EXIT Stage Left will be performed live in front of a studio audience and over the internet. The event will be followed by a live Q and A with the cast and crew.
COUNTDOWN BEGINS AT 6:00PM, LIVE SHOW BEGINS AT 7:00PM

EXIT Stage Left Live Flyer

The Season 1 Finale of EXIT Stage Left will be streamed LIVE on the internet with a live studio audience. The Scripted show, which I am a producer and Director of Photography, will stream live on the internet at 7:00PM on Thursday June 25th.

See Tubefilter for their writeup!

Below is the official press release:
EXIT Stage Left (www.exitstageleft.tv) tells the story of an off-Broadway theatre troupe and the issues they face while staging a new play. Told in thirteen original episodes, the web series is produced by Emerging Artist Productions and features the talents of seasoned theater professionals. Billed as a Web Series of Theatrical Proportions, EXIT Stage Left will completely embody their motto once the season finale is aired LIVE ON THE WEB, one night only.

Performed as a special event, the season ender will be streamed live on June 25th, 2009. As if that wasn’t enough, the performance venue will include a studio audience, plus an after -show web chat with cast and crew. “I’m pretty certain that this has never been done with a narrative web series before,” says series creator Sinohui Hinojosa, “while there are many live streaming shows on the web, performing a scripted episode of an ongoing series, live in front of a studio audience, is a first for web programming.” The episode will be streamed live at 7pm (pst) and free tickets for the show (which will be held at the main theater stage at San Jose State University in Downtown San Jose, CA.) will be available by sending an email request to tickets@lowrytheatercompany.com (limited to seats available).

“While this is a bit of a logistical nightmare, we plan on shooting the episode with four cameras and our entire cast, in an extended episode which may run up to twenty minutes long,” says series producer and technical director for the finale, Thomas A Koch. He along with producer Bernard Fok are first to admit that this is a bit of a gamble. “This is the closest to live theater you can get, anything could go wrong and we will be working without a net,” says Fok, “but we honestly believe that our actors are up to the challenge and will deliver the same outstanding performances that they have all season.”

Leading the ensemble of eleven actors, Michael Navarra, Steve Budd and Annamarie MacLeod have concluded the shooting of the first 12 episodes, which launched this past Christmas, but are prepared to look to the future and the expectation of season two. “Once we were picked up by KoldCast TV, season two became a part of the deal,” says Hinojosa, “and we expect to expand on the story of the Lowry Theater Company, but right now, all we are thinking about is the season finale and how we are going to make it work. We expect that our audience will appreciate how truly special our live show will be, which should bring us new viewers and additional exposure.”

For details on the show, to watch previous episodes or to order your free tickets, please go to www.exitstageleft.tv or send an email request to:
tickets@lowrytheatercompany.com

About Emerging Artist Productions:

Emerging Artist Productions is a SF Bay area digital production company, specializing in HD productions and open to all facets of collaborative works, from short films, documentaries and corporate spots, to new media and independent feature films.

Contact:

Sinohui Hinojosa, Executive Producer, Series Creator
email: producers@lowrytheatercompany.com office: 408-898-4944 cell: 310-857-8991
Emerging Artist Productions/Lowry Theater Company LLC.
http://www.exitstageleft.tv

The announcement at NAB about the RED Rocket was yet another product announcement from RED with no shipping date. In a recent post at reduser Jim Jannard announced some more specs and the expected ship date of the first week of July. This ship date, is clearly ahead of the Scarlet and Epic ship dates and is very soon after the announcement of the product. This is somewhat confusing as the Scarlet was announced well over a year ago, with updates in November and December and we still have no release date for either product other than “summer 2009, behind schedule by a couple months.”

So for this NEW product to be announced and ship prior to the Scarlet is somewhat puzzling and maddening for sure.  Really, I want my S35 Scarlet NOW!

However, as I thought about it, I suppose it does make sense.

Red Rocket almost certainly takes a lot of its IP from RED RAY. Red Ray provides hardware decoding of the .R3D file as does RED Rocket. Red Ray has been in development as long as the Epic and Scarlet cameras, so Red Rocket, while it might be a new and awesome implementation, still has had some development since NAB 2008.

So, with a July release date for RED Rocket, should we expect to see the EPIC and Scarlet start shipping? I don’t think so. RED Rocket targets a different market than either the Epic or Scarlet cameras. Scarlet is going to be a MASS produced camera competing in several spaces between the HDV crowd all they way up to the Digital Cinema Crowd.  Epic will be the top of the line Digital Cinema Camera.

It’s target market are post houses and really more specifically, HOLLYWOOD post houses. Hollywood doesn’t have to wait for Scarlet or Epic. They can shoot RED ONE right now. But “the big guys” have a real problem with post on RED. It doesn’t fit into their usual workflow.  Independent producers and post houses have really jumped into the RED workflow and made it work.  Companies like Plaster City Post, OffHollywood, or Silverado Systems have made it work and support RED with an indie spirit and top notch service.

Independent RED productions don’t have the level of complexity that larger Hollywood productions with their studio heads, multiple producers, levels of bureaucracy and “in the loop people.” Producers and stakeholders need dailies. They need review footage, they need to see what’s going on even if they are away from the set. This, up until now, has been a CPU intensive operation requiring lots of time and lots of horsepower.

RED Rocket makes it possible for large scale dailies creation. This more than anything else they do, will allow RED to move into mainstream Hollywood production.

Scarlet and Epic will only speed up the adoption of RED RAW as the main digital film acquisition format starting at the indie level and moving into the mainstream Hollywood level.

FROM RED:

RED Rocket board with Quad DVI and Dual Link HD-SDI- $4750

Decode and debayer 4K R3D files realtime. Hyper-accelerated transcode to any system codec. Specs to be posted upon completion of testing.
Plays full quality realtime 4K to 4K monitor or projector from DVI output. Plays full quality 2K/1080P scaled from 4K footage out the Dual Link HD-SDI from RED Rocket card.
Plays full quality 2K scaled from 4K footage realtime through system graphics card and monitor.
Optional Breakout box with Quad HDMI and Quad Dual Link HD-SDI- $1200
Plays full quality realtime 4K to 4K monitor or projector from QUAD HDMI/HD-SDI RED Rocket breakout box output.
Delivery schedule in now 1st week of July.

UPDATE: Best Buy online offering 5D mkII for $2499.99 right now.

We’ll see how well this puppy shoots now!

Canon 5d mk2 Manual Control

5D Mk2 manual control

The real question for this is, why no 24p? If this really is by popular demand, why not offer 24P as well. I think that Canon’s source for their popular demand is journalists and other still shooters trying to use the camera as a real video camera, NOT indie filmmakers.

Indie filmmakers want 24P. news organizations do not.

This however does open up the possibility for updating the camera to allow 24fps should enough people ask for it.

I was searching google news and found this awesome quote,

“The UN Security Council has condemned North Korea’s carrying out of a nuclear test as a “clear violation” of existing council resolutions, and says it will begin work immediately on a new resolution.”

It’s almost like, resolutions don’t work.

Also, this just in. After a harshly worded letter to my dog, he continues to bark at other dogs. Time to write him another letter.

In this previous entry, I talked about our simple lighting setup. We used Lowel Rifa lights for the actors and some fresnels for enhancing the background. Since I wrote that post, we have added locations to the show and have run into new challenges. When shooting in our original location we were challenged due to lack of space. When we added the new location to the show, we had the opposite problem. Too much space.

The new “Lowry Theater Company” is a massive space. A huge theater, big stage, large prop and wardrobe rooms, and a large black box theater, left us in need of more lights. Luckily Prompter People came through. We were able to use several of their new LED lights, called Flolights. We use three LED 500’s and five LED 1000’s

These lights provide a broad and long throw without the heat. The barn doors allow us to control the spill of the lights as well. The first thing you will notice is that on close ups, we finally have the lights to properly accomplish 3-point lighting. You can see in episode 8 how that tool changes the look of the show. With all of our lights, we now have enough light to accomplish the 3 point lighting for multiple cameras. And we no longer run the risk of throwing the breakers! These lights use considerably less power than equivalent “hot lights.” In fact the lights consumer just one-tenth of the power.

If you notice the credits to Episode 8, you will see that Chris Faulkner is listed as the Director of Photography. Chris has been shooting with us since we moved to the new location and has been handling a lot of the gaffer duties during these shoots. I had a job that required me to travel to Germany for a week, and during that time, EXIT Stage Left had 2 shooting days. Chris took charge of the camera department during that time, and used the new LED lights to great success. Those two shooting days resulted in footage for all of one episode and most of the next one.

I resumed my duties as the Director of Photography a few weeks ago and have been delighted with the LED lights. These lights, when diffused with frost gel provide some extremely smooth and powerful light. The built in dimmers give us the infinite control of the light. The throw from these lights are several times more than fluorescent light fixtures as well, and are an excellent replacement for both Hot Lights and Fluorescent lights. This allows us to move the lights back from the actors and give them more space to move around. This is extremely important when we are doing the improv elements to the show.

RED Digital Cinema has announced final specifications for their set of prime lenses.

RED Pro Primes

The lenses come in at a fast T1.8 and  a similar front diamater of mm.  The cost of the 5 lens set is $19,000.  Incredibly inexpensive for a PL lens set.  Of course, $19K is a lot of money for no-budget indies.  Obviously there will be a lot of lenses in the rental market, so the price to rent will be very competitive.  The lenses ship in the next week.

The lenses come in at 25mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, and 100mm.  The 300mm Red pro prime shown in the photo has been on the market for a while now.  There is a bundle price with the 300mm as well.

More photos and details will be released at the REDUSER party which starts at 3:00pm pacific time.

We at EXIT Stage Left are now using Prompter People LED lights on our shoots. These LED lights come in 2 main sizes, which put out light similar to 1K and 500watt lights at a fraction of the power. We also use the on-board light for our documentary filmmaker.

I highly recommend you go and say “hello” to Brett from all of us at EXIT Stage Left and Bay Area Filmmakers!

Panasonic has introduced new E-Series P2 cards. The cards are cheaper and faster than previous generations. The prices are several times lower than their equivalent A-series cards.

http://www2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/prModelDetail?storeId=11301&catalogId=13251&itemId=342748&modelNo=Content04162009020504436&surfModel=Content04162009020504436

Maxell has also announced that it will be creating P2 cards. http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-electronics/20090420/NY0091020042009-1.html

I remember a new NAB’s ago that Hoodman also made such an announcement which never came to fruition.

We use Panasonic HVX-200’s and P2 cards for our web series, EXIT Stage Left

This is a short notice as the official notice is coming soon. The producers of EXIT Stage Left are seeking actors for their new web series, tentatively titled “Beer Rash.” Two particular difficult roles, both of which are for college aged males who can play the guitar and sing . A sense of humor is a must for this extremely funny web series.

Email me!
thomas (at) bayareafilmmakers.com