Brooklyn Brewery MASH
“I am always searching for a new technique or a style that I have yet to experiment with, so it’s all about leaving things wide open with my filmmaking. I had been playing with this idea of combining stills and video on a music clip I had been working on and wanted to see if it would work for the project we were doing for the Brooklyn Brewery.”
“Landon originally came to me with this idea of jumping from these different locations, but he wasn’t sure the best way to do so. We talked through a few options before I mentioned a technique I had been wanting to play around with. I originally tested a variation of this in the Peach Kings "Thieves and Kings" music video. It basically involves shooting a sequence of still images that seamlessly transition between live action shots. Similar to a time lapse or stop motion except the camera moves a few steps with each frame. Once the motion is smoothed out in post, it gives the effect of an insanely fast moving camera in one seemingly continuous shot.”
“So the core concept was starting on stills and landing on slow motion video, and then going back to stills. As we were talking the concept through, we kept making it harder for our selves like the idea of throwing the Frisbees for example. Basically Landon and I kept making this shoot more and more complicated than it really needed to be.”
“The stills were all shot on a Canon 5D and the slow motion we shot using a Sony FS700. It was a little haphazard as we were trying to go from a full sensor 5D frame to a cropped sensor on the Sony, and all at a different frame rates and different lighting setups and at different angles. So there were all of these extra factors that made those transitions more complicated than we would have liked. The most difficult part to this project was definitely in post, when we were choosing the best image for the sequence during the edit. Just by changing one single image we found we would change the whole fluidity of the sequence.”
“Because this is such a linear video, it was critical that we shot all the scenes in chronological order for continuity. I pretty much storyboard everything I shoot. I like to see the image on paper first before I can feel comfortable capturing it. It’s kind of a really good way to edit the project before you’ve actually shot anything too. So with this project we not only had a detailed storyboard, we also developed an animatic, because we were trying to work out the timing for each scene so it would fit a 60sec piece. Our biggest issue was always whether this was going to be too much for someone to visually understand what was going on.”
“With the animatic, we started with a series of drawings. But in the end, we grabbed a whole punch of street view screen caps from Google to give us a better idea of pulling all of the scenes together. The animatic is important, because you need to have that sense of pacing when you’re shooting off a thousand images like we did.”
“The Brooklyn Brewery spot was totally unique in terms of our client experience. They were so hands off. All they wanted was something ‘cool’. That’s always such a fun parameter to work to, but then again, it can also be pretty daunting, because how do you quantify ‘cool’ as a brief? So we just tried to make this as crazy as we can and do something that was new to us as well.”
“The Brooklyn Brewery spot was totally unique in terms of our client experience. They were so hands off. All they wanted was something ‘cool’. That’s always such a fun parameter to work to, but then again, it can also be pretty daunting, because how do you quantify ‘cool’ as a brief? So we just tried to make this as crazy as we can and do something that was new to us as well.”
“When we sent it to the Brewery, we had no feedback other than ‘OK. great’. They were going to use it as internet spot were they could blast out to blogs and website to promote this tour across Brooklyn. In the end, this video was picked up by a bunch of major websites because it was so different with its unconventional use of photography. In the end, the spot ended up getting a lot of press. In someway the press it got actually overshadowed this promotional tour.”
“In the end, this project came about because Landon cold called the Brooklyn Brewery asking if they needed any video work. In the 25 years that they have been established, they had never done any traditional video advertising. In fact they only promoted themselves by giving away free beer! When this project came about, I think he looked to me because of the unconventional techniques I've used in past work. Landon is also an award winning storyteller and always has a ton of great ideas. So that combination of being able to have this collaborative story telling mixed with this unique approach really elevated it to a piece that neither of us could have done alone.”