I’m giving a chat about creativity on behalf of the Art Directors Club of Denver‘s annual awards show. This 45-second teaser video highlights the consequences of creativity.
This talk is open to the public, please tell your friends. Hope to see you there.
Who: You + ASMP + the Art Directors Club of Denver What: Chase Jarvis keynote address When: Friday, June 12, 6pm Where: Denver, CO (Denver News Auditorium) Details:www.adcd.com (more info coming soon)
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Thanks to your feedback from this post a couple weeks ago, I updated my iphone photo portfolio today. Please take a spin thru. And in keeping with the spirit of this post, feel free to tell me which ones you like, but be sure to tell me at least one that sucks and how it could be improved.
I’m rotating the content of these portfolios quite frequently now–finally letting go of the drama associated with “a portfolio”–so I’ll continue to keep you posted.
[Get my iPhone photos of the day by following me on Twitter (@chasejarvis). These images also make to my Facebook fan page, occasionally with some commentary. Love to have you join.] –
I’ve been yelping about photo and videoconvergence since long before the Nikon D90 and the Canon 5d, so it’s nice to see the support for these claims just keep on rolling in. For example, Esquire magazine today announced that the June 2009 issue of their rather glorious magazine (on sale May 10) features Megan Fox on its cover, and more importantly, that the image was captured with a video camera. Yes. That’s right the REDone’s 4k image is the first I know of to be sitting nicely on the front cover of a high-end, public-at-large magazine.
I love it. Rather jealous, actually, of photographer/director Greg Williams. I’ve been working with the RED a fair bit in the past year and trying to talk my magazine friends into letting me pull off that move. Nothing doing. Been laughed outta the building in fact. So big kudos to Greg and the Esquire team for taking the plunge and making this happen…
“It allowed her to act,” Williams says. “She could run scenes without being reminded by the sound of a shutter every four seconds that I was taking a picture. As in still photography, a lot of it is capturing unexpected moments. This takes that one step further.”
What kinda magic can 22 photographers from 16 countries do in 12 hours in Dubai? Well if they can round up 6 traceurs, 1 beautiful woman, 1 Mountain Dew, and a Porsche Cayenne, they can create something pretty darn cool.
Enter the collaborative Dubai Parkour Project.
Here’s how it went down: we all gathered as a part of Gulf Photo Plus, an annual photo festivus in Dubai UAE of more than 1000 photographers from around the world. Just so happened that I was teaching a hardcore little seminar called Prep. Shoot. Wrap! for a range of photographers–some intermediates and some young pros. I also roped in Kate, Scott, Cody, and Adam the Intern from my crew for help. The seminar, now in its second annual iteration, basically sets out to simulate an actual commercial production. And this is the real deal, complete with scouting, casting, shooting, production, post production the whole enchilada…
But rapping about the main event is not the purpose of this quick post.
This post is about a fun new supplement to that mock print campaign we added this year aimed at collaboration and at addressing the convergence of photo and video–an important part of the changing landscape of professional scene. This go-round the students were also required to create assets for a collaborative group video project uniting those two media – all in one day.
This above video is the result of the class’ efforts. I hope you think it’s as cool as we do…in a group learning sort of way… It’s quick and dirty, not taking ourselves too seriously here…but really loving the concept of a bunch of photogs creating assets for one group project on the fly.
For a few of the details on how we pulled this together, plus some gear lists and shout outs, hit the continue reading link below. –
To say the class “wrote” a script for this piece would be a huge stretch. A more accurate description would be to say we took 30 minutes, gathered around a white board and scribbled down a basic storyline and a mechanism for how we could possible make such a task feasible. That was step one. We considered how best to capture, review and edit a huge body of work in a really short time period. And here’s what we came up with:
Prep: First, the students agreed as a group that in order to facilitate the story we would together shoot a 20 second intro that set the scene, and a 20 second conclusion that wrapped the story. We shot both these from a bunch of different cameras and a buncha different angles with almost everybody gunning – and all the models on one set – lots of different looks. This turned out to be a crucial step in pulling this together. The rest of the random sequences would be pulled together to make the meat of the video.
Shoot: On the shoot day, the class of 18 divided into six groups of three, each with their own local Dubai parkour athlete–or traceur to use the parlance of the sport. Each group shot with a different athlete in each of three locations across the city. The intro and end of the video was shot in a group setting and then each group went their own way at each location. We moved from each location as a big group but made sure to select locations that were large enough that the athletes would be able to get their sport on and the photographers wouldn’t be trampling all over one another to get their shots. This also proved key. It was amazing to see so many of the same moves shot from a number of angles with different cameras… An uber low rent “bullet-cam” in some cases. Loved it.
Wrap: Once the shooting was complete–12 hours in total–the photographers each edited down to their favorite 10 video clips and/or 10 still sequences with up to 20 frames each, and provided us with their RAW files. From there, my brave crew took over. It was a heck of a task pulling together all the different footage, but Scott and Cody locked themselves in hotel room in front of a burly Mac Pro, surveyed those images, processed them all into tiffs and .mov files, and laid this sucker together as best they could in 24 hours. Intro at the front, closer at the end, and all those sequences in the middle.
Ultimately, everything went according to plan. The students worked hard together in the trenches, learned and laughed. I’m not sure something like this has happened before where a disparate group of photographers and videographers from a variety of backgrounds with entirely different experience and expertise levels have come together–on such a short timeline and around a sport that few of them had ever heard of–to take part in a collaborative learning experience that created something as unique and as relatively cohesive as this. And that is cool. It’s certainly not perfect, and there is plenty of opportunity for growth and polish, but damn this was fun.
The Take Away: Given the nature of photography meetups happening around the world fostered by you, me, and numerous others in this community, here’s a little call to action: I’d love to see this sort of thing catch on in your world. Let this be a little starting block. Occasionally, instead of getting together to simply learn about photography and shoot photos together, hows about you get together with some buddies, add a layer of complexity, and make something like this? Or way better. We did this in one day. What could you do in a week with your friends? You don’t need a seminar with an instructor, and you don’t need a bunch of fancy equipment. Get 10 of you shooting together toward some final project that we can all sit back and drink in. It would be great to see these things popping up on the web – a collaborative piece that reflects a bunch of different viewpoints and a creative synergies all bound up into one piece.
My hat is off to this hardworking bunch of students. We had a blast making this, and I think you would too. Share the idea with your friends.
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Big ups to The Saturday Knights for providing the perfect music for this piece. Please support them and buy their music here on iTunes.
For a couple months now I’ve been posting an iPhone image to my Twitter and Facebook everyday. No photoshop, just in-iPhone-app editing and a mobile post. The exercise originally started for two reasons: 1)to keep the creative/vision mojo flowing; and 2)emphasize the image, not the tools needed to create it. Its been really key in my own creative development lately, and I’ve been jazzed to get a ton of community feedback around how this little endeavor has taken hold in others’day to day as well.
That said, I wanted to bring a piece of this action here to the blog on a semi-regular basis for those of you who are not tweeters or facebookers. Idea is that I’ll post a handful of my iphone images from the previous week or so here and ask for your vote in the comments about your favorite. Any above the belt feedback is always welcome, as would be links to iphone images that you’re creating.
So which is your favorite of the following four images? [first one here, other three after the jump...]
Some hotel lobby lamps…
- click the ‘continue reading’ link below … –
Light at Frankfurt airport.
Flag on the beach in Dubai.
Fire hydrant by my local coffee shop.
Discarded shopping cart.
Vote for your fav, post a link, or post some feedback in the comments.
The title of this post is ripped directly from the title of a short must-read book, written by Saatchi & Saatchi Creative Director legend, Paul Arden.
Here’s three pieces of advice from this book: 1. Do not seek praise, seek criticism. “It is quite easy to get approval if we ask enough people, or those who are likely to to say what we want to hear. The likelihood is that they will say nice things rather than be too critical. Also, we tend to edit out the bad so that we hear only what we want to hear. So if you have produced a pleasantly acceptable piece of work, you will have proved to yourself that it’s good simply because others have said so. It’s probably ok. But then it’s probably not great either. If, instead of seeking approval, you ask, ‘What’s wrong with it? How can I make it better?’, you are more likely to get a truthful, critical answer. You may even get an improvement on your idea. And you are still in a position to reject criticism if you think it is wrong. Can you find fault with that?”
2. Energy. “It’s 75% of the job. If you haven’t got it, be nice.”
Number 3 plus a link to buy this sucker after the jump [click continue reading link below].
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3. Do not covet your ideas. Give away everything you know and more will come back to you. “You will remember from school other students preventing you from seeing their answers by placing their arm around their exercise book or exam paper. It is the same at work, people are secretive with ideas. ‘Don’t tell them that, they’ll take credit for it.’ The problem with hoarding is that you end up living off your reserves. Eventually you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you’re left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish. Somehow, the more you give away, the more comes back to you. Ideas are open knowledge. Don’t claim ownership. They’re not your ideas anyway, they’re someone else’s. They are out there floating in the ether. You just have to put yourself in a frame of mind to pick them up.
“Mulling it over, I couldn’t articulate it fully but definitely, I knew I had become lazy, really lazy. A spectacular sloth by the standards of shooting film. Film is hard. Film is a stone cold unforgiving killing bastard. Film is once in a lifetime, no excuses. F8 and really, really be there: ready, steady, in focus, correct exposure, and pressing the shutter in synch with life.”
Doug Menuez said that, just this morning. And if you are unaware of Mr. Menuez, start taking notes. You may recall the piece he wrote that I linked to a couple months ago called Surviving Your Own Photography Career.
Well, a couple weeks ago, I had a long brunch with Doug in NYC. Great photographer, amazing man. We talked about some really heavy stuff and, alternatively, we laughed our asses off. He’s now clicked into 2.0 mode, and is writing regularly over at his new blog Doug Menuez 2.0: Go Fast, Don’t Crash.
POV photography has come a long way. I’ve long had a seriousinterest in it, but this video by José Luis Ortiz (and behind the scenes photographed here by Erwan Grey) brings a whole new meaning to helmet cam. Couldn’t pass on sharing this…
It used to be a pie in the sky idea to get a “birds-eye” view. Then we made cameras smaller, and we attached them to remote control helicopters. Now we’re just strapping them straight to eagles!? Sure some pro cine guys could argue this footage has some room to grow–say smooth cam in Final Cut Pro–but don’t tell me this isn’t amazing. Props for the innovation, guys.
Dig at the 5:50 and after 7:00 mark the kind of speeds at which this raptor is diving. I’m excited to see where this type of video can go. Can I please watch this bird hunt?
Photo of the rig and addt’l POV stuff after the jump. –
If you’ve tuned into my Facebook or Twitter recently, you’ll know I’m finally back in the saddle, stateside, after a couple of fun and productive weeks in Dubai, UAE. I made my way to the Middle East’s skyscraper mecca for a number of reasons, one of which–I’m proud and excited to share–was my first official fine-art gallery show.
Having been uber-busy heading into the planning of this thingie, I went into it with low expectations–maybe even reservations–only to have them smashed to tiny little pieces. And for that I have many thanks: to the elegant curator, Elie Domit, who pulled together the group show–appropriately titled Kaleidoscope–as well as my fellow show mates Asim, Drew, Joe, and Vince, all of whom I adore. Also, I owe deep gratitude to the master planner, Mohammed Somji, and his right hand lady, Hala, who made all this happen. The two of them had been so very unassuming about the arrangements they had secured for the show…just a sort of “cool new gallery” they’d said. Just so happens that the gallery is the swanky, new, and architecturally stunning space called The Empty Quarter gallery nestled in the Gate Village area of Dubai’s DIFC neighborhood.
But, as perfectly fitting as it is, the biggest thanks I owe is actually to you. If it weren’t for so many of you encouraging my b+w New Zealand landscape series (some of you from way back from the first time I showed any of these images back at Photoshelter Keynote in NYC), this multi-year project that literally started out as scouting photos for commercial jobs, would likely never had left the ground as a legit fine art project, and certainly wouldn’t be hanging in Dubai. I’m so NOT a classic landscape shooter and had really just been privately moonlighting as one in order to push myself beyond my comfort zone…but all the notes of encouragement you sent my way really made me take it more seriously. And for that, I’m grateful. Thank you thank you thank you.
What’s starting as a trickle here with this fine art kick off, will hopefully be a firehose of more progressive material in the not too distant future.
If you happen to be passing through Dubai (do people do that?), the show hangs until April 15. All prints at TEQ are limited editions of 45 and are 16X24” on archival inkjet. You can see the entire series here (I’d love your feedback), and can ping the studio in Seattle if you’re interested in pricing or alternate sizes.
A supershort Facebook vid that Cody pulled out of his Flip Mino HD from the opening evening, plus a comic releif snapshot, compliments of Scotty and Cody after the jump. [Click the 'continue reading' link below.]
