34th Cleveland Int'l Film Festival - Trailer Shoot

This past weekend, we shot the Cleveland Int'l Film Festival trailer.  This is one of our favorite projects, because it brings local crew and community together for a couple days for some good bonding time and no-pressure fun.  This year's idea is "...because of the Cleveland Int'l Film Festival" and we had over 80 people in two days come in to tell us how the film fest had influenced or changed their life.

We shot with the Canon 1D Mark IV, and my co-DPs John Turk and Jon LaGuardia have confessed that this is our new love child.  We've done a lot of work with the Canon 5D lately, yet the 1D seems sturdier and the monitoring capabilities are better than the 5D.  It also shoots slo-mo and, more importantly 24p, which was crucial as we'll be doing a film-out to 35mm. prints.  We were discussing whether this could be one of the first film-outs from the 1D and think that, possibly, it could be.  It will be interesting to see how an HD DSLR will handle a 35mm print and 30 foot projection.

The backdrop to our interviews are the vibrant colors of this year's campaign, courtesy of the talented folks over at Twist Creative, which were then rear-projected onto a 20-foot screen.  Jon LaGuardia created about 30 different variations on the colors, and we switched them out with every interview.

Many thanks to our great crew of (from left) Kip Gynn (location sound), Rick Stern (projectionist, key grip, electric), Matthew T. (assistant director), Kate O'Neil, Bobby Ruggeri (second A.D.), Jon LaGuardia (director of photography, editor, media manager) Bob Stefanov (line producer), Kylee Cook (stylist, hair and make-up), Bill Garvey (location manager), Keith Nickoson (key grip), and Donnie Schneider (key grip).  Not pictured are John Turk, (director of photography, snapping the picture), Grace Nowak (producer) and Danielle Muad'Dib (stylist, hair, make-up).

We'll be creating a number of different versions from the 80+ people we shot, which will be screened during the festival, prior to each film...so be sure to block out March 18-28 for one of the best programmed film festivals in the U.S.

See you there.