Vince Penman is a commercial and advertising photographer, director/producer and interactive art director who lives in Austin Texas, with his wife Rachael Penman and children.
This blog is a mixture of professional, personal and everything in between. Life is more than just about work.
For the past month, I have been doing nothing but making commercials, at least it feels like it, and for the most part it is true. I am actually working on yet another one as I write this. Total protonic reversal. That’s not the name of it, that’s just how I feel. I told you the line between photographer and video producer is thinning.
The latest commercial I did, which was approved today from the client, was an absolute blast to produce. And I am going to fill you in on how I did it. But first the spot:
I wanted to have a feeling of constant movement in each of the shots. In order to achieve this I needed to use a Steadicam. Well, the Merlin Steadicam costs $800 and no one rents them nearby. Since we have a set, and rather low I might add, budget for these spots, any money we spend is less we make. So I decided to DIY it. I will spare you photos of my shoddy machine workmanship, but I will just say it worked fantastically… once I got the hang of it. I basically followed the plans from this guy. After a couple of trips to Home Depot, I was set. (I might do another post and show how I made the thing with pictures and all I just don’t have time right now)
For the coloring of the spot, I wanted something really different. We have Magic Bullet Looks, and I LOVE that plugin, don’t get me wrong, I just wanted a little more punch. So I thought about doing it in Photoshop. Yes you can edit some video in Photoshop, but I wanted even more control than that. So, once I got the spot edited to where I wanted it, I exported the footage as a psd sequence. What that means, is I exported every frame to a Photoshop file. Then I could control each frame how I wanted, just like any photo in Photoshop.
A lot of people know I am not a big fan of actions. In fact I get fed up with all of the paid actions that people sell online. Don’t get me started, really. There are some actions, however, that I think are totally worth the money. The actions from Totally Rad Actions. Seriously. This isn’t a plug, but I truly think these are possibly the most worthwhile actions that anyone can buy out there. The rest, don’t even bother. Create your own.
So what I did was to create a “recipe” of several of the actions. Then I ran a Photoshop batch on all of the 900 images, and voila. I re-imported the frames into After Effects and bam, that was it.
I know it sounds like a lot of work, but I think it was well worth the effort. I even tried to recreate the effect with Magic Bullet and couldn’t pull it off.
If there are any TRA users out there, here is the recipe for kicks:
So, there is nothing really too exciting about this spot. Some of you who know me might have seen this already. I actually did it a year ago for the client when they were in the process of switching over to us. I had done it as a comp initially. Now it’s been a year later and they wanted to run it. So I cleaned it up a bit and off she went.
Funny thing is though, the song, that’s all me. I wrote the song that night that I was producing the spot. I had my guitar with me and boom a couple of hours later, I wrote a song for a commercial. Thanks GarageBand.
You might have noticed that I have updated my blog a little. The pictures are bigger. Bigger is better. At least that’s what they say. Whatever. I was tired of images getting lost in the thumbnail smallness. So if you scroll past this post you will see how small the other pictures were.
Now, If you are like any other individual reading this blog you might have looked at the picture above and at least wondered why a grown man is working in a room with cute girly stencils on the wall. No? I know who you are. The rest of you, let me assure you it was strictly a professional decision. Truth is the room that we made into a home office was extremely hot. Like 10 degrees hotter than the rest of the house. It’s only February (for those who didn’t know we move from Alaska to Austin Texas last month and I work from a home office). So over the weekend, I kicked my daughter out of her room and moved in, with the intent of painting… eventually… maybe.
ps my daughter didn’t mind the move.
[UPDATE] How are things now? My old office is just right in temperature. It seems my computer stuff is putting out too much heat. Now I am stuck in a hot, humid, pink room with stencils that look like they are ready to peck my eyes out.
http://www.vimeo.com/2580235
I have been on a time lapse kick for a while now. Unfortunately you haven’t seen much of it. I have two projects in the works that I still need to finish. I had the chance, however, to remember to turn on my screen capturing software and capture the process of making an ad. It was another quick turn around as the client wasn’t able to grasp the goat boy concept. So I turned this around in about an hour. I started to look for stock photos, but then I remembered this shot of my wife from our Christmas card shoot (more on that to come).
Click on the picture for a larger view. I have been absent from the blog lately as I have been working like a madman for the past couple of weeks. We move in just 15 days. Yikes. It’s moving too fast. Here is a recent ad that I did. I didn’t take any of the pictures, but I used stock images. The client told us about it at noon today and wanted to see the ad finished in a couple of hours. I just love it when clients give me so much time [end sarcasm].
BTW I am still trying to finish the video for a fun project I did last month. Hopefully I can get to it before I move, but no promises.
So most of you may not know what the SIAAs are. They are the Service Industry Advertising Awards. What you see above is the award we got for a yellowpages advertising spot. (pats self on back) This one to be specific:
I was calibrating… mmmmmm playing with my scanner and came out with this “photo.” This is how I have felt the last few weeks. I have been so busy that I feel trapped in my computer. There have been many late nights, but there is a light in the distance. Well, more like a pin light.
Well, it’s now official, we are moving to Austin Texas. I haven’t been on the blog for almost a month now becasue it has been such a crazy ride. Friday, December 29th, my wife and I were sitting around at dinner discussing the possibility of moving to Austin. I had previously spoken with the president of my company about the fact that my wife isn’t crazy about Alaska and that I would love to try and open a branch of our company in Austin but nothing yet was official. As we sat there I thought how important it might be to actually check out the city and not only go off the word of the internet and some friends of ours that had lived there. “I could go tonight,” I found myself saying, but not truly registering the words. Then it hit us both. I could go down. We had the sky miles. So I hopped on a plane that night and 24 hours later I was sitting in a hotel room in Austin, Texas. It didn’t take me long to figure out that Austin TOTALLY rocks. I also got to see my sister and her family up in Oklahoma, which was really cool. After I got back into town the planning began. I needed to come up with a sound enough business plan to convince my employer to send me 4,338 miles away and start a branch. I spent the entire last weekend preparing a presentation. Then Monday rolled around. My stomach was in knots. The president of our company said he needed to “till the ground” and prepare the owner for what was coming. I got an email 20 minutes later saying the owner was “down with it.” I didn’t even have to present a plan. I was a little heart broken at that point because I really wanted to present it. The president let me present it anyways. I did OK. It was probably better he approved it before anyways as I was a nervous wreck. I have the tendency sometimes to stutter over my words when I get nervous. Well there you have it. We are going to Austin. The logo you saw above is a prototype for an Porcaro Communications Austin logo. The pictures below were from my trip. Enjoy.
It is really cold outside. I saw the setting sun being reflected off our sign when I was outside and thought it was pretty cool. This picture summarizes what it’s like living in Alaska sometimes. Dark and cold. Like a living Noir. *sigh* I need to take more Christmas photos.
