Archive | April, 2010

FREE LIVE Event: HDDSLR Cinema with Vincent Laforet

By on April 29, 2010

chase jarvis blog_vincent laforet classHey hey. Reminder that over at creativeLIVE.com, we’re bringing in my good buddy Vincent Laforet for a FREE all-weekend-long workshop about making videos with the new breed of HDdSLR cameras.

[update: we're LIVE now! check it out. And... you spoke, we listened. For those who couldn't catch it, every night there is a full FREE playback starting 8pm Seattle TIME (gmt -8)...still pay to download if you wanna keep it...]

Starting tomorrow, from 9am to 6pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday (yes that’s THIS weekend, all day long, all weekend long) Vince will be delivering a firehose of instruction that will help you + any first-time filmmakers and photographers making the transition into video understand the core building blocks necessary to make their first videos and short films. This is a soup to nuts how-to course, from gear, to theory, to execution, and all you need is an internet connection to participate. Live chat with the classroom and conversations via @creativeLIVE on Twitter included.

Register in advance here. The daily schedule is posted here. Drop in when you have time, or stay for the whole weekend. As with all creativeLIVE classes, the live feed is free. Pay to download if you wanna put it on your hard drive, ipod, or wherever you want.

Course Information

* Course: An introduction to HDDSLR Cinema.
* Instructor: Vincent Laforet
* When: Friday, April 30 – Sunday, May 2 (9am – 6pm PDT, GMT -8)

And FWIW, I think I’m gonna drop in one day to pay a visit in person. Hope to catch you there.

Choose Your Own Adventure.

By on April 22, 2010

chase jarvis sunrise streetIf you wait around to read the email when it pours into your inbox, will you ever have time to take pictures?

How many ideas will you miss by chasing the next best thing rather than finishing the project you’ve already started?

If you continue taking those crappy gigs that generate dogpoop looking photos or films, will you ever have time to create the ones you want?

What is the cost of doing things that your industry says are “normal”?

How many pictures will you let pass you by if you wait till you get a better camera, better lights, or better vision?

If you do what your teacher tells you to do without pushing the boundaries of photo school, will your work look just like everybody’s in your class?

How old will you be when you finally quit your day job because it sucks?

When was the last time you Continue Reading →

Photographing Moby. Or Maybe Not.

By on April 21, 2010

chase jarvis photograph of mobyOne of the things I loved about learning to speak a decent bit of French a few years back was that just when you realized that you knew enough French to get by, THAT’s when you realized that you had so much more to learn. Same goes with any second language, or flyfishing, or race car driving or laundry or medicine, yoga, or anything that you can really sink your teeth into.

And the same goes with a life as a professional photographer.

I’ve shot in what feels like every place on the planet under crazy-tight circumstances, with 80 people on set, with celebrities, with no margin for error, client breathing down your neck, 120 degrees, uphill both ways, blah blah, you get the story… so much so, that you could say that you get numb to it. Except every once in a while…

Such was the case with a recent portrait shoot of one of my favorite artist/musicians, Moby. He’s an amazing guy. I was scheduled to photograph him as a part of his “Gristle” tour (fascinating) and in connection with a project I’m doing that I’ll disclose at a future date… We were shooting at Town Hall Seattle, 7pm. Except in the hours before the the shoot, my day went totally sideways. Estimates due. Drop in international guests. Pre-production woes for a different shoot. Meetings that ran long. Traffic. Yada yada yada. Just stuff. Everything that could go wrong, was Continue Reading →

This Wednesday – Copyright and the New Economy

By on April 19, 2010

chase jarvis - copyright is complexI want my work to be protected and used only when I want and how I want. But I also want it to be consumable in the new media. Confused like the rest of us?

If you make art for a living or are interested in the rapidly evolving rights for people who create stuff–and especially if you live in/around NYC–then point yourself at this FREE day-long symposium brought to you by the fine folks at ASMP. It’s on WEDNESDAY of this week. I’ll be presenting, talking about my personal experiences in the legal system as well as with the new media. But perhaps certainly more useful, there will be a panel and I’ll be lucky enough to be seated alongside the esteemed Harvard Law professor/founder of the Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, plus a whole bunch of other talented and smart people above my pay grade and moral standing.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010. TimesCenter, 242 West 41st St. New York, NY 10018

It’s FREE. Register here to attend. Schedule details and a list of my co-panelists after the jump Continue Reading →

Dartanyon’s Guest Post: Create a Podcast from Scratch in 6 Easy Steps

By on April 15, 2010

[Note: I'm excited today to bring back an element to this here blog that we started a while back, but got lost in the mix: monthly guest posts from my badass staff. Since each of them are experts in their own right, I figured you'd be interested in hearing some different perspectives. Today, our tech guru and all things 1's and 0's master, Dartanyon, drops some knowledge about how to create a podcast in 6 easy steps.... Round of applause, please...take it away Dartanyon...]

Around here … we make a lot of content. I’m sure many of you who tune into our LIVE broadcasts, have heard me talking about the vast amounts of data we create. One of our favorite things is to make fun videos giving a sneak peek behind the scenes. After we make all of those, we need to deliver them out to you, our awesome community. One way we share content is via our iTunes podcast. This is a quick run down on how we make that happen.

Step One Content: First off, you’re going to need to have a movie (or audio) file in some format. Nearly every video we create passes through Final Cut Pro, where we edit a bit and add our motion graphics. From there we export high resolution Quicktime Movie files (.mov) that we will compress in the next step.

Using Apple's Compressor App to make output compressionsStep Two: Compressions Now that you have yourself a movie, you’re going to need to think about what kind of devices your audience is going to use in order to watch your video. We create a few different compressions right off the bat: We always create an iPhone optimized size for our podcast and at the same time we create a 720P version to upload to youtube.com and maybe our Facebook Fan Page. In addition, we create a 1080P version that we keep here in the studio on our media server for showing on the projector. We create the different resolutions using Apple’s Compressor, part of Final Cut Studio, but you could also use Quicktime Pro or any other video programs you may have.

The iPod|iPhone compression is formatted to fit the iPhone window, or 640 × 480 pixels. We use the H.264 codec because of it’s size, quality, and how well it interfaces with iTunes. The YouTube version is formatted for Hi-Def playback. It’s 1280 × 720 pixels, and again we use the H.264 codec for this one, as suggested in the YouTube specs. We’ve discovered that Continue Reading →

A Conversation on Planning (and Inspiration).

By on April 14, 2010

I feel compelled to share with you my latest documentary short film in the series I’ve been commissioned to create for Russell Investments. This particular piece is about planning–a topic that bridges my client to the rest of the world’s day to day endeavors–but it might as well be about inspiration. That’s the primary reason I want to share it here… Not for the commercial message, but because Helen Thayer is one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met.

She began climbing mountains in New Zealand with Sir Edmund Hillary (first man to summit Everest) at age 9. She solo walked to the north pole at age 50. She has walked thousands of miles across numerous deserts, most notably the Gobi Desert in China, when she was 60 . She has walked across Antarctica. She has lived with wolves in the Yukon for a year. She was a national champion in track & field and luge. She has represented 3 countries in international competition. It came up rather casually that she’s summitted Mt. Rainier more than 20 times. And she most recently celebrated her 70th birthday by kayaking the Amazon River. Oh, and she’s really coming into her own now as a National Geographic photographer. She’s 72 now and she’s Continue Reading →

Introducing creativeLIVE.com: Worldwide FREE Creative Education [updated]

By on April 7, 2010

[updated 8-April 2010: I added the recording of the live announcement after the jump]

Hello Friends! I’m happy and proud to announce today that over that past year I’ve been working together with my super-tech friend Craig Swanson to bring you the world’s first LIVE creative education internet channel. And the best news? It’s FREE. That’s right, it’s free to watch any and all live feeds from some of the world’s best creative instructors. Tune into creativeLIVE.com and check it out. Calendars, courses, archives and more.

On the photography side of things, we excited to announce in quarter one featuring Vincent LaForet, David DuChemin, Zack Arias, Scott Bourne, Art Wolfe, and many others. Wanna learn how to have vision in photography? We’ve got the instructor. HD Dslr Cinema, we’ve got it. Lighting? We’ve got it. Software? We’ve got that too. And if we don’t have it? Tell us and if there’s demand, we’ll create it for you.

I’m not an instructor, but it’s been a huge goal for the past year to connect the community with many of my friends who ARE instructors and ARE amazing at what they do. The goal here is to help democratize creativity.

In addition to all the photography gurus and course, we’ve got design classes, painting and other fine art classes, and programming classes up the wazzu. You’ll find … Continue Reading →

LIVE Broadcast: Special Announcement + Q&A

By on April 6, 2010

What: special LIVE announcement + Q&A; followup

Where: at the url www.chasejarvis.com/LIVE

When: Wednesday April 7th at 10:40am USA west coast PDT.
(1:40pm USA east coast USA EDT)
GMT -8 on the international clock.

Hi Friends. If you’ve been tuned in here, then you know we’ve been doing a good bit of LIVE broadcasting lately. It’s been really fun. And there’s more of it to come WEDNESDAY. I’ve got an exciting announcement I’d like to share with you on our LIVE channel, and that announcement will be followed by a worldwide, live Q&A; via Twitter.

If you can be available please tune in tomorrow (maybe today depending on where in the world you live!) at the above time!

Hope to see you there.

How To Shoot A Car Commercial: One Tenth the Size, But 10X Cooler.

By on April 5, 2010

Too often advertising is a lot about BIG. Especially automotive advertising. Big budgets, big gear, big egos. Big and boring. This latest Nissan commercial from TWBA Toronto, however, isn’t big in those traditional senses. Instead, it’s big on spirit, innovation, and effectiveness. Plus big points on photography/cinematography. Seriously great camera work. Enjoy the making of video here above, but be sure to click the ‘continue reading’ link below and enjoy the finished commercial after the jump… Continue Reading →

I’m Live at TEDx This Sunday. Fearlessness in Creativity.

By on April 2, 2010

Hopefully you’ve heard of TED talks. If you haven’t, you must check them out. The annual big TED conference happens every winter in California, but there are a series of smaller events that happen worldwide year round… Just so happens that I’m delivering one of those talks at Carnegie Mellon University on this coming Sunday, April 4. Easter for those of you who observe it or like eggs and bunnies.

I’ll be talking about Fearlessness in Creativity somewhere in the vicinity of 3:30 and 4:30pm EAST coast time. Which is 12:30 – 1:30 West coast time. The event is sold out, BUT good news: it will be streamed LIVE right from the stage to your desktop or (ahem) iPad by clicking on this link: http://tedxcmu.com/watch.

I highly recommend you tune in to several other speakers, like Raghava KK for example, earlier in the day, starting at 10am EDT. A complete list of speakers and times can be found here.

Hope you’re able to check it out. Wish me luck. Have a happy weekend.

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