Fotochrome Newsletter - Feb 2024
Last year was a big one…
Last year was big for Fotochrome. In addition to the normal buzz of shoots and projects we released an internationally filmed project (a first for us), we dove into a feature length documentary with our friend Nathaniel Rappole (Gull), Will got married to Allie, and Jack and Rebecca celebrated 10 years of marriage.
But while we were heads down focusing on projects and living life we didn't keep in touch as well as we would have liked. So, we are looking towards the new year with hopes of rekindling old friendships and sparking new ones.
It’s easy to lose touch and one of our resolutions is to fight the drift!
Let’s have a coffee and catch up.
Montmartre, Paris
Focusing on Form
As mentioned, we flew to Paris for our first international production, a collaboration with McKinnon and Harris about the inspiration for some of their timeless designs.
The piece came with numerous challenges. Obviously filming in a foreign country involves a lot of pre planning and producing. We drew on connections in Paris to find actors and crew we could team up with to capture our shots. We actually green screen composited our lead actor from the states into shots in Paris to maintain budget. We also worked locally with Leigh Hanes at Squall Sound to produce a custom score for the piece.
From storyboarding to color grading we gave this piece so much love. We would appreciate you giving it a watch and letting us know what you think!
Inspired Play
We got into this business because we love art and cinema. Everyone has to keep the lights on but we all have passions or pursuits we follow purely because we are inspired. Here are some things we have been inspired to work on lately.
Although we and the vast majority of the industry shoots in digital these days, it's refreshing to experiment and explore with the original medium: film. The tangibility, the challenge. The fleeting and finite nature of capturing a moment that you maybe won't see realized for weeks or months or even years. Shooting in analog helps hone your skills without the modern crutches of instant visual feedback, false color, focus peaking, and waveforms guiding your decision making and helping you achieve the 'perfect' image. More so than anything else, it's a reminder of the special alchemy of photography. The fact that we figured out how to capture memories by carefully exposing silver halide crystals to light for just the right amount of time. The color photos are 35mm stills from my Canon AE-1. The black and white are medium format shots out of the iconic Holga, a plastic toy camera from Japan.
Another passion project, here is a sneak peak of some graphics for the forthcoming documentary Street Muse Thailand. We have been working with Nate Rappole (many of you may know him by his stage name Gull) to produce this documentary about musical ecology.
Without giving too much away, the doc explores the musical traditions of North East Thailand. One of the primary points of focus is the Khaen, a Thai mouth organ. We modelled and animated a scene to break open the Khaen and elucidate it's mechanism and the source of it’s unique sound. This sample gives a little peak behind the curtain of 3d animation and shows a few of the clips from the documentary.