This is the new promotional video I made for... well just watch it it's funnier if I don't say any more.

For more info visit the company website.

Credits:

Griffin - Danny Gavigan

Conner - Elliott Kashner

Writer/Director - Kevin Good

Production Design - Erin Goldstein

Crew - David Campbell, Sarah Vaughn

Bomb by - Jim Brown/Morlock Enterprises

NEXT ROUND:  FEB 16nd, 2012

I'm organizing a regular writers' read-through roundtable: a few screenwriters get together, take turns reading each other scenes/short scripts aloud, and briefly talk about them.  Rinse, repeat.  This is an opportunity to get together with a handful of fellow screenwriters, and work on our writing in a relaxed round-table environment.

Writing screenplays is tough when you're in a lonesome bubble.  My favorite aspect of my college screenwriting class wasn't discussing theory and structure and studying the greats.  It was doing table reads of scripts-in-progress, discussing what was working and what didn't from a myriad of perspectives, and moving on to the next script.  It was massively helpful to hear others' interpretatioins of my words and vice versa.  It was motivational to know I had a deadline to get some pages readable.  I was always unstuck and moving and challenging myself and evolving.  If only there were a way to do that without $40,000 of college tuition!?

The 'deets:

• Free
• You must bring an excerpt from a script that you have written for a group read; no passengers.
• Brevity is king: SCRIPTS OF SEVEN PAGES OR LESS normally formatted for a screenplay.  EDIT/CLARIFICATION:  A scene/excerpt from a long piece is fine, and generally what I'll be doing.  Likewise a short film script is fine.  Radio plays, stage plays, also fine.
• You must contact kevingood (at) crisislab.com to reserve a seat.  If I don't know you personally, tell me a bit about your writing experience and why you want to attend.
• This is not a class.  Think of it as a collective work group; a chance to have some fun and get some light notes from different perspectives.  It will be only loosely moderated by me, Kevin Good.
• Location TBD based on attendees; in or near DC.

NEXT ROUND:  FEB 16nd, 2012

Touché water, touché.

My current photographic push is trying to come up with great underwater photography.  The addendum to this challenge is: doing it without spending a ton of money.  Step #1:  Buy a ridiculously cheap underwater bag for my DSLR.  For $120 a company named DiCAPac makes an underwater bag that thus far has kept my camera dry.  The confidence-instilling blurb from their website says it best:

"Because the DicaPack is up to 5 m waterproof, your filming limits are expanded to taking pictures of swimming or of multifarious life."

With my multifarious life subjects getting ready, I faced the challenge of light.  I wanted to do studio-style lit portraits.  I chose to use a pile of speedlights to avoid having anything plugged in near the pool.  Then I threw a Pocket Wizard MultiMax on the camera and jumped in the water.  No dice.  Anyone with two seconds of underwater experience knows that radio transmissions from little wireless triggers don't make it through even an inch of water.  Well now I have that two seconds of experience.

Attempt number two was to go off of an optical slave from the on-camera flash.  There isn't room to get a full-sized speedlight in the bag, so I went with the pop-up flash and then a stubby SB-400 that just fit.  Neither consistently triggered.  Water eats up a whole lot of that flash.  It's almost like flash container.  Looking at the surface of the pool you can see the flash popping, but it just doesn't escape the water with enough vigor to trigger the built-in optical sensors on the speedlights. So we ended up shooting some stuff from just under the surface, where the PW could poke out the top and send it's radio signal, and some other stuff fully underwater just with natural light.

What I learned:

• Radio triggers don't work.
• As soon as you get more than a couple feet from your subject, the cloudiness of the water really washes them out.  Stay close and shoot at super-low ISOs, because you're going to have to stretch the hell out of that contrast in post.
• Everything takes 10x longer than you expect once there's water involved.
• Humans-- much to the ironic shock of drowning victims across the ages-- float.  One of the biggest challenges is getting everything to sink enough.  Scuba weight belts would be dandy, but remember we're doing this with no budget.  And where do you hide a weight belt on a model anyway?
• Flat ports, like on this cheap bag, have a zooming factor as if you were looking into a fish tank.  This makes all of your lenses suddenly a bit longer/more zoomed.  Chromatic aberration/sharpness/etc?  Forget about it; go buy a real camera enclosure with a real port.

In order to properly bring the lights into play, I've picked up a Wein Ultra Slave for next time.  It should be sensitive enough to pick up the underwater flashes optically, so I'll be doing more lit shoots soon.  Thanks to the lovely models Candice and Kristin, photographers Chris, Isaac, and Eliza for helping out, as well as Paul Simkin for loaning a gajillion speedlights.  It was hella' challenging, and there are far more horrible pictures than useable ones.  But a few nice frames did come out, I'm excited about the challenge of finding that next level.  I'll see you all in the deep end soon.