I’ve been hard at work as a cinematographer but also 3D artist. If you’d like to follow my journey to learn Zbrush for digital sculpting, Mari for texturing, Mental Ray/Vray for lighting, and my previs work check out my latest post on The Worklight.

The Worklight!
http://www.theworklight.net/2013/05/31/may-update/

If you are only here for the camera porn I’ll be posting that stuff here.

Cheers,

Matt

Here are some non-nondescript photos from some of the shoots from the past weeks.

Striking the set after shooting a commercial at Home Studios in NYC. I was really happy with how great everything looked on this shoot and more importantly how quickly we were able to move. I did the whole shoot with a 6k Par, 1.2 Briese140 and two Jo-Leko 400ws. The sun was shining through the windows for the entire day, and there was a 360 degree rainbow during lunch.

This is a photo of the new Ergocine Lion-R on set of a project that was being sponsored by Canon. The director and I were interviewed about using Canon equipment for filmmaking. Obviously I love Canon everything.

This Police car was great to shoot. It looked great in every shot.

Hero shot of the Epic and Arri II gear head.

Found this awesome-mobile on a branded content shoot for Canon Powershot that I was B-CAM on.

I’m going to try to get out a Worklight/Previs video this month too!

Cheers,

Matt

In honor of Company 3 sponsering the Tribeca Film Festival this year, they had a little Facebook competition.. and I won! My prize was this cool Crumpler camera bag. This bag is actually perfect to hold my 5DMKII for location scouts.

Thanks Co3!

Cheers,

Matt

This month a Dutch magazine called Broadcast Magazine published an article about camera ergonomics. The author featured the one and only Ergocine and asked if they could use some of my photos for the article.

Funny enough, they used a photo of me when I was an intern holding an Aaton LTR7 that Diana shot on 35mm film!

Here is Dave’s/Ergocine post.
http://www.ergocine.blogspot.com/2013/04/history-repeats-itself.html

Cheers,

Matt

The Tribeca Film Festival and Apple host an event called “Meet the Filmmakers.” For the last two years a friend of mine, Daniel Choy Boyar, has been a speaker at the event. This year, his session was called “Lighting Your Film with Daniel Choy Boyar.”

Veteran gaffer Daniel Choy Boyar has worked with numerous cinematographers on hundreds of productions, ranging from commercials and music videos to independent shorts and major feature films. Join him for a discussion about green-screen lighting, interview lighting, and lighting professionally on a low budget.
Wednesday, April 24, 7:00 p.m.

Dan and I have worked together on many commercials and for the last few years I’ve been developing my own style of technical drawings to illustrate the lighting plans. There are multiple programs like Vectorworks and Omnigraffle for 2D overhead lighting diagrams, but I wanted to make mine in 3D.

For his presentation this year, Dan asked me to make several diagrams to illustrate the lighting setups he’d be presenting. I was excited to part of the event and treated the assignment as a speed challenge. I”m happy to say that I created all of the diagrams and designs in about an hour. I have a continuously growing library of 3D rigged and textured lighting, grip, and camera equipment that I’ve created in Maya over the last few years.

You can see Dan’s whole presentation in this PDF.
http://directedlighting.com/pro-lighting-042413.pdf

Cheers,

Matt

This is a little previs that I made for a job, unfortunately this shot got cut, but I learned a lot putting this together. I modeled the dolly track and rigged my Fisher10 dolly to them. I used Autodesk Pinnochio for the model of the girl.

The shot isn’t very complicated, but it showed accurately how the director and I wanted to approach a relatively big camera move in a small studio.

Cheers,

Matt

Just finished a quick one day VFX commercial and we use my Canon C300 with an Optimo 15-40mm. TCS had a the EF to PL adapter and with the lens support it was pretty solid.

Cheers,

Matt

I got a chance to shoot with the Fujinon 19-90mm Cabrio zoom lens today. I was really impressed with the range, 19mm wider than I usually ever shoot and 90mm is a decent close up focal length. The lens handles flares really well and is very sharp. I was trying to compare it to my experience with the Canon 30-105mm. The obvious difference is the focal range, they are both about T2.9 and both very sharp.

The Fuji is really geared for handheld with it’s zoom rocker and form factor so that is a big plus for handheld work. But it’s around $47k so that is a lot more than the Canon 30-105mm, which is more like $25k. They are both great lenses. I need to test the new Zeiss cine zooms now.

Cheers,

Matt

The Smart Car commercials I shot with directors Dark Igloo and production company M ss ng P eces are live on the Smart website and their Youtube channel. The spots look great and coincidently the set photos look great too. I basically live on Youtube/Vimeo these days so I was excited to see the Smart Youtube channel header featured a set photo with the directors and myself.

You can see the Smart Youtube channel and the 4 spots here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/smartusatv?feature=pvchclk

Cheers,

Matt

Just wrapped a really quick and fun shoot at Six Flags, NJ. We shot with three Canon C300s, 2x Canon 30-105mm t2.8 zooms, and the Canon Cinema Primes. This was my first time seeing all of these lenses together and in a challenging backlight/flare situation. They all looked really great. The Canon 30-105mm is becoming one of my favorite lenses <3

Thanks to Craig DiBiase and the Minus L production team.

Cheers,

Matt