Faces behind the grape

I just got back from a terrific job up in Napa, CA. Rather then just show the bottles of wine on my client’s web site, they wanted to show the faces behind the wine to give it a more personal feel to their brand. .  These are the farmers, vineyard owners, wine makers, and winery owners themselves,  that are behind the scenes of producing their product.

We wanted these to be very “real” feeling, not overly styled, just raw, in-the-moment feel to them. Hopefully we pulled that off.

What  better place to work for a couple of beautiful days then up in the wine country!

Now look at these beautiful faces below:

These guys were very cooperative, although, they made me pay for it by lying in their droppings!

Just another day at the office

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3D snowball fight

3D is here to stay and creative on-line content is changing daily.

Magazines and newspapers will not be printing using the traditional press for much longer ( at least to a much lesser extent ) with the advent of the “on-line” content.  Look at my post on 1/26/10, this is a great example of where we are headed, very exciting!  For a visual storyteller, this just opens up a whole new branch of creative content to create.

This small 3D movie clip was created from a series of 8 different composited images, see if you can find them all!

We shot the models against a green screen in a studio situation, see the pics below.

With some use of Photoshop and AfterEffects we put a pretty simple image into a new approach. The exciting thing for me is to think of all the commercial applications this could have. For example, this snowball fight could be an on-line ad for PacSun.  Hopefully you would get a fresh, youthful approach at seeing their winter clothing line which would stand apart from traditional 2D print ads.  Can’t you just see the 20 year olds at Starbucks on their new Apple ipad, surfing the web or PacSun web site, and seeing this snowball coming at them?  !! I see the next Apple ad, don’t tell anyone.

I can’t wait to start my next still 3D content project. The next step will be to add some live action video to this world.

Stand by for more 3D.  James Cameron wont’ have a thing on us.

Avitar, Shmavitar!

Cheers

http://www.vimeo.com/10107581

Here are a few behind the scenes from the shoot. Pretty simple set up really. I trick was to light it to look like outside lighting, so I wanted a little more directional lighting falling on the faces as opposed to a really “soft box’ look.I love the light quality of a raw light head going through a  Lee 255 diffusion. It cuts down the harshness of raw light, but not too soft. I think it’s similar to sunlight through a soft layer of clouds.

Obviously the background image is a strong sun backlight, so we put a “sun” light with a warming gel to give some of that warm “kicker” light, but we still put our front key light with some direction to it. If I shot this on location in the mountains (which we contemplated) I would have lit it the same way. Hopefully it works to sell the illusion here.

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