Martin Scorsese for DirecTV
Michael Grecco was hired to shoot Martin Scorsese
When I travel, I carry-on a laptop and all the camera gear needed to do the shoot including a bootable hard drive cloned from my capture computer. If I have to rent or buy a computer to do the job, I can just pop in the hard drive and I am ready to go. I could have done the job using the laptop but the client experience would have been sub-par. I waited for the 11:50 flight from LAX to arrive and my Tenba case was one of the first ones off the conveyor belt. With a sigh of relief I called for my van and headed to the Hudson Hotel for a little rest before the shoot. If the case hadn’t arrived, I would have gone to the new 24 hour Apple store on 5th Avenue (aka the cube) and bought a G5 tower for the job. Our company policy is do whatever it takes to make the shoot work. Even if the client understands that things happen, it is my job to deliver the whole experience and as it turns out, I needed the computer and the laptop to make this shoot go smoothly.
The first shot was on the rooftop garden and the second set-up was to be on seamless backdrop inside the conference room. Unfortunately, to get to the rooftop garden you have to go up a small flight of stairs. The plan of rolling the rented mag-liner cart from one set to another was blown. We were going to be under the usual impossible time constraints so I had to come up with plan B. I put the main rig on the priority shot out on the rooftop and then set up the backup H1/Leaf to shoot tethered into the laptop for the backdrop shot. The shoot could now move seamlessly from one set to the other without the delay of moving equipment.
Mr. Scorsese was very nice and seemed to like the concept of the shoot. His people told us we only had about 20 minutes with him before he had to leave. We started on the roof with the primary shoot. Grecco is known for his dramatic lighting and today was no exception. Even shooting outside in natural light, he overpowers the sun with strobes and controls the lighting ratios just as if he were in a studio. This gives the images a dark and brooding feel which is perfect for the director of Taxi Driver. Once the shoot started and everyone could see the images come up on the 23″ monitor, time stretched out a little just like when we shot the Spielberg Cover for Time Magazine. Subjects become collaborators when they can see the immediate results of the photo shoot.
The shoot wrapped up inside after some gray backdrop shots were taken and everyone left happy. Mr. Scorsese was even involved in the editing process and chose his selects before leaving. I processed final DNG’s and JPGs of the shoot on the spot and copied them onto a portable hard drives for DirecTV art director Ben Hilts and Michael Grecco so they could edit on the flight back to LA. As an added precaution, I pulled one of the mirrored drives out of the G5 tower and carried it with me on the flight back, separate from the checked computer gear. There is a lot riding on shoots like this financially and with the talent’s limited time. You can’t ever be too careful with the digital image files.
For the rooftop shot, we set up an intervalometer to capture the shoot process from setup to breakdown. For part two of this post, we will show the resulting Quicktime movie and Michael Grecco will comment on his lighting concepts.
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2 Responses to “Martin Scorsese for DirecTV”
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October 12th, 2006 at 11:48 am
[...] This is part 2 of the Martin Scorsese shoot story. The following is a Q and A with photographer Michael Grecco about this shoot: [...]
August 6th, 2007 at 8:10 am
[...] Knowing your equipment, having back-up plans, developing expertise and talent all count. But so does having the time/resources/personnel to set-up th shoot. Michael Grecco shooting Martin Scorsese for DirecTV shows how it’s done. Backstory at deathtofilm.com. [...]