“Sponge”, the short I shot in 2010 (as cinematographer) has been finished for a bit now, but hasn’t been shown in public yet. My triumphant return to fiction – all 15 minutes of it! – is screening at Anthology Film Archives with two other shorts as part of their New Filmmakers festival. Appropriately enough, on Valentine’s Day.

Here’s the trailer.

Screening info:
When: Tuesday, Feb 14 at 6:00pm
Where: Anthology Film Archives, 2nd Ave and 2nd St, NYC
Tickets: $9 General Admission, $6 AFA Members

And here’s my original post about the making of the film.

The video below has a good summation of recent developments on this front:

I’d be very interested to hear about any experiences on this subject, from any journalists, photographers or camerapeople reading this site. I’ll share two of my own.

The first occurred in 2009, when attempting to film an interview with famous economist Nouriel Roubini for the German TV series Mal Zwischendurch (“In Between”). We were setting up in an outdoor cafe area by the waterfront of Battery Park City in Manhattan when we were approached by a private security guard who informed us we were filming private property which was prohibited. I explained that we had the blessing of the cafe. The guard stood firm.

“May I ask why this is not allowed?”

“You’re not allowed to film any of the buildings.”

“Actually,” I explained, “We’re filming an interview, the building just happens to be in the background.”

Predictably, this got me nowhere. So I moved to what seemed to be a public park in front of the marina, shooting a different angle. I set up my tripod, reflector and had a very nice shot ready to go when the guard reappeared.

“What’s wrong now?”

“You’re not allowed to film here.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a private park.”

I looked around. People were freely walking in and out of the area with strollers, children, pets. The square, overlooking the Hudson River, certainly didn’t seem very private. Certainly there were no gates, fences or other markers of any kind. I motioned at the promenade along the waterfront. “What about over there?”

“That’s Parks Dept. If you don’t have a Parks permit they’ll stop you.”

I’ve dealt with Parks before, that didn’t come as a complete surprise. But the whole scene was beginning to take on an air of absurdity.

“Well, tell me then, where CAN I film?” His answer was memorable.

“See that security camera there?” He pointed to an elevated camera on the wall of his building. “If that camera can see you, you’re not allowed to film.”

Aha! Now things were getting interesting. Were we in a story about a security drone covering his own behind, or a direct struggle between free speech (aka journalism) and surveillance? One thing seemed clear: there was a war underway between different cameras and different agendas.

Ultimately, we managed to get our story by shooting on Parks property and being lucky or quick enough not to get caught, against a backdrop of lurching gunboats roaring menacingly up and down the river.

Two years later, I was filming in the financial district, before the Occupy Wall Street protests. I was gathering some general street scenes when I heard a voice behind me, “You know you’re not allowed to do that.”

Bracing myself for yet another illogical run in with some form of security or law enforcement, I slowly and deliberately turned around to see…a rather short woman NOT wearing a police uniform but a bright yellow vest. A civilian working the street, handing out free newspapers like AMny or Metro, and staring triumphantly as if she had caught me shoplifting. I grinned and dismissed her, but a question remained unasked. Had it occurred to her that the same photographs in the newspapers she was selling were acquired by an actual human photographer working the same streets as I?

And I was left to wonder: has journalism itself become so suspect in the public mind that this woman preferred the ubiquitous surveillance cameras blanketing our city streets, viewed by hidden entities behind locked doors, to a cameraman recording life on the streets and sharing it with the public? Or worse – that doing so had the air of criminality, and should be punished even in the absence of laws prohibiting it and a constitution that guarantees it?

Got a feeling this issue is going to heat up even more moving forward.

Oh, lucky you, she’s playing Joe’s Pub this Saturday Jan 28th, 2012.

Pound for pound, at least 4x as strong as a human.

Teaching the young ones the value of conservation.

Indo kids are the best. Super focused on learning, but a laugh riot given half a chance.

Interviewing activists in the field, without artificial lighting. Rather than using a flexfill as a fill source, I often like to repurpose it as a subtle edge light instead. There are so many subtleties in natural light, from colors to reflections. Sometimes artificial light is too much of an equalizer.

In Bahasa Indonesia, humans are called Orangs, our primate cousins Orangutans. After spending some time with them in the Sumatran jungle, I can see why. Their faces express emotions in ways that are surprisingly familiar…I even convinced myself at times I knew what they were thinking, or at least feeling.

As their natural habitat grows smaller due to the vast and growing palm plantations in the north, the Republik battles to strike a fair balance between Orang and Orangutan. You can find out more at www.orangutanrepublik.org

Some people have their panic attacks on shoots. I have my sleepless nights weeks earlier during prep. Will we have consistent access to power? Will we find ourselves shooting at night in areas with no lights? Will we need to film in areas where even a medium-sized camera would make people uneasy? How to be nimble and lightweight but also prepared?

Here’s my stab at answering those questions: Sony EX1R as the properly outfitted A camera. Canon 5DII as the B camera, for low light and low profile shooting. A Lite Panels 1×1, a pair of battery belts, a compact tungsten lighting kit, and a Zylight. A 4×4 frame with bounce and silks. Two MacBook Pros, a small RAID, and a UPS unit. And most important of all, good crew. Pictured (L-R): sound mixer Matt Geldof, assistant/B-camera shooter Jennifer Olsen, me.


In Port au Prince, a girl cools off in the overflow from a refilling water truck.


The compassionate eyes of a tireless fighter. Gerald Crispin explains how his group’s heavy machinery clears rubble to allow rebuilding to begin.


Woman sweeping debris in a half-collapsed school. We saw Haitians hard at work every place we went, putting their lives and communities back together.


I confess to not being the biggest fan of the Canon 5DII as an “A” camera due to a lack of professional features and a sometimes fragile image. But with a fast lens (a 50mm 1.2L) the camera is phenomenal at night. Here, running and gunning amidst a torrential thunderstorm in Petion-Ville, with a rain housing.


And here, again, with the lens wide open. I dialed the key light down to the faintest glow to get the look I wanted: out of focus car lights dancing in the background and only stray light on the background buildings modeling the subject’s head (Alban Nouvellon, DINEPA).

The day we left, Cholera broke out.

There was a poll on FoxNews.com last week, on the one-year anniversary of the quake, that asked whether it was worth trying to help Haiti. One of the options: “Haiti was an economic and social disaster BEFORE the quake. It’s time to put a “closed” sign on this country.” Can you imagine looking into this young woman’s eyes and tell her you chose the “closed” sign, as 74% of visitors to Fox News did?

If you’d like to read a little more about my experience shooting in Haiti, click here.

Jennifer has also shared some of her striking still photos from the trip and written about the experience on her blog.

To my amazement, a few short months later I was working with writer/director Chance Muehleck on just the type of film I had hoped for (click HERE for the film’s website). The design and composition of the film is carefully laid, although it’s subtle enough not to slap you in the face. After a lot of recent hectic documentary work, it felt liberating to get into the subtleties of lighting and composition.

For the shower scenes my gaffer Marshall Coles and I created the effect of a window behind the glass, in a nonexistent room that is really a dark hallway. The man’s world is lonely and minimal, so I associated him with flat, colder light. The woman is living as a kind of parasite, so I decided to place her in lighting that would be reflected. To further distinguish her, her light was made more lively; patterned and in motion.

During this shot, where the woman emerges into the apartment, I wanted a gag that would show this transition, which we achieved with lights on the fire escape coming on progressively with dimmers, and patterned through branches we rigged outside the windows.


Night scene with Molly Camp, the lead, who played her close-ups wonderfully.

The film is being edited now. I’m not sure when we’ll get the final result, but hopefully we’ll see something soon – maybe by the end of the year.

2011 UPDATE: The film is complete! It’s now being submitted to festivals.

2012 UPDATE: The film is premiering in NYC, appropriately enough, on Valentine’s Day, Feb 14, 2012, as part of the New Filmmakers festival at Anthology Film Archives.

It was the same way with shooting widescreen but also framing for standard 4×3 TV. You can do this to an extent but eventually you fail because all versions are compromised, and not one of the formats gets a perfect composition. If one shoots black and white one needs to light for black and white, it demands a much different approach.