Luna Fest

I'm happy to announce that good friend and independent film maker Jen Grace has put together a smashing production that is being extremely well received. In fact, she just let me know that her piece, Breaking Boundaries: The Sondra Van Ert Story, has been chosen as one of ten to selected to tour with next year's National Lunafest. Lunafest "is a national traveling festival of short films by...for...about women" that cover more than 100 venues nationwide. Other entries cover the globe including Brooklyn, Columbia, France, South Africa and more.

Jen competed for years on the pro snowboard circuit as the Irish Snowboard team (yeah, she was the entire team). Her movie is related to her passion and inspiration for snowboarding via Sondra, who has a crazy good story. Keep an eye out for the flick and the fest. Happy to have images featured in the movie Jen - excited to see what's next.

Resize, Refit, Reshape, Rethink

For anyone still doubting the power of processors and pixels to affect our collective view of the world here is yet more evididence. As if the old Dove video isn't enough here's a slightly more tech approach to the ongoing issue of resizing images to fit not only the various monitor formats but the plehtora of media devices pushing images in general.

This is a cool outside the box approach to what we all bump into at times. Rather than working purely in a linear approach the engineers (props folks) have managed to work in non uniform columns. That is they have worked out an method for determining the importance of pixels to the overall image and then removing those deemed the least vital in the spectrum of the picture.

Great to see what's ahead and that as much as manipulation, and at times deceipt, play a role in visual media today that tools are being developed that push the envelope of what we as photographers would all hope for. I can see this technology and the face recognition used within being extremely useful. Let me know when you see this out in use.

Light Painting & Moby

If you're anything like me you're constantly wondering how things get done, made, created, elevated, etc. Reverse engineering is a top hobby. In that spirit here's a great glimpse behind the scenes with a recent Sprint commercial using stop motion or a kind of 'flipbook' style photography. The light and artistry here is damn good - and notice the size of the production staff.



Speaking of behind the scenes, for anyone out there on this side of things Moby has made his music available, with certain limitations, for legal multimedia projects. On his site you'll find mobygratis where
independent filmmakers, students and non-profits can listen to select pieces and then register and submit requests for use.