 We shot the video with the RED B17 with the Nikon mount. Mostly Zeiss ZF primes but I like the Nikon 135mm f2 a lot as well. We also shot B-CAM with the Canon 5D Mark II. Mostly the inserts and quick cut-aways. I used a 1/4 and 1/2 BPM which is subtle but adds a little glow to some of the shots. Principal photography was shot in one very long day. Prison, Condo, Restaurant, Exterior. Then I was away on a shoot in Texas when Jay-Z decided he wanted to make a cameo and my AC shot the intro scene. The very first shots of the buildings are actually HVX200 with the FPS hack, which explains the extra sensitivity. It was a very interesting test to see the difference between the 5D and the RED on the same exact scene with the same lighting. The 5D has a very nice in-camera look, but once you shoot it you obviously don't have the ability with the REDRAW to tweak or shift the colors. We shot under a lot of natural light in the prison, so super green florescent lighting and on the RED is was pure green. The 5D however balanced it out pretty well and rendered some decent skin tones. This is with both set at 3200k. A lot of the lighting was natural just because of the time constraints but we mainly filled in with kinos and a 1x1 litepanel. The RED at 800 ISO f1.3 is pretty grainy compared to the 5D 3200-5000 ISO f2.8. Obviously there is a time and place to use the different systems but you can see a good comparison in the last scene where Fab is hugging his girlfriend. The first time you see them on the deck its the RED, the last shot however is the 5DMKII. I've done about 3-4 videos with the RED and MKII as b-cam its basically boiled down to using the RED for scenes we can light properly and that have a lot of camera movement. Almost everything else we use the 5D, which includeds inserts, establishing shots, timelapse, b-roll type stuff. Its so much faster to mover around with it and I use the indie-slider with mine and its makes for some quick and interesting setups. My favorite is using the slider right on the ground like a hi-hat. Anyway, hope you enjoy it. I know its in B/W so you can't compare colors. :furious3: Later, Matt

lol where did you find that? :lol: I'm pretty sure creating a video like this is cause for dismissal on a union set.

looks great! very impressed. :)

Nice article. On a low budget music video, my main concentration lately, there is rarely an art director / production designer / set dresser. Some directors come from a theater background or a crafty background and are very hands-on when it comes to dressing a set. Other are not, and it pretty much falls on the DP's shoulders to make it work. I think as a DP the most important thing you can do is figure out what you see in the frame and what you don't see in the frame. Once you have that figured out you can re-arrange furniture, paint walls, light, and place actors to make the space feel appropriate for the scene/shot. A common mistake seen on low budget / inexperienced sets is spending time on fixing something that is out of focus, barely in frame, or not in frame at all. This included set dressing too high above talents head with out low angle shots, stuff outside windows that aren't lit, things on the floor with no wide or high angle shots, etc. I'm looking forward to the day that I can have a meeting with the set designer and plot and design all of the practicals on the wall/set and pick the color/tone of the walls to match the over all art direction. I'd say the next important thing to do as a DP/Art Director is to light the good and stuff and flag the light off the bad stuff. Bad stuff can include talent. :lol: Matt

Hey Guys, I have a video coming up in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Can anyone recommend a good grip and electric rental house. Its a modest budget so just simple 1-3 ton kit would do it. Chapman dolly would be ideal. Thanks, Matt

For a blue/green screen shoot or a set extension shoots, tungsten is less preferable because of the above mentioned grain. So you could render the plates unusable if there was too much grain to match the BG plates or pull a key off hair/fabric. On a feature/location shoot however its usually impractical to shoot all daylight especially if you are trying to match sodium vapor or practicals. Unless you have the extra stop to introduce a blue correction filter. The RED "grain/noise" isn't too bad looking either, a few people like the look. Several techs I've worked with recommend rating the camera at 250 asa when shooting tungsten so you don't get tricked by REDRAW into underexposing and making the grain issue even worse. With daylight however we rate back at 320 or even 400/500 to protect for highlights. This is all good in theory but when things get moving quickly I'm usually comfortable keeping everything at 320 and just not underexposing on tungsten balance. Its all meta data anyway. Build 17/18 are much better than 15, which I did my first video with. :ph34r: Matt

I've used that lens before and it definitely has breathing/vignette issues on the wide end. Much more than the Canon 7-64mm. Is it a rehoused 16mm or a manufactured s16mm lens? Matt

It really depends on your final output. On youtube the difference between UP and these ZF primes is minimal, having shot with both on a RED. I understand different lenses have an inherent color cast but after you run the footage through Color/Scratch etc. that is not that important. On set having properly geared UP/SS with a 270 degree focus rotation makes them much easier for an AC to manage. However on a run and gun RED shoot the ZF primes are VERY lightweight and are very fast for the money. A couple people offer services to get them geared and de-clicked (iris). I'm doing a test soon on a video comparing ZF primes on a MarkII and versus Canon L Primes. ZF primes beign preferred because they are full manual while the L Primes have the floating focus/AF mech. I'd take that table that Zeiss put out with a grain of salt considering that Zeiss manufactures the ZFs, Ultras, and MPs. I probably could have made that chart just based on their retail price. :lol: Just my opinion, however. Matt

Thanks for the help guys. I ended up going with 6x 2k Spacelites with solid skirts. I planned on having a 12x12 light grid for a bottom but it was sucking up too much light. I used it with two 5ks instead for the key. I also clustered the spacelites tighter for 360 degree dolly shot. Not the prettiest thing in the world but worked pretty well. The booklite-skylight is pretty expensive to execute compared to spacelites which are pretty cheap. Someday I'll pull out the mega bounced skylight. :lol: Matt

PS: what is a John Alton light? :unsure: