News

June 4th, 2010

Omni-Tracker

So one of the things I’d like to do through my blog is to acknowledge those people/friends that have helped us in the shortfilm unconditionally. My friend Warren from Omni-Tracker went above and beyond in helping me. So even if it’s through my little blog, I’d love to help him back how he helped us. We used two types of dollies. Tracks/rails and this Omnitracker. Warren let us use his Heavy-Duty version of this small but very practical dolly. Our main setup was aproximately 20 pounds…so it needed to be strong. They just released a lighter HD setup which I recommend for DSLRs.

Here below are my good friend and talented DP Tiffany Taira, as well as Luigi Passalacqua (color grader)  doing different tests last year. I think at the end of the day, you use whatever it is that you have and explore all the possibilities. We could put the dolly on either classroom tables, floors, etc. Really practical especially when you don’t have the flexibility of setting up a big dolly.

We used the Omni-Tracker in a variety of ways, straight moves and circular dollies. Since we didn’t have a way (or budget) to have orbital type of dolly moves either for reveals or to lower the camera to the ground while hiding tracks, we found this to really help us achieve what we were looking for.

What helped us was to preview whatever we were going to shoot in animatics in Maya. It also saved us a ton of time on the set. We didn’t have that much time for certain scenes, so we had to get what we could. I got the help of my friends Eduardo Martin and Edward Robbins when it was time to get the models for previsualization. You both rock. Then Tiffany and I could start trying different things and braimstorming ideas based on the scenes.

So, we used the setup for three different shots. A low angle shot of the kid entering his bedroom, a reveal rack focus shot from one kid to the next and a long circular dolly around the main kid in a key scene. I want to mention also in the videos are our camera operator Jason Kim and our focus puller Rich McKain who  worked totally hard on the shoots.

For those looking into live-action independent shorts, I can’t recomend this little tool enough. There is a lot of stuff out there. This is just one of the tools that worked for us.
Hopefully this helps.



Carlos.