Posts by Charles

Turn down the lights, fire up the projector and light a candle if that’s your style…here’s my picks for the Top 15 Music Videos Of 2011. I tried to encompass a lot of image styles and music in this list. There’s all types of directors and production scales ranging from Canon 7D equipped bare bones budgets to freaking Michel Gondry shooting stop motion on a Bolex (or so I read). I think that’s what’s crazy and great about being a director and designer in this time. If you want to, you have access to pretty much everything (visually speaking) if you put time into it. Hopefully some directors, DPs and photographers are inspired by this, it was a good year for the moving image and I suspect it to only get better and more creative in 2012. Hope you all dig the list and if you make it through each video all the way through, no skipping…you can rule out any form of attention deficit disorder.

I haven’t listed any of these in a rank, only because they’re all good at specific things. However, if I had to pick one favorite, it’d be Eric Epstein’s magically haunting work for Memory Tapes.

View all the videos after the break (more…)

Here’s a beautiful 3 part vignette shot by director Riley Blakeway of Taj Burrow and friends in Fiji. Filming in a place like this, with surfers of this caliber, you’d expect it to look great and it does. Riley goes a little further to make it something else with the color and grain work, which I really appreciate. All three pieces have a great organic film-like grain and the color grading is spot. A feeling and look that you can’t just do with a plug-in.

When I first watched it, I was convinced this was 16mm and maybe super 8mm in spots. Here’s the kicker, “All of the surf vision was shot with the EX1.” says Blakeway. He also added that intros and outros were super 8mm. The camera is the Sony PMW-EX1, a type of camera that is similar to what a lot of us were used to shooting with before the Canon DSLR days. Not a 5D, 60D or even a RED Epic, which is great to see. I’ll try not to get into the technical too much on this, because it’s simply well shot, well edited and graded. His attention to detail is great on these, well done Riley.