It’s been a very wet few days at the Cannes film festival this year. The umbrella has been the souvenir of choice. Hopefully the sun will come back out tomorrow and everything can go back to being glamorous on the beach. Here are a few shots from the last few days, mostly from before it started raining on the second day. We went over to Monaco for dinner the other night and there is a 360˚ panoramic shot done with the Pano app on the iPhone here too.
A big thank you to my friend Rick Kaplan for the All Access VIP pass at the show tonight. I only wish I had a real camera with me instead of just a little point and shoot. But being able to go anywhere including backstage makes it a lot easier to get a few decent shots, no matter what. It was a great show with some very cool Beastie Boys tributes for MCA, who past away today. RIP Adam Yauch.
A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be asked to shoot the reunions of some iconic TV show casts backstage at the TV Land Awards for Entertainment Weekly. We had (most of ) the casts of In Living Color (with the Fly Girls), Murphy Brown, One Day at a Time, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and Laverne & Shirley. It was a great night and a lot of fun to see them all hang out together again, even if just for a few minutes.
I was happy to find out that my commercial spot for Chelsea Piers won “Best Visual Experience” in the APA Short Video Contest. Here is the full list of winners. Thank you APA judges and of course thank you to the cast and crew and everyone at Chelsea Piers for helping make it happen. I hear I’ll be receiving a Small HD DP 4 EVF as a prize. Very Cool. Here is the spot again if you missed it in the earlier blog post.
When I heard Entertainment Weekly wanted me to go down to Dallas to spend a day shooting One Direction, I must say my first thought was “Who?”. If you find yourself asking the same question, then you must not be a teenage girl. But I quickly learned that One Direction is the latest British boy band sensation who had just debuted their first album at #1 in the US on the Billboard charts. Something no British act has ever done. Not the Beatles or Rolling Stones or anyone else you’ve heard of. Pretty impressive. So off to Dallas I went. When I arrived at the hotel at about midnight the night before, the first thing that seemed odd was the 30 or so teenage girls running around in the bushes in the parking lot and the state police guarding the entrance to the hotel. One Direction were in town for a fan appreciattion mini concert and autograph signing after a contest on Facebook to determine which city had the most fans. Dallas seems to have won and the event had to eventually be moved from a mall to the minor league ball park to accommodate the expected 10000 fans.
My assignment was to shadow the band all day and shoot whatever happened. A day in the life, if you will. I enjoy a nice day of taking pictures and have shot my fair share of concerts and live events. What I was not prepared for was the level of fan hysteria. Sure I’ve heard stories of screaming girls going back to Beatle mania, but does that kind of thing still happen? Well I can report that it most certainly does. And now the fans have Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to exponentially ratchet things up.
After sound check and some interviews in the locker room, the stadium was full and it was time to take the field. The picture above is the boys as they were about to walk out of the tunnel into the stadium and face the fans for their first real solo gig in America (they had only played the today show before this). It was a cool moment and I’m glad I was there to capture it. Thank you to their publicist Mike Navarra for helping make it happen. No matter what they do from here and how many other countless shows they will undoubtably play (Including being the musical guest on SNL tomorrow), there is only ever one first time.
What happened right after that picture as they walked past me onto the field can only be described as ear splitting. The girls (I only saw one boy and he was wearing a teletubby costume) erupted into an enormous collective scream that they then sustained for the rest of the hour long event. I’ve never heard anything like it and it was so high pitched and loud that my ears were actually cutting in and out at times. I’ve heard that screaming girls have set a decibel record at some venue beating out the previously loudest act, Mottorhead. I believe it. This is one of the many fan videos on YouTube, if you want the full experience. Here are a few of the shots from that day. You can also see some others on EW.com. I wish the boys the best of luck as they start out on their upcoming tour and thank you for letting me tag along.
The latest issue of Entertainment Weekly is out with my shots of the Desperate Housewives on the cover. The shoot was back in January in Pasadena as their last season started airing. Since then the show has made news for real life drama in the court room and the final season has been getting great reviews. They seem to be going out with a bang. The show has certainly made an impact over the years giving rise to countless Real Housewives of…. reality series. These ladies are the originals however. The shoot went very smoothly and was totally drama free despite some rumors that things could go otherwise that have dogged them ever since the infamous Vanity Fair shoot in 2005. But to hear what happened then, you just have to go out and pick up a copy of EW. You can also see some outtakes from the shoot here.
