opticnerve

#1 McAllister Tug Film

McAllister Tug Film - Now In HD! from Jon Kane on Vimeo.

For the making of our new web site it was decided to put all of my work on Vimeo as the ‘player’ for the videos on the site. Within an hour or so of putting a batch of the work up there, that included the ‘Tug Film’, the staff at Vimeo picked it as their number one fave video of the moment. Within a few days it had been seen over 6000 times by people all over the world. After a few more days it was chosen by The New York Times as a “Must See Video” on the Lens Photojournalism blog. I did the film for fun and as a gift to my friend Buck who’s family owns McAllister towing tug boat company. He asked me if I wanted to take a ride on the lead tug the day they pulled the Intrepid back from Staten Island after it’s refurbishment. Of course I said yes, and I borrowed an HD camera for the day to shoot some stuff. The film is the result.

#2 Jamie Lidell Re-Mix

Jamie Lidell ReMix - Nintendo DSi from Jon Kane on Vimeo.

For the launch of the new DSI Nintendo wanted to showcase the sound and camera functions they added to the old DS to create the DSI. The idea was to “re–mix’ a song using the DSI sound functions and make a music video to the song that featured some of the fun new camera toys. Jamie Lidell is a favorite singer of one of the Nintendo staff members so he was the artist of choice. I re-mixed Jamie’s song by manipulating pieces in the DSI and then outputting them to Final Cut and editing the bits together that I liked. The video was shot in 2 days and in addition to Jamie, and some extras (how ’bout that old lady!) featured the dancers from the Art Pop group Fischerspooner and their brilliant choreographer Vanessa Walters. I edited the piece at optic in Red Hook. Graphics were created by animators Brian Caiazza and Marc Boutges.

#3 Sonim Phone Spot

Sonim RPS from Jon Kane on Vimeo.

My friend Michael Quinn had a new cell phone client at his agency Creative Feed. Sonim wanted to make a clip that somehow dramatically illustrated that the Sonim phone is water resistant. And of course, they had virtually no money. Yipeee! Well, I was dying to test out the Phantom high speed HD camera in a low tech environment. So, I rented one for the day and shot this spot in my back yard in Brooklyn. I used 2 small mirrors to light the phone by reflecting the sun (thanks to DP George Motz stopping by to help), a piece of black velvet hung off the banister of my deck stairs and a small vase of water. The camera was turned sideways and I poured about 2 cups worth of water from just out of frame down onto the phone and ran the phantom camera at 500FPS. Later I slapped on a few sound effects and….boom. Drama! Once they saw the spot Sonim decided to air it in Europe, and thus, eventually, I got paid. Thanks Michael!