I am proud to announce the unveiling of GT3 Climb- a video by Will Roegge in which I helped to capture some of the footage. This video is an account of Director / Photographer / Racer Jeff Zwart as he pilots a Porsche GT3 Cup car to the summit of Pikes Peak setting a new World Record.
This is the product of two people running up and down a mountain operating up to 8 cameras at once, great input from Jeff and lots of amazing editing by Will.
A few weeks ago I was up at the Pikes Peak Hill Climb filming for Jeff Zwart and his Luminox Porsche GT3 Cup car with my bro Will Roegge. Jeff ended up setting a new world record in the Time Attack Class with a time of 11:31.095 – 30 seconds faster than the previous record holder, Rhys Millen. It was a big deal for me to shoot for such an accomplished Director, Author, Photographer and driver, so I had to step up my game. This proved to be a difficult task with 2:30AM call times, 7-11 breakfasts, between 11,000 and 14,000 feet elevation, crazy temperature swings etc. etc. etc. The “glamorous life” of a photographer!
While I was there, I met a really nice guy Brandon Parker that was a part of the 15+ person Red Bull Moving Images video crew. Upon checking out his site I saw he did something really cool- upload screencaps from recent projects before the final edits were cut. Post production usually takes a while, so these screenshots show some of the work in a timely manner. Will should have the video cut soon, and I will post the final video when its all said and done.
So, here are some of what I was capturing on the mountain with my camera at the 2010 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb.
Recently I was hired to do shoot behind the scenes video footage for a NOS Energy Drink commercial. The commercial was based around the driving skill of 2009 Formula Drift Champion Chris Forsberg. For those not familiar with drifting, it is a judged motorsport that calls for drivers to control a high horsepower car while it slides sideways at high speed through a marked course. It is similar to rally racing, but is done on a closed course and judged on execution and style rather than who finishes the course fastest.
So the other day I ran into an old friend that does some work with Contour Cameras. He mentioned he had seen some of my videos and wanted to equip me with some of the latest and greatest POV cams on the market. I gladly accepted and looked forward to seeing what these cameras could do and how they compared to my Sony XHR-MC1 POV camera. The street price of $329.95 made these a lot more user friendly than the Sony- which cost about 10 times more than one of these cameras.
A few days later I had a knock at the door from the UPS man with 3 pretty large boxes for me. I was FLOORED when I opened the boxes and saw TONS of goodies from Contour Cam. Here is what the spread looked like:
So I just finished a new blog posting about the new Profoto D1 monoblocs. I give a bit of behind the scenes info on a shoot and lots of technical lighting info. Take a look and let me know what you think!
As you may notice by the content of my blog, I do a lot of work with Hyundai and Rhys Millen Racing. There is always something fun and exciting to produce from the ground up. Combine that with my affinity for cars and racing, and every job is better than the last. Its also fun to know that I have been involved from day one, producing the original proposal on the program, designing the renderings of the car, shooting the teaser video and soon, heading up to PIkes Peak to watch this new car in action.
The car I speak of is the RMR Hyundai PM580. This vehicle is a purpose-built racecar designed to head up Pikes Peak Mountain faster than anyone has ever done before. Here is a video I shot of Rhys and his father Rod talking about the family history at Pikes Peak:
As you can see, the family has a history with the mountain- which hopefully the PM580 will add to, breaking the elusive 10 minute barrier.
I have done some renderings in the past for Rhys, building on top of existing images to propose a new design, a new racecar livery etc. This vehicle was a chance for me to start from literally the ground up and bring to life the design that Rhys had in his head. Here is the final product- days of work, 247 layers in a photoshop document and lots of coffee went into producing this monster.
A few months ago I was approached by a division of Hyundai called the ThinkTank. Its an online community of avid Hyundai enthusiasts providing feedback directly to Hyundai Motor America. With the success of the RM460 at the 2009 SEMA Show, they wanted to produce a video about the car. We wanted to do something unlike the traditional car clip- as this car was anything but traditional.
The RM460 was dreamed up by Rhys Millen – inspired by the Ferrari 599 FXX. He wanted to build his own mid-engine supercar for SEMA, so he took the 4.6 Liter Tau engine from the Genesis Sedan and essentially put it in the back seat. So much incredible fabrication and attention to detail went in to producing this car. We had a tight timeframe to work with- filmed this in 1.5 days at 3 different locations. It was a blast to film and to do something a bit outside of what our industry typically produces.
Here is a teaser video I put together for Rhys Millen Racing. They wanted to show the changes they made for the 2010 season and that the car is competition ready for the first race this week. There will be a full writeup about this shoot coming soon…
So the other day I received an email from Forza Motorsport 3 and Turn 10 Studios. Wondering how these guys got my email address opened the attached PDF and was delighted to read:
Dear Automotive Photographer / Videographer,
You have been chosen to receive a pair of limited edition Puma x Forza Motorsport 3 shoes. We value your work and passion as an automotive photographer / videographer and would like to show our appreciation for your hard work on and off the track. Your talent has shown through the motorsports imagery you have captured and we would like to thank you for sharing your passion with us.
Please feel free to come check us out online at www.forzamotorsport.net.
If you know me well, then you know that I love shoes. My closet is a collection of neatly lined up Pumas, Adidas, DVS and many other shoes. As my girlfriend describes it, “All 60+ pairs are standing at attention!” So you could imagine my delight when I found out they were shipping me FREE SHOES! Not only that, but after doing a little bit research, they are only going to produce 324 pairs of these guys. I think these will make a GRAND addition to the collection.
As Mr. Will Roegge so succinctly put it, “Can’t wait to heel toe in them.”
Crazy treads for intense heel-toe action on Forza Motorsports 3
Business in the front, party in the back!
Embroidered Forza Motorsports 3 Logo on the tongue
I am very happy to announce that I have created a new website for myself. It has been well over a year since I have updated my old site, and it was time to start 2010 off right. I used the Livebooks platform to develop a new site that showcases my photography and video work. Livebooks is essentially a plug and play system for photographers and creative professionals. This solution is currently used by some great photographers like Chase Jarvis and Joe McNally. I figured if they are using it, Livebooks is doing something right.
I am very happy with how easy it was to get up and running. I selected one of the pre-designed templates, signed up for a trial and was uploading content within minutes. The backend is easy enough for anyone to use, even without web design experience. The interface is very smart and makes it very easy to search engine optimize your site as you upload the content. The layout of the site is straight forward and is in a format that a lot of the art buyers are familiar with. There are some great features built in like slideshow options, PDF download and printing capabilities right from the gallery. The images are pre-formatted with all the appropriate contact info on the PDF.
I also like that even though the site is flash-based, Livebooks creates an HTML version of the site for search engine optimization. So if you go on my site with an iPhone, you will be directed to the HTML version so you can still see what it is that I do. The main template is very functional, and for a bit more money I can add modules that will further customize the site.
A big concern was being able to retain existing hosting, but redirect to my Livebooks portfolio. I have a lot of content on the internet that links back to certain directories, and if I had to move everything, it would have been awful. E-mail is the same, and still goes through my existing web host. Livebooks includes hosting with the $39 a month package, but in my case, I did not need it.
So far everything is great. Even their customer support has gotten back to me in a reasonable time to answer the many questions I had. Making a jump like this is not something to take lightly, and they were able to help me out. I will let you know how things go as the integrated Google Analytics start tallying up traffic statistics!
