www.mkatlemanreel.com

Michael Katleman is a Film and Television director whose recent work includes “Smallville”, “Life on Mars”, and “Justified”. He was referred to me by Max Joseph after Max had produced Michael’s DVD show reel.

My guys and I were again asked to create a design that mimicked the pre-existing DVD reel; if not in functionality or exact look then at least in tone and color palette. Michael’s DVD had a purplish, watery look to it and Tyler and I figured that we wanted to do something with the water, so I proposed the idea of having the content materialize out of it. Matt created the water effect in After Effects and the end result is what you see now, from a UI standpoint.

After the initial build of the site was done, Michael asked us to build the “Extras” section, which is one of the cooler UI applications that I have built out of Flash. The idea was to take select scenes from one of Michael’s features “Primeval” that had special effects work done on them and break it down from script to execution. All of the panes that you see in the interface are designed to sync with one another and the result is the ability to track to scene from written word to what you eventually see on the screen, after all the testing and effects work is completed. It’s interesting to watch how it mutates between each stage of production.

JW

For this project I shot most of the coverage/candids of cyclcists throughout the west side of LA. I got the call to shoot on Tuesday and was out filming at 5:30am Thursday.

The piece was produced in part by GOOD Magazine in association with YOXI and the goal was to help promote the use of bikes over motorized vehicles in urban areas. My filming took me from Brentwood to Santa Monica to Venice to Marina del Rey to Hollywood, and then BACK to Venice.

It was a great time and I hope to work on some more projects with GOOD in the future.

JW

www.thomasyatsko.com

Tom came to me as a referral from Max Joseph, a frequent web development collaborator of mine (we’ve done a couple motion projects together as well). Tom is an LA-based Director of Photography who is currently shooting for the Fox Series, ‘Fringe’.

Credit again to Tyler on this one with the great design. We knew that we wanted to create a site that incorporated a rotation effect and this design ultimately paved the way. What appeals to me the most are the simplicity (and as a result, efficacy) of the site, and the resize effect that takes place whenever a visitor resizes their browser window. Took me a little while to figure that one out properly.

View Tom’s work on his site, and his resume on IMDB.

JW

When I purchased the Canon 5D Mark II, I was obviously eager to test out some of the new functions, and this video was one such test.

I shot the entire video with the EF 70-300mm lens for solid close-ups. The video was shot at 30fps (as was the only available framerate on the camera at the time), and converted to ProRes 422 for editing and online editing. I did some light work with saturation in post as I really wanted to push the colorspace of the raw footage and see what I could get away with.

I was, and still am blown away by the leinency that this camera affords in post-production. Anyone who has worked with the footage knows how generous the footage can be, especially when the DP (ahem) knows the correct picture-style to shoot in to achieve flat source footage.

JW

I took this candid outside of The Gamble house in Pasadena, California after a tour of the premises. It really is a beautiful home and quite the architectural feat. You might remember this house as the 1955 version of Doc Brown’s house in the ‘Back to the Future’ movies. I only know this because I’ve watched the movies recently and was like ‘hey, I know where that is’.

The heavy vignette is deliberate, for those who were curious. I actually layered two different types of vignettes: one was a standard black vignette, the other was a saturation vignette. I again used one of my new favorite filters in Photoshop – the plastic wrap filter – around the edges of the couple to give them a pop-ier look and feel. An inadvertent, but welcome side effect of the filter was the artsy weathered look it gave the bench and the couple; it feels like it really gives the photo more character.

JW

Jesse Sarr is a Los Angeles-based musician, with a focus on folky acoustic rock. He was introduced to me by a mutual friend and asked if we could set aside some time to rent a couple lights and shoot some promotional photos.

I obliged, and we shot a series of photos in the large tree situated on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills (right by the BH sign). We chose the tree because of it’s massive size and also because of all the character that you can see the tree has; years of engravings and love notes to say the least.

This photo was one of my favorites from the shoot, and recently I reopened it and did some heavy post in Photoshop. I used the plastic wrap filter to make Jesse pop-out from the pic a bit more, and lots of vignetting effects to cancel out the sky in the upper portion of the photo.

JW

www.rollandberry.com

Rolland came to me via Mazik of Self Aviary, in search of someone to complete a pre-existing design that other developers had prepared for him. After looking at the design and the way in which the existing code was placed, it was apparent to me that we would either have to start all over, or invest a lot of time figuring out how various elements were grouped within their design. We chose to start all over.

I’m a big fan of Rolland’s art – especially his iconic poster (pictured above) – so I proposed to him that we use that work as the background for the website. He liked the idea and wanted to further it by adding in the electrical nodes that you see throughout the site – another work of his. Rolland also decided that he wanted to use limited color – so we stuck with the idea of using color only in the navigational elements of the UI.

This was the first site that I had developed fully after migrating from ActionScript 2 to Actionscript 3, and it was a great opportunity to learn some of the fundamentals that were impacted upon me. Virtually everything was different in AS3, and therefore I went about coding in it rather begrudgingly. However, anyone who works with Flash knows that AS3 affords significant speed and flexibility upgrades once you learn to love it.

The site took about a month to develop and execute, and the images, text, etc. that you see on the page are all dynamically updateable through XML – another big improvement with the AS3 framework, and necessary as Rolland’s fashion collections are constantly being updated.

If you have a flair for the artistic when it comes to clothing, check Rolland out.

JW

www.michael-robison.com

This simple portfolio website was developed for director Michael Robison in conjunction with Max Joseph/ChimponaChain, LLC. Michael’s website was one of my first for someone involved in the entertainment industry. After viewing his work, I knew that I wanted Michael’s design to be understated, but have a wow-factor that was uniquely all it’s own – hence the “dust effect”. We were also instructed to design to the style of his pre-existing DVD reel, and that is where the salt-flats picture comes in.

The effect, in my opinion, is the large draw to this site (that and MIchael’s work, of course). It’s seamless and lightweight and it just works. Big ups to Tyler and Matt, my design team on this project – the concept was really Tyler’s; we just added to it. He did the design and had the idea for the dust effect, Matt and I brought it all to life. We used Illustrator and Photoshop for layouts, and Trapcode Particular in After Effects for the dust; all brought together by Flash.

JW

It stands to reason that over this holiday weekend people have been eating a lot, drinking a lot, or both. So I thought I’d share this photo from the Getty Villa in Malibu, California. Hopefully, not everyone is feeling this way today (I was the DD yesterday, so I’m in the clear).

This picture was taken right around the time of my birthday (I’m still waiting on your card), and I was using one of my gifts – a new Canon EF 50mm f/1.4. This photo was taken at 1/8000 shutter speed, because I’d always wanted to do some high-speed water stuff, but never got around to it. Plus, I never owned the proper equipment until recently, so acquisition posed a bit of a challenge.

The fountain seen here is situated in the middle of one of the Villa’s many courtyards, and features four of these miniature grotesques. I found them to be particularly compelling and the light was great. Did just a little bit of post work in Aperture (mostly sharpening), and posted it here.

JW

JumpStart Films in conjunction with Yellow Submarine Marketing, produced this longer, PSA cut of the nationally televised commercial spot “Tracks”. The spots were produced for Big Brothers, Big Sisters, a national mentoring program.

Thanks in part to the very generous donations of time and resources of various parties, we were able to successfully shoot these spots in two days. The “Who Helps” components were shot in Sewickley, PA, and the “Tracks” components were shot in Hazelwood, PA. As our time and budget were both limited, so was the gear that I had to work with. The lighting and grip equipment was generously discounted to us from The Gaffhouse, and included three lights (1.25k, 2K, 4K HMIs), a generator, a 3-ton grip package, and a 30ft jib (for one day, cause that’s all we could afford).

We shot on the Sony EX-3 (a camera I love and heartily endorse), with a Letus35 Extreme. I wasn’t wild on this lens adapter, but to be fair, it was the first time I’d ever used it and we didn’t have the right filters (NDs, predominantly) to stop the lenses down properly. However, we got pretty lucky with lighting conditions and my guys did an awesome job lighting and flagging everything else.

JW