Archive for the ‘Behind-the-Scenes’ Category

Last week we had the pleasure of being an exhibitor at PhotoshopWorld in Orlando, Florida. It was not the first time SlickforceStudio had a convention booth (our longtime Southern California fans may remember way back to ActorFest, Glamourcon, and the Sci-Fi Conventions at the Shrine), but it was certainly our largest public display to date, and our first convention foray on a national level. It was also an important convention because it marked the debut of the DVD box set of Mastering Retouching™.

It was a pleasure and an honor to meet so many masters of their craft, as well as the countless friends, customers, fans, and curious public that approached our booth. I, personally, got a chance to meet many people who I have known on-line for years but never met face-to-face.

I pulled together a power-team for this conference, including magazine covergirls Esther Hanuka and Erica Jackson, Mastering Retouching™ beta-tester Matt Timmons, and SlickforceStudio man-behind-the-curtain powerhouse Kevin Savarese.

I’m proud to say that Mastering Retouching was extremely well-received, so much so that we actually sold out our entire convention supply. Brand new Level 7 volume “Exotic Features” was also included in the series for the first time, and has now been added to all new orders.

We made many new friends, both professional an personal, including NAPP-founder Scott Kelby (photo 1), retouching-guru Dave Cuerdon, and best-selling author Matt Kloskowski (photo 2). We had a blast at PhotoshopWorld, and hope to see those of you we didn’t meet at PhotoshopWorld West in Vegas later this year!

It goes without saying that Kim Kardashian is one of my favorite clients. So when she contacted me to shoot not one, but both of her 2011 calendars, it didn’t take much convincing. Now, why would anyone need two calendars, you may ask? Good question.

Kim made waves on the gossip circuit when she went renegade last summer, tossing aside her classically perfect brunette hair and swapping it for a blonde look. When fans cried for the return of natural Kim, she called me. “I have to go back to brunette for the show,” she said, “but I want you to capture the blonde before I change it back!”

Deal. So two days after returning from a shoot in Italy, I got Kim in my studio and we shot her 2011 calendar. You can read her words on the shoot here. Later, when I sent her the final images, she had a brilliant idea: “Let’s do TWO calendars! One blonde, one brunette!” And that, my friends, is why the woman is a mogul. She can sell anything.

Shoot #2 was scheduled in late January. And finally, on our fifth shoot together, I successfully convinced her to let me bring in a behind-the-scenes crew (you gotta understand, this girl has cameras following her everywhere…) This shoot was incredibly relaxed, as her crew and I have now worked together several times. We’ve learned to play off each others strengths, as any good team does, and Kim really has fantastic people on her team. Mario Dedivanovic’s make-up is flawless, Frankie Payne nails my favorite windblown look every time, and Monica Rose’s styling is always mind-blowing.

Look for an upcoming post once the calendar previews are released!

Thanks to Slickforce’s own secret-weapon Joyce Park for these great production shots!

I said I’m watching Gossip Girl, b*tch!

Once in a blue moon, a project comes by that changes my style forever.  Mirage was one of those projects.

My good friend and writer/director Stephanie Jones approached me with an interesting concept. She had a feature-film script that she was about to pitch to a major studio, but as those in the entertainment industry know, the execs that greenlight films are rarely artists themselves, and as such, they often have a hard time visualizing how a script will translate to the screen. Stephanie was a USC Cinema alum, like myself, and I had worked with her as a cinematographer several times. She was hoping I could take what was in her head and capture it visually. It would be just like storyboarding, only far more realistic.

Logistically, this shoot was a beast. There were 8 full concept shots, each at different physical locations, and all containing multiple characters. The beauty of motion picture is that you can rack focus from one character to another. But in a still it meant I’d need an enormous depth of field to keep all characters in focus.

In what became the most memorable image of the series, known as the “Alley Fight” (pictured above), I had 12 characters in the shot, ranging from 2 feet to 70 feet from camera. It was also scripted as a night scene, which meant I’d need a ton of light to get a reasonable depth of field at 100 ISO. And I’m guessing Stephanie thought I didn’t have enough to worry about, because on top of all of that she told me 6 of the actors would be in fast motion (running and flying through the air!), so slow-shutters were impossible too. I love pressure!

Given the technical demands, I decided that capturing the shot in one take was impossible. I would have needed to shoot at F32 at 100 ISO…yeah you try that, lemme know how it works out! So I had to get creative. I locked down the camera and broke up the scene into four stages: foreground, middleground, background, environment. The environment shot was key because I wanted to avoid the fake look of green-screen photography. I needed to know where my lights and shadows would fall if you actually saw this fight on the street. At dusk, I shot the alley at a 30 second exposure. Then I had all 12 actors stand in, and we blocked the shot just like an actual film scene. I needed to make sure all the action would be seen and that actors wouldn’t be blocking each other. Once we marked the characters’ spots we then pulled them out and shot them in groups. The foreground was the most important, because it featured the leads, so I shot that first. Then the middle ground, which was perhaps the most fun, because it was a full-on stunt scene, coordinated by my friend and action-director Alex Wen (The Matrix, Lethal Weapon 4).  Take a look at the raw capture and you’ll see that we really threw that guy in the air—full invert! Then finally we shot the background stage, as well as various exposure plates, such as smoke from the truck and wetdowns on the street. It’s also important to note that we ultimately color-timed the final image to match the environment plate, rather than the other way around—yet another reason why it’s so important to shoot scenics first whenever possible.

This was relatively early in my photography career, before I started bringing in a behind-the-scenes photo/video crew, but the uncomposited images tell almost as descriptive a story.  In the end, only two of the shots were done in-studio on green-screen; the rest were all shot as location composites, in similar form as described above.

The alley shot went on to win the Grand Prize GURU Award at PhotoshopWorld for Best Compositing. I’m really proud of the fact that it’s a location composite versus an afterthought shot in studio, which I think adds to the visceral nature of the final image.

Vida gets smokin’ hot for our 100th Cover!

I’ve always like shooting with Vida. She’s as pro as they come, so much so that some days don’t even feel like we’re working. She does her thing, I do mine, and we’ve each done it 1000 times. So when the publisher of Vida’s mag (yes, she now commands her own entire title) contacted me with the “after dark” concept, I thought “Well, here’s something new.”

For one, I’ve always shot not only Vida, but nearly every other model either in a studio or outdoors in sunlight. Suddenly with an issue that would predominantly feature outdoor night shots, I had to get creative—especially technically. I decided to reach into my old cinematography bag of tricks and pull out all the “night shot” classics: fog machine, silhouettes, out of focus cityscapes—the works.

We shut down the Highlands club in Los Angeles for day one (it was pouring down rain and my poor photo assistant Ashley slipped 🙁 and fell down the escalator.), and the shoot went relatively smoothly until an hour before wrap. We were shooting the cover shot (cabaret on stage with smoke) and our fog machine tripped the smoke detectors on the entire complex. Though I apologized profusely to the LAFD, one wonders how in fact the club didn’t set it off nightly. Sensitive little buggers.

On day 2 we secured a house high atop Studio City, with a killer view. The owner was, let’s say, eccentric. Naturally, in freezing October temperatures I forced Vida to get in the unheated pool (I’m horrible, I know).  But my favorite setup was the lingerie look on dry land. I had my assistants smoke up the background, but the wind was strong so it kept blowing away. I had them put it on full-blast, but then suddenly the wind stopped, and then the fog was so thick I couldn’t see Vida. So for haha’s I took a test shot—and fell in love with the look. I could barely make out her silhouette, and she was surrounded by an ethereal glow. Magic!

Though I didn’t know it at the time, we were shooting what would become my 100th magazine cover. Though I hardly feel my career has been long enough to look back, moments like these offer a great opportunity to stop, reflect, and realign yourself with your new goals.

Scorchers in the desert

Production shots:

SHOWCase #2 was the 4th full magazine issue I produced in its entirety. I think I had gotten the publisher of SHOW hooked on desert shoots just like I was, so we shot the “sequel” to SHOWCase #1 within 60 days of shooting its predecessor.

For those of you who know my background as a cinematographer, it’s no surprise why I get so excited shooting on location. I mean, no photographer LOVES being inside the studio every day…it’s like letting a dog out of the house to run free. So as SHOW became more successful (which is 100% shot on seamless), I found myself pushing to shoot the special issues as far away from SlickforceStudio as possible.

I had just bought my property in the desert (which would become Ultimate Graveyard), but I hadn’t been able to put any real time into it, so I felt it wasn’t yet camera-ready. Instead, I chose Club Ed, one of my favorite desert locations as a DP. They’ve shot a billion movies here, most notably Rob Zombie’s “The Devil’s Rejects,” and “Nothing to Lose” starring Martin Lawrence and Tim Robbins.

One of the reasons I like shooting in the desert so much is that it forces you to be on your A-game. You’ve got no water, no power and no restaurants for miles, so you have to run a really tight production. We brought in RVs, generators, and of course I had my crack team of super-assistants making runs around the Antelope Valley all day (my assistant Cherry got a speeding ticket that day too…sorry, Cherry!) I sometimes get a lot of flack for my super-sized productions, but I’ve never been a minimalist—it’s just not my style. My inspirations have always been larger-than-life directors and photographers, like Michael Bay, James Cameron, Antoine Verglas, and Herb Ritts.

The models for SHOWCase #2 were soon-to-be-Playmate Jessica Burciaga and urban-superstar-model Jesikah Maximus. I labeled my Capture folder “Jes².” I had worked with them both on countless issues before and I knew they were both great models (J-Max and I were in Puerto Rico shooting her “SHOW: In Paradise” issue exactly one year earlier) so I already had their trust. And that’s very important, because when the models trust you, you can push them very, very far.

These girls both had crazy bodies, and when J-Max showed up with her fire-engine-red hair, I decided was going to photograph them as if I were shooting a comic-book. I had them kneel on scorching-hot gas pumps, pour buckets of water on themselves, crawl on trucks, and roll around in the dirt. But man, did this issue kill. I have to say that this is probably the first issue I’ve shot that turned out exactly like I saw it in my head. And that’s not easy for 100+ pages of content. And although the day was long (15+ hours) and everyone was beat to sh*t, it was some of the most fun I’ve ever head on set. I think it was probably in my top 3 days of 2008. It’s one of those rare moments where you stop to reflect, take a look around, and realize you’re doing exactly what you dreamed of doing when you were a kid.

Is there a breeze in here?

One of our new 2009 clients was People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. I guess they figured they’ve got a lot of women wearing nothing for the animals…and we make women look great wearing nothing LOL. So I think it was love at first sight for our companies. (Actually, I owe a special thanks to Layla Kayleigh for turning PETA on to us.)

These are two of the three campaigns we shot in 2009—the third will be released in Feb 2010. Layla Kayleigh and I first met on a magazine shoot in early 2008, and we’ve remained friends ever since. When PETA asked her to do their “Animal Testing Breaks Hearts” campaign, she was sweet enough to recommend me for the gig.

Working with friends on a national campaign is really kind of surreal, because, oddly, no one is stressed out. Layla knows I’m gonna make her look great, I know the camera loves Layla, and we both know our beloved make-up artist Therese Willis is gonna take it to another level. It’s also really fun sticking mouse ears, a tail, and a virtual mouse (we used a plastic penguin for the stand-in) on your friend, who thousands of guys are in love with.

The next campaign was with Twilight‘s Christian Serratos. This was my first time meeting Christian, but she was a super-pro and very easy to work with. Michelle Cho from PETA and I had discussed a Twilight-like forest concept, so I knew I had two options: shut down the Angeles National Forest and light it with 18K HMIs from condor cranes like in Lord of the Rings…or greenscreen (LOL).

Sorry for the sarcasm, but I’ve just never been partial to greenscreen. Don’t get me wrong, compositing has its place, and I do it when necessary, but even then I try to build at least some of the set practically. For one, it helps the model/actor interact with the environment believably. Second, I think it disciplines you to build a concrete vision of the final product in your head, instead of what a lot of photographers are doing now, which is shooting the model now and figuring out the background later. The two dead giveaways for composited shots are the floor (where the feet meet the ground) and that all-too-common uniform backlighting…because it’s easy to cut out, but the lighting is always unmotivated. (Okay, enough soap-boxing.)

So I went to a greenery rental house in the Valley and rented a big tree. The people in my building thought I was crazy, and they’re not far off. I opted to shoot gray-screen instead of green-screen because I knew Christian was going to be naked and I didn’t want that awful green spill on the girl’s skin. Just drives me crazy. I knew I was going to fog up the background and desaturate it anyway, so gray made the most sense.

I’m really happy with how both campaigns turned out. I have to say the PETA crew is super cool, and my whole staff loves working with them. Michelle may be the coolest director/person-in-charge/celebrity-liaison I’ve ever met in my life. I hope we work together for many, many years.

Shooting PETA comes with it’s share of controversy, of course. SlickforceStudio was featured on Fox News recently while they were tearing apart PETA and the Christian Serratos/Twilight campaign…something about the exploitation of women and all that. Okay, guys. Thanks for the publicity.

If cheerleaders looked like this, I never would have left high school.

Production Shots:

I’m terrible at shooting guys. Okay, well, maybe not terrible, but I find it much easier to direct women. Women have a range of acceptable looks to experiment with: sexy, innocent, smart, flirty, badass, adorable, etc.  Men just like to look cool.  And Chris “The Birdman” Andersen was definitely that.

For my shoot with Chris (and models Destiny Daniels (left) and Esther Hanuka (right)) for Rebel Ink magazine, the editor and I discussed recreating the set from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video.  We got some old oil drums, a beat-to-shit muslin backdrop, my awesome intern lent me his cousin’s basketball hoop, and we soaked the concrete floor. Anyone who has a studio knows that it doesn’t take long for you to shoot out every possible angle and background, and wish you had a different studio. But this might be the best Slickforce has ever looked.

Chris was cool as hell, and his demeanor put the models at ease as well.  As with nearly all mag editorials, you need a centerfold/spread. And you’d be AMAZED at how hard it is to find a centerfold pose for a guy (try it right now…see? WTF is he gonna do, lie down and arch his back?)  So I was thrilled with how well this 3-shot spread came out (above). It’s one of my favorite shots of 2009, and I’m gonna get a poster up in the studio.

This shoot appears in the January 2010 issue of Rebel Ink, on stands now.

Here’s your Pep, boys.

Production Shots:

I was thrilled when I got the call that Vida Guerra was returning to modeling. She was my first celebrity model client when I started shooting magazines. I first worked with her on shoots promoting National Lampoon’s Dorm Daze 2. By 2006 we were working together almost exclusively (I think I missed a King and an FHM cover due to prior arrangements), so I was extra bummed when she retired from modeling in early 2007, right after we shot her calendar in Cancun (THAT was a fun trip with lots of stories that I’ll save for later, but remind me to tell you about calling Vida’s dad the wrong name all week and something about a chicken.)

When approaching a shoot, I always try to avoid repeating not only myself, but also other shoots that the model has done. With a model like Vida, you have to accept that guys are buying the mag primarily for her incredible shape. But having become Vida’s friend, one thing I always felt that other photographers missed was her smile and her personality. Yeah, her butt is great, and that’s easy to make look good, but I decided to show Vida in a way she hadn’t been seen before—having ridiculous fun. This was Vida’s first magazine shoot in over two years, and I wanted something really different. So what better location than Ultimate Graveyard?

We all busted our butts for the two-day shoot, and I towed that ’55 Chevy Clipper into the desert with my Hummer (I picked it up at an auction for $500…the Clipper not the Hummer LOL). Then, all the production vehicles, including the RV, got stuck in the sand due to windstorms, so I had to tow 5 vehicles out of the sand. That was the day I fell in love with my truck.

Vida says this is her favorite shoot ever. Hopefully the fans like it too.

(And as you’ll see in the behind-the-scenes, my crew really helped me hit this one out the park. Love to my awesome Slickforce team.)

Production Shots:

Found these behind-the-scenes pics while going through the archives, and thought you guys might like to see.

This is from the premiere issue of SHOWCase (shot Oct 2008), featuring Vanessa Veasley and Laura Dore (then known as Sweetie Cyanide). I’ve always loved shooting in the desert, and this was actually the day I got inspired and decided to buy my own desert property, and Ultimate Graveyard was born.

This issue was a lot of fun to shoot, and I’d worked with both models many times before, so we could cut to the chase and just shoot amazing stuff. I already knew what poses worked best for both of them. These ladies endured both the heat (day) and the cold (dusk), and for anyone who thinks I just liquify my models…these production shots are COMPLETELY unretouched, so take a good look at their bodies and you’ll see just how real they are.

If I’m guilty of anything, it’s putting Vanessa in too many back-arch-orgasm-face poses, but hey, it was just really working for me. (And the white boots didn’t hurt either.)

(BTW it was hot as hell that day and I was tired of the models getting all the attention, so I decided to go shirtless too. Sue me. If you look closely, you’ll see that my stylist isn’t even wearing pants, so there.)