Jason R. Johnston’s short film The Bench premiered at the 2009 Cinesol Film Festival this week to great applause. A newspaper review of the film can be found here.

© 2009 Jason R. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

The members of Orange Media, which was unable to participate this year, are thrilled to have joined forces with Captive Films to take home such a prestigious set of awards. And also congratulations to all the teams who competed and we’ll see you at the starting line next year!

Pictured (left to right): Rommel Garza, Sergio Tovar, Jay Juarez, Jose Lomas, Hernan Cortez, Jason R. Johnston, Ivan Buenrostro, Bertha Gonzalez, Gabriel Ramirez, Erick Treviño, Alyssa Salas, Gerardo Salinas, Mark Rodriguez and Edward Cordero.

© 2009 Jason R. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

Due to a miss-communication, Orange Media was late to the registration period for the Cinesol 4th Annual 36 Hour Film Race this weekend and opted not to participate. Erick Treviño, president of Orange Media, and the voluntary members of the defunct team voted to continue participation by assisting another team. All of the ex-Orange team members were excited to help Captive Films (Jose Lomas, Aisa Showery and Gerardo Salinas) with the production of their motion picture Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores, a fun action-adventure short film about a Mexican A-Team hired to rescue a man’s kidnapped daughter from a dangerous cartel.

With every Cinesol film race comes script variables which must be included in any production to ensure legal participation. This year’s requirements were: genre (action-adventure), character (mariachi), location (bakery), prop (cape) and dialogue (”this is going on my blog”).

Principal photography began after 4am Saturday and wrapped after 5pm. Second unit photography happened after 6pm and wrapped before 8pm. Foley was captured around 2am Sunday morning as the final edit sweetening and music production and recording was happening. I came on board the show as cinematographer (credited as director of photography) with 1st AC Rob Liendo who rocked the joint consistently well throughout principal photography. Rob’s professionalism and awesomeness kept the shooting efficient and we got the show done on time and on budget. I’ve had camera assistants and grips and volunteers who were happy to help, but I’ve never had a “1st AC” before and Rob was a pro and kicked ass so a big thanks to him for coming down from Pennsylvania to volunteer his time.

Also a big thanks to Sergio Tovar, Ivan Buenrostro, Mark Rodriguez and Pepe Revilla who are always happy to help camera and electrical but were also able to break out and have roles in the cast this year, while still managing to find time to help Rob roll cables, set up lights and dolly. I’m thankful for all these guys volunteering their time to play these dual roles as efficiently and gracefully as they always do.

Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores is directed by Jose Lomas and written by Bertha Gonzalez. Produced by Aisa Showery and Gerardo Salinas. Executive Producers are Erick Treviño and Edward Cordero. Gibby Ramirez is the editor with assistant George Garcia. The killer original music score was written and performed by Jay Juarez, Rommel Garza and Erick Treviño who let me peter around with the MIDI accordion. “Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores” stars Pedro Garcia, Ivan Buenrostro, George Magee, Gerardo Salinas, Sergio Tovar, Jorge Damm, Erick Treviño, Alyssa Salas and Hernan Cortez.

Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores is intended to premier at the 4th Annual 36 Hour Film Race results program during the Cinesol Film Festival September 13, 2009 at the TSTC Student Theater in Harlingen, TX. Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores would probably be rated R for language and violence.

© 2009 Jason R. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

Orange Media is using the new Panasonic AG-HPX300 recording on 16GB E-series P2 cards with the AVC-Intra 100 codec at 24PN. Lighting is two Arri babies and a vintage Mole junior on a regular gas generator. All the gear worked flawlessly and I am very, very pleased with the HPX300. The location shown in the videos was a good 200 feet from where we could bring our trucks so we had to haul our gear the rest of the way. We arrived at 4pm and left at 3am. I also did all the zombie makeup. All the footage on the BTS videos above was shot with my little Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS.

© 2009 Jason R. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

Pictured above: Behind the scenes on location at Speakeasy in McAllen, TX for Orange Media’s Twisted Date. The photo shows how the monitor was masked for proper framing in this film’s very wide aspect ratio of 2.40:1.

I was DP on this short film submission to the Cinesol Film Festival’s first annual 24 Hour Film Dash competition, held this weekend, where teams had one day to create a five minute short film from scratch.

Shot on a Panasonic AJ-SPX800P with an RNG35 v3.1 DOF adapter, with Nikon 50mm f/1.4 prime, mounted onto an AJ-D610WBP zoom. Recorded in standard def 1.78:1 (16×9) on P2, but composed and later flipped and matted for 2.39:1. Lowell tungsten lamps used, none brighter than 250W.

The production was plagued with problems from the beginning which stemmed from fragile egos behind the scenes. The director and crew tried to quell any hostility but in the end, the show suffered. I think there were a lot of great things that happened on set with our actors and there were some wonderful technical achievements for the team, but as a whole the film was too ambitious and deliberate to have been told well in 5 minutes. This project was a definite learning experience for everyone involved.

Twisted Date will be screened with the other entries of Cinesol’s 24 Hour Film Dash screening and awards ceremony this Friday, May 8, 2009.

© 2009 Jason R. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

We did have a few problems on the set of Finding Cochino, mostly between the director and the writers. While they were having production meetings I was picking up the slack (and relieving the director of unnecessary stress) by pulling second unit duty and shooting some scenes on my own: the fluffing scene, the love scene and the goodbye scene.

As Director of Photography I was responsible for the overall look of the film (lighting, composition) and my style allows me to block actors according to the composition of the shot and the mood of the scene. Also, I tend to shoot long, dynamic master shots that don’t require cutaways to hold an Audience’s interest.

For example: the scene that takes place on the set of the adult film where the actors are dressed like pigs; that entire scene is a single take that goes from three-shot, to four-shot, to three, to five and back to a three-shot with small zooms, pans and tilts to suggest nudity and sexual situations when there is none at all. Also, the camera is at the actors waist level shooting upward with a wide lens and small lights a few inches from the actors and walls to suggest a very large room when in actuality it was only about fifteen feet from the lens to the wall in the background. But it looks huge in the shot.

I was actually a bit disappointed not to have won cinematography, but I suppose if the audience didn’t notice my work then I must have actually done a good job that my work didn’t interfere with the enjoyment of the story.

It’s not that our movie looks like we took our time — it was obviously rushed — but I’ve been doing this for a long, long time and I know how to move a production along. We had thirteen unique setups spread across two locations and one studio. Eleven of those setups were entirely accomplished at the studio. Audiences can’t tell this because I shot and lit each scene differently each time. You’d never know that 80% of the movie was shot in the same room because they never look the same.

Ultimately, I had fun putting the old Hollywood film philosophy of “economy of shots” into practice. I’d rather have a few hours to light a shot but sometimes, you only have twenty minutes. In the end, though, I am quite pleased with the film we entered.

On Being a Cinematographer

A week before shooting Cochino we had built a dolly but I never used it. It would have been nice to have had a drama to show off with light and fancy camera moves but part of being a good filmmaker is knowing when not to do something.

In other words: it’s all about restraint.

Just because you can have your camera circling the hero as he rises from the ashes in slow motion doesn’t mean you should. Just because something looks cool in theory doesn’t mean it adds anything substantial to the story that’s trying to be told.

And that’s the problem with a lot of movies today: they’re more interested in looking cool than having substance or being clever. Sure, the chick at the bar has a nice body, but will she be able to discuss something other than her job at the hair salon? Probably not.

I’m not saying nice-looking big budget summer blockbuster movies aren’t nice every once in a while, but don’t expect anything meaningfully long term from them. Style over substance is the bane of a true storyteller, but things were always thus.

The job of the cinematographer is to visually communicate the director’s vision to the audience (I particularly enjoy the visceral approach — sometimes literally). I study the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Francis Ford Coppola, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, David Fincher, Brian de Palma, Clint Eastwood, Jonathan Demme and a few others to get the creative juices running.

On Telling The Story

When you dumb yourself down to adjust for the lowest common denominator you limit yourself artistically. And just because you live in south Texas near the Mexican border doesn’t mean your work has to be limited to quincineras and taco stands. Write what you know. Do what you’re passionate for. The ones who get it will get it. The ones who don’t won’t and there’s no point trying to please them when they can get their kicks someplace else. And we all know what happens when people try to please everyone.

On The Future

Each of us at Orange Media have ambitious upcoming projects: individual short films where we will take turns at the helm. We are each knowledgeable, intelligent and emotional people and our films represent that; even in movies like Cochino.

In the next few weeks I will be writing, directing and shooting a short very much like Reservoir Dogs, but just a quickie like Files that we can produce in a day as an exercise before we start turning out the films we really want to do.

But for right now, Ed, Gibby, Erick and myself are working on Finding Cochino: The Director’s Cut and are shooting brand new scenes and re-cutting others. The soundtrack will be completely re-recorded and mixed properly for a motion picture. We expect the new version of the film to be closer to half an hour in length and just as clever…as well as offensive.

© 2008 Jason R. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

I just got home from the after party celebrating our short film Finding Cochino and its sweep at the 36 Hour Film Race awards ceremony at CineSol Film Festival last night.

We won a total of five awards including a special award they created specifically for Eric Salazar. Here they are:

Best Film – Finding Cochino
Audience Favorite – Finding Cochino
Best Supporting Actor, Male – Eric Salazar
Best Director, Comedy – Edward Cordero
Best Editing – Gibby Ramirez

I’m stoked, man! I didn’t win for cinematography but that’s ok considering we won best film and audience favorite…that pretty much means we all kicked ass. This of course means we’ll need to crank it up again next year, but we’ll be ready.

© 2008 Jason R. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

Here’s what it looked like:

The film shown during the interview is called Dead End and was recorded off of YouTube for the news story by shooting a computer monitor. Dead End was produced by Visual Works Entertainment for the 2007 Cinesol 36 Hour Film Race. I think it won the audience favorite award and an award for special effects.

© 2008 Jason R. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

© 2007 Jason R. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

This weekend was amazing. After being sick for two days with a stomach virus, I was completely, absolutely involved with the CineSol Film Festival’s 36 Hour Film Race. Our group, Orange Media, was tasked with completing a complete ten minute short film, from start to finish, in one and a half days.

We were told to create a horror movie which consisted of a cheerleader character, had a meat market as a location and used the dialogue “I’ll have another.” We are competing against several other teams from across south Texas with the same parameters that we were given.

We decided to create a zombie-horror-survivalist movie starring Eric, Adriana, Edgar, Amber and Sergio. Directing was Gibby, Edward was DP, Erick was producer and our AD was Jessie. Jay and Rom with sound design and myself as film editor and foley artist. I also made an on-screen appearance as a dead body that is pulled from a truck; a scene in which I performed my own stunt fall.

Gibby asked me to write and perform the part of the Emergency Radio Announcer where I decided to give background to the short film and also gave the film an answer for the zombie infestation albeit a depressing one. I had written the script in my Google Mail account as I was finishing editorial at Ed’s house. Then I drove to the studio where ADR, music and foley was being recorded. I stood at the microphone holding Erick’s Apple Book and read the scripts I emailed to myself. After a second take of the first monologue which needed to be timed to fit before the first bit of dialogue, I delivered the next two monologues on the first takes. I then performed foley noises with Jessie and Erick assisting and performed the vocal effects for the zombies.

This little short film, I think, is some of my best work from an editing point of view. The film is tight; it MOVES quickly and covers a lot of territory story-wise. There are no less than nine locations. One scene involves quite a lot of dialogue that actually wound up requiring a re-shoot because it was too damned long. Once it was done, the movie had a running time of 9 minutes and 32 seconds. The end credits (which needed to run no longer than a minute outside the duration of the movie proper) were about 45 seconds in length. The film was titled “The End” whose title appears at the very end of the movie. Sort of like a reverse on “28 Days Later” whose card appears at the end of the precursor scene as both a title and an explanation for the proceeding scene.

The title was my idea. Gibby would have liked “Decay” as the title but didn’t make a decision so the title was picked by lottery. Everyone put their idea for a title onto a piece of paper which was then mixed in a hat. The winning title was drawn from the hat and Gibby had to live with it. He wants to call the film “Decay” when we do the director’s cut. I don’t think there will ever be a director’s cut unless several scenes are completely re-shot. I found most of the original scenes to be absolutely underexposed. As a result, many of the scenes show unfixable video artifacting. I know that the guys like their movies dark and moody, but that doesn’t mean you shoot them that way. If anything, you shoot them very well lit and make them darked in post using telecine conversion and color correction processes.

No matter, the next film we make as Orange Media will have me directing the photography. It’s going to be yet another horror-gore-thriller, independent movie which I really don’t want to be pigeonholed to. But whatever, making movies with the guys is fun. They’re all a bunch of creative fellows and we have some great talent such as Eric, Adriana, Edgar, Amber and Sergio.

Interestingly enough, Sergio was supposed to be just the continuity guy, but wound up being a zombie in full makeup and prosthetics. I think we used tripas (cow intestine) for Amber’s Victim #1, masterfully handled by Jay. And Sergio was an extremely capable actor. The dude surprised me, actually. I work with the guy almost every day at the office in master control and he’s real quiet. Loves “24″ though.

“The End” was shot using a Panasonic HVX200 in 16×9 at 24p. Edited using Final Cut Pro on a Quad Core Apple Macintosh PowerMac. The film was completely produced between 11pm Friday, August 24 and 7:30am Sunday, August 26, 2007. The judging and awards ceremony for the 36 Hour Film Race competition will be held during the CineSol Film Festival at the South Padre Island Convention Center at 3pm Sunday, September 2, 2007.

© 2007 Jason R. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.