Jeffrey Buras

I’ve been doing production stills for an independent feature film called The Happy Poet.  These are a few of my favorite shots so far.

As usual, The Austin Filmmakers have been meeting every week.  At our last meeting we watched a rough cut of Mr. One-Note, which looks very nice.  I plan to do the color correction once it’s edited.  We need to shoot a few more pick-up shots, but nothing difficult.

We’ve been experimenting new places and times to meet.  We’ve been looking for a location in north Austin to counterbalance the Summermoon Coffee House that’s more in the south.  We tried meeting at the 34th Street Cafe, which is a very nice resaurant, but not a good place to hold a meeting.  Last night we tried Sherlocks Pub, which worked out nicely.  We’ve also been alternating meeting Mondays and Tuesdays to accomdate those who have commitments on either of those days.  The next meetup is on Monday at 6pm at the south location, Summermoon Coffee House.

A week ago I attended the Network Austin Mixer, which was a great place to meet people who are working in Austin.  I called one of the core members before, and have been playing phone tag ever since.  Ray Rosales and my friends from Humblebee joined me at the mixer.  While I was there, Brandy from Set It Off! told me I should attend the next networking event for Reel Women on Monday at Opal Divine’s, which was also a blast.

I’ve signed up for many online services that connect employers and job-seekers, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to keep track of them all.  The latest one I registered for is Nextcat, which I signed up offering DP, grip, electrical, and PA skills.  The problem with these services is that they will become outdated quickly, and I will probably forget to update or delete all of them.  It’s pretty scary knowing all that my personal information is all over the place.  It’s a consequence of the digital age, I guess.

I sat with the director and editor of Mr. One-Note as the footage was being captured. I was happy with the way the film looks and am confident that we had good coverage. It’s dim, but I intentionally shot that way to protect the highlights. I’m more surprised at how creatively conservative I shot, but it’s reasonable considering the small space where we were shooting.

Here’s a few stills:

And H. Cherdon from Humblebee took some behind-the-scenes stills which you can see in her SmugMug gallery.

We shot “Mr. One-Note” on Friday.  This was the second film to be produced by the Austin Filmmakers Meetup group.  (I was not involved in the first). It was written and directed by Reagan Peterson and produced by Mike Rembis.  It’s a short, one-location comedy about two females fighting over an uninteresting guy.

Since all of the action takes place in one apartment, it was easy to create several different setups without too much effort.  I shot the film with daylight-balanced lighting since we had a mix of tungsten and powerful daylight florescent lighting.

I shot the film with my Canon HV30.  I did not use a DOF adapter, which probably would have complicated things anyway.  I used a shoulder mount about two-thirds of the time, which made movement a lot easier.  I admit that I used the auto-focus a few times.  The HV30 focus control is so difficult to dial-in and it’s hard to see on that tiny flip out LCD monitor.  I was careful to only use it on wide-angle shots with tricky movement.  For those kind of shots, I trusted the auto-focus more than myself.

The shoot went pretty smoothly.  We could have benefited from a stricter schedule and better planning, but the simplicity of the shoot covered most problems.  It might have been nice to have a grip or two more to work lights since some people (including myself) were working double-duty.  But it was a cramped location, so a few more people may have actually created more problems.  Either way, I was pretty happy with the way it went.

After working through all the legal and financial paperwork, I’ve launched Expressionism Visual Media. Expressionism focuses on marketing materials for small businesses. This includes videos and photography.

Now all I need is customers…