On Freddie Roach

Posted on by
Reply

The HBO documentary series “On Freddie Roach” that I have been Director of Photography on for more that a year is finally going to air on January 20th, 2012 at 9:30pm. I for one can’t wait to see it. I’ve only seen rough cuts of the first few episodes so far and I’m pretty excited about it. I’m even considering getting a television, nah probably not.

On Freddie Roach Crew in the Philippines

I can’t divulge too much information about the show until after it airs but I will say we had a great crew and we traveled the world and worked long and hard to bring this story to life. I was honored to work with Film 44, Herzog and Company, Peter Berg, The Malloy Brothers, Matt Goldberg, Justin Cooper, Brandon Carol and Travis Franklin to drop a few names. We shot an incredible amount of footage with a multitude of different cameras. A team of assistant editors worked around the clock siftting through many terabytes of data and getting the story elements to editor Stephen Strout who worked some Avid magic piecing it all together. I’m writing all this all without having seen the show but I have a good feeling about it.

I didn’t know the first thing about boxing when I got this gig but it didn’t take long to realize I was working with some of the best in the world. The story centers around the life of Freddie Roach, a former professional boxer who now trains world champions such as Manny Pacquiao, Amir Khan, Oscar de la Hoya and Mike Tyson. Freddie is also is in a larger daily fight with Parkinson’s disease, most likely induced by his boxing career. I’ve become a fan of the sport of boxing as well as an admirer of Freddie Roach over the course of production.

This show is very real and absolutely nothing was scripted. We woke Freddie up very early and filmed what happened until he went to bed in pure cinéma vérité style. Our crew was small, we shot with available light and tried our best to be completely invisible. We never knew what was going to happen but something interesting would happen every single day and it was our job to capture those moments that only happen once. Thanks Freddie, for sharing your life with us.

The Last Day of Twenty Eleven

Posted on by
2

This year to ring in 2012 about a dozen friends went in on a large cabin in the mountains at Big Bear Lake. Felice made Beef Wellington for our New Year’s feast which was amazing. I got a small keg of New Castle which we kept in the snow and there was also plenty of good wine and whiskey to imbibe. We did a full day of snowboarding, some hiking around the lake, a little off-roading and a lot of Cabin Chillin’ in the last days of 2011.

I wasn’t really planning on making a video about this but it is in my nature to document anything interesting that goes on. We started playing around with my GoPro and the next thing I know I have the 5D time-lapse cam set up and rolling with the 15mm fish eye.

When I got the footage back to the lab (a.k.a my apartment) I used it as an excuse to delve further into Final Cut 10.0.1. Having recently upgraded my video card to be compatible, I’m still not totally happy with the software (upgrade?). It crashed at least 20 times while I was cutting this very short piece so I can’t really imagine cutting a feature film with it at this point. The good thing is that since they have completely removed the “save” function and made it automatic I didn’t loose any work.

I’m still trying to figure out what these posts are going to be about and who my audience is so I’ll stop short of the long article on FCPX that I’m sure has already been written by other editors and filmmakers and just show you the video that I made on the last day of 2011.

Food Photo Shoot for The Tasting Kitchen

Posted on by
Reply

I happened to run into Chef Casey Lane from the Tasting Kitchen restaurant yesterday and he was anxious to get some new photos of a few dishes, so this afternoon I did a little photo session for them. The best part was getting to eat some of the food after we got the shots.  The burrata and brocolini salad was amazing… oh and I think the shots turned out pretty well too.

I brought my 580EX II and diffuser cup but I ended up lighting mostly with candles and doing long exposures on a tripod. I also used my LED video light set to its lowest setting handheld to give it a little more kick. My ISO was at 1250 since it was pretty dark and I was going to try a few different lens options but the good old 24-70mm f/2.8 seemed to do the trick. I shot in RAW and processed them in Lightroom 3 which seems to be better than my old workflow in Adobe Bridge and Photoshop. Here are a few selects that might make you want to get a dinner reservation.

Don’t Stop Believing

Posted on by
1

SantaCon is an annual mass gathering of people dressed in Santa Claus costumes parading publicly on streets and in bars in cities around the world. The focus is on spontaneity and creativity, while having a good time and spreading cheer and goodwill. There is also some drinking involved.

This year was my very first LA SantaCon and I was joined by my little helper Dee Dee and by Bad Irish Santa Mick. This video was shot entirely with a telephone and edited with some frustration in FCP X.

“No force on Earth can stop one hundred Santas!”

New Website.

Posted on by
5

Stand by. I’m working on it.

I’ve had this website since 1998 and after many iterations of custom HTML, PHP, CSS and Flash, today I installed WordPress. I also redirected my other very popular and mostly pointless domain “fuckitall.com” to this site. It was terribly out of date and though thousands of people visit it every day I had no motivation to update it. Sorry if you are looking for that, it is gone, but check out my reel while you are here. ; )

Thanks for stopping by.

-Niles