Panoramic print of men standing on a ferry looking at the Brooklyn Bridge, [ca. 1890]

The image below is a panoramic photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge taken from the deck of a Ferry crossing the East River in New York. At the time the photograph was taken the bridge would have been about seven years old.  John R. Connon, a Canadian living in New York, took the photo using his best known invention, the cycloramic panoramic camera, which was patented in 1887.

The image below is a still captured from SA’s panoramic music video of Macy Gray performing at a party full of old cinema and new media types, captured in Hollywood with me directing for Social Animal. Like John Connon more than a century ago, I’m also an immigrant from Canada working on new panoramic format advances while living in the ‘States. Coincidental, eh?

Strip away the phony Hollywood tinsel and you’ll find the real tinsel underneath.

My job includes overseeing Social Animal’s Creative Agency subsidiary, which produces commercials and visual imagery for advertising. We put the ‘wonder’ in Wonder Bread, according to the old saying. Since people often ask me about what is exactly involved in creating a campaign, I thought that I’d post a link to this video, which was put together by Eric Soboleski at Social Animal. It shows all the goings-on backstage on a one day shoot creating the print and TV campaign for our client Teno, an upscale jewelry brand. Click on the image below to watch the video:

99% inspiration

Pablo Picasso is quoted as saying, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” Compare this observation to, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” from TS Eliot’s essay on playwright Philip Massinger from “The Sacred Wood.” (1920) Following you’ll see that good photographers can find inspiration in old photographs and that my pal Giuliano Bekor, whom I modeled for here, is a great photographer.

I AM big. It’s the pictures that have gotten small.

On the set of Social Animal’s 360-degree interactive music video, my friend Giuliano Bekor had me evoke Sunset Blvd’s Max Von Mayerling in an editorial spread for BlackBook Magazine. The video, which I directed and which was produced with my colleagues Matthew Forrest and Guy Shiffer, is the first of its kind in a new interactive format that I designed. It is technically, at the size of six Imax screens, the biggest music video ever shot. Most people, however, will engage with it on a much smaller screen online or on a personal mobile device. A few hours after these photos were taken, I will be directing the fabulous Macy Gray, who sings the classic song “Whatever Lola Wants” with the Deron Johnson Ensemble in a party scene that represents New Media’s arrival on the Hollywood scene. By moving the cursor, audiences will have the unprecidented ability to look around the room as they choose, checking out the party scene, which is populated by a variety of characters from the earliest days of cinema to the latest 3d avatars. These photos, whatever one may think of my modeling ability, seem oddly appropriate since Sunset Blvd, a favorite movie, concerns characters from the silent era who find themselves thrust into the new media of their time, talkies. Lets see if the addition of interactivity on video has as powerful an impact as the addition of sound had on the movies.