A feature film I camera operated on last year for director Mark Robinson with cinematographer Magdalena Gorka appears to finally be finished. The Levenger Tapes was shot with my 5D kit as well as a second 5D kit they put together. I was only on it for the final week of production so I didn’t get to enjoy the all night shoots in the desert.

Prior to this most of my experience had been shooting documentary style productions where I was always fishing around for the best shot while I was rolling. Magdalena saw me doing this while waiting for our actor to come into my frame and said sternly in her thick Polish accent , “Niles, what the fuck you doing? Hold you fucking shot!”. She has gone on to shoot one of the biggest movies of the year and I hope to work with her again in the future.

“Detectives in a remote town pore through every frame of a troubling tape to find the whereabouts of three missing college students. The chilling footage becomes more and more disturbing when the students come upon the bloody dress of an 8-year-old girl in the secluded wilderness and take it upon themselves to find her. Linking the case of the missing girl and the missing students together, the detectives race to piece enough information together to find them alive.”

I recently got the opportunity to work with the Malloy brothers again under director of photography Giles Dunning as a camera operator on a series of spots for Major Legue Baseball. We shot on location at the Spring training facilities around Orlando, Florida and Phoenix, Arizona for one week.

For talent we had some of the best players in baseball. I’m not really a sports guy as any of my friends will tell you so I didn’t really know who Victorino, Upton, Bautista, Longoria, Kemp, Ellsbury and McCutchen were but it must be nice to make millions of dollars a year just playing baseball.

RED Epic w/ Canon 24-70mm

This was the first shoot for me using a Canon EF mount on a RED Epic. We had a pretty light crew and rigged the Epic similarly to the 5D handheld rigs which we used for our other cameras. We also used the 300fps 2KWS option for some of the shots. It’s not as good as a Phantom camera for slow motion but is a lot better than a 7D which can only do 60fps at 720p. For lenses on this shoot we used a lot of old Nikon primes that Giles had with Canon adapters.

It was a good shoot and here are the spots.

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.

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!”

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