Dog Park – Canon T2i Test Footage

My first little DSLR vid.

After much himming and hawing over getting a 5D or 7D for quite sometime now I finally got lured into the world of DSLRs with the release of the new Canon T2i.

Had my first chance yesterday to go out with my friend Matthew Iha to do a little testing. I can’t pretend that I had any clue what the hell I was doing as the footage will show. It was all pretty reckless, just grabbed the camera and headed to the dog park on Town Lake here in Austin. The profile was the default and we were only using the kit’s EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Lens. Most of it was shot 1080 24p but did manage to work in a couple 720 shots to try slomo in post.

Would have had this online last night except that due to my noobishness ran into major headaches trying to edit the native footage. Today after downloading CineForm’s Neo Scene, transcoded the files to avi and re-editing it from scatch in Sony Vegas all is right with the world.

Hope you’ll forgive the not so great footage and hasty edit. Overall I loved it. Defiantly not the right camera for all situations but loads of fun. I think the main thing I didn’t like was the lens but today I got the Fotodiox Pro Adapter Philip Bloom mentioned in one of his blogs that’ll allow me to use some of my old Nikon lenses. think that will make a big difference. Will post some more when I get a chance to play now that I know how to edit this stuff. =)

Music : The Cult – Peace Dog

Open Letter Regarding “Drama”

I would like to address a couple of comments made on our short film. I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, believe that children should be encouraged to fight and further take great umbrage with any who would imply that I ever would. What I do believe is that people should be encouraged to stand up for themselves and not be controlled by the bullies of the world.

As I’ve stated elsewhere, although a particular piece deals with an particular issue that does not mean that it is advocating the negative aspects of that subject. Conversely, exposing the subject allows it to be discussed, hopefully in a rational and productive manner. As an example, the film “Precious” exposes child abuse and incest. No reasonable nor responsible person could think that “Precious” advocates in favor of the topics it so couragously dealt with.

In “Drama,” the Auntie is by never meant to be a role model and is not presented as such. No one could possibly feel this film is a lesson in good parenting. At the end of the fight, Drama does not throw up her hands in victory, she is not raised upon the shoulders of her peers, they are not chanting her name in support, she doesn’t embrace her Auntie and does not look happy even with her Aunties praise. And if you missed incredible talent and nuance of the wonderful young actress Ann Woodward performance, when she looks in the mirror it’s a bittersweet recognition that she does indeed have inner strength. This was a critical and quite deliberate choice in the story. There is no smile, no gloating, there was no satisfaction in her triumph yet, perhaps for the first time in her life, Drama realizes that doesn’t need to run, doesn’t have to hide, and has the strength and courage to no longer be victim. One may argue that her path to self discovery was an unpleasant one but often in both life and art, that path is.

If you would like to voice your support by leaving a comment we would appreciate if you would do so directly on our page at the Nikon Festival here: Drama’s Nikon Festival Page

If you would like to vote for Drama and require instructions on how to do so you may find them on our site here: www.votedrama.com

A huge thanks to everyone who has been supporting our piece and who understood it without explanation.

Sincerely yours;

- Ray

Raymond J. Schlogel

Nikon 140 Second Film Festival

Just a quick little post about a little 140 second shot film entitled “Drama” we did for the Nikon Fest. I’ll be posting the actual video here with a lot more details and a long list of credits and thanks but for right now just trying to get the word out so you good folks might go give it a peek and hopefully leave a little comment. I’m not sure but I think that right now they are going by views and comments. After that 50 will be chosen to move on to the next round. So here’s the link and feel free to spread it around! Not especially easy to tell a whole story in 140 seconds but I think we did a pretty good job if I do say-so myself! Hope you agree!

Click Here To See “Drama” And Comment!

For Love & Stacie

“Before he has a chance to think too much, struggling filmmaker Michael Davis throws himself wholeheartedly into crafting a celluloid valentine for Stacie, his very recent ex-girlfreind and soul mate. What could go wrong? Even Michael couldn’t have predicted the unbelievable twists and turns he would capture on his camera in the following days, which would eventually evolve into the feature “For Love & Stacie” – at once a courageous, cathartic, hopelessly romantic testament to the lengths to which we will go for love, and a darkly comic, almost-too-honest, painfully familiar odyssey through the kind of misery and psychological debasement that only a loved on is capable of inflicting”

So it’s been quite awhile since I made my feature doc For Love & Stacie, though it’s won a handful of awards it’s yet to make me rich … or even buy me a taco. With that in mind like most “artists” it’s become more important to me for it to be seen than for it to make me money. Of course it would be nice to have both but as the latter hasn’t happened I’ll just have to push for the former. Basically I’d rather give it away and hope its seen by many rather than continue to try and sell it and have it only seen by a few. All that said, here it is, free on the internet for the world, or at least a couple people with too much time on their hands, to see in all it’s original glory. Well, not “all” it’s original glory, had to compress it quite a bit to get it online but you get what I mean. I only have two favors to ask if you watch it:

1) Post something about it! Somewhere! Anywhere! Even if you hate it and want to dog it that’s fine with me. If you love it tell the world. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, your blog, message boards, whatever. Since it seems impossible for a little indi filmmaker to make a dime doing this (at least for this little indie filmmaker) it would mean everything to me and I’d be ever grateful just to know it’s been seen by many and hopefully liked by a few. So give it a mention and share the link.

2) No SPOILERS! Again, you can crap all over it if you want to when you post but do me the one honor of not giving anything away to those who haven’t seen it.

That’s it, if ya really REALLY like it you can find it for sale on DVD or a much higher res download on bside.com but honestly at this point it would actually mean more to me for people to post about it than to buy it.

DVD : http://www.bside.com/films/forloveandstacie

Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/loveandstacie

MySpace : http://www.myspace.com/loveandstacie

Look forward to hearing what you think. There are some tidbits about the film on it’s MySpace page but in here I’ll only say that For Love & Stacie went from concept to completion, by that meaning literally from the day I had the idea till the day it was shot and completely edited in six months. The total budget was 3k. It was filmed on Canon XL2’s (oh how I wish I had my EX1 back then!) and edited in Sony Vegas. Any questions just ask, but if your question has spoilers I won’t be able to answer! For full cast and crew visit it’s IMDB page:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0773284/

Thanks a bunch and hope you like it.

- Ray

P.S. Okay, a friend of mine nicely pointed out that since my electricity is about to get cut off because it’s two months behind and I don’t have rent, mayhaps it wouldn’t hurt to put up a donations page for those who enjoyed it and would be willing to make a little donation. I can’t imagine anyone would but if you do well God bless ya, a penny would make me smirk, a buck would make me smile, 5-10 and I’ll do a happy dance, and anything more I think I’ll just spontaneously wet my pants. Know that anything I manage to get back from this will go to rent and the pile of bills I’m behind on. If it ever gets more than I need (like that’ll happen) it will help me payoff some equipment. So if your feel so inclined just click the link below to PayPal and pick a number! I seriously find the quality of my life is just so much better when I have the lights on!

REDucation

Finally nearly recovered from an unexpected trip to Salt Lake City & LA. I was asked by Mannie Frances and Douglas Spotted Eagle from Vasst to come out a shoot some test footage with the RED Tesla for Sony’s presentation during RED’s first REDucation week.

The shoot was meant to be fairly simple, some glam type shots of three BMW’s on the Slat Flats. Originally the owners of the cars were only willing to get the cars out there and more or less plop them down for us to get some shots with perhaps a couple slow drive-bys. We actually spent a good 30 minutes in a nearby gas station while they painstakingly polished every detail before heading out to the location. After filling up the only two 8 gig cards we had with footage one of the owners spontaneously peeled out and started doing donuts, the other two were quick to follow. When this began Mannie and I had been looking at some of the shots on a laptop straight from the camera in Vegas and without batting so much as an eye decided to format one of the cards so we would have some room to capture some of this. Glad we did, got some amazing shots. I’ll see if I can get some of the source footage to make a little montage.

Fast forward a couple days and Mannie and I are in LA at the LA Center Studios for REDucation week demoing Sony Vegas with the fresh footage in one of their awesome 4k theaters in front of a live audience. Was a blast, the presentation went great considering just days before I had no clue that I’d be doing it! Vegas performed flawlessly during my part of the demo and Mannie did a great job co-presenting and filling in the blanks by pointing out some of other RED specific improvements Vegas had made in their latest updates. On a side note I had met Ted Schilowitz from RED at NAB before but it was kinda neat to have him come up and welcome us while we were getting ready to present. Really wish we had had more time to just hang out and absorb but was back in the airport and on a plane just hours after we wrapped up.

Suffice to say it was an incredible week. Getting to spend some time with Spot (Douglas Spotted Eagle) and Mannie as I bounced between staying at their respective houses in Utah, to the shoot,  to the cool room at The Standard in LA, to the presentation at REDucation, just incredible. Hope we get to do it again next year!

- Ray