Category: Behind The Scenes
Stickers, the photoshoot.
Everyone loves stickers, right?
I’ve designed a couple of stickers to get the word out a bit about the film.
I haven’t decided which design I will print but I hope to have it ready for the Paris Tattoo Convention next month. Hopefully I’ll have them available at the Frith Street booth. I may do flyers based on this design too.
Beau Brady was in town for the Brighton Tattoo Convention last weekend. We were chatting about the film and he joked that I could have him parody the classic Atlas pose. It was a funny conversation and I thought it was a great idea.
The day before Beau flew back home we did a quick photo shoot. He spent the best part of a whole day “getting vascular” by eating chocolate, drinking milk and protein shakes, lifting heavy things and doing push-ups.
Beau used water bottles and our shop helper Nicholas, as weights:
He gets posture advice from Jordan during training and the shoot:
Blue Steel.
We tried to find gold briefs but alas, shiny black leatherette was all we could find at short notice.
Shane and Nicholas hold the backdrop while Jordan and Chad watch from the sidelines.
“Which way is the beach?”
While taking posture advice from Jordan and art direction from me, Beau’s expression is “Are you fucking serious?“
The chosen shot, unedited.
Thanks Beau!
FST: Transcripts on the shoulders of giants
Yawn, more posts about transcriptions? where are all the videos?
Well, the sad truth is that I’m at a stage of production where that’s what’s happening and there’s not much to show for the work I’m doing. Danny is working on the transcripts as I film new interviews. I can’t do new interviews as often as I’d like because I have to work around everybody else’s schedule. Frith Street Tattoo is still running as usual and I can’t conduct interviews in a noisy tattoo shop. I have to do interviews after work or during tattooer’s days off. To add to the difficulty, there’s been a few conventions recently where nobody has the time to get interviewed because they are preparing for, or traveling to to conventions. I’m also preparing for upcoming conventions.
Whining aside, I’m still enjoying myself and within my very loose schedule and I still expect to have this film finished late this year.
While I don’t plan to sell this film or charge people to view it, (I’ll dedicate a post to the reasons for that at a later date) there’s a strong chance that I’ll offer things for sale that have things to do with the film: T-shirts, stickers, drawings, tattoo flash etc. Some other things I’d like to share and offer for sale would be:
- A photo book including work produced at Frith Street with other behind-the-scenes type shots. I’d like this book to also include some of the planning notes I’ve made during the production.
- A book of the edited interviews that will be used in the film.
In preparation for the kind of organisation those things require, I put together a book of the interviews I have so far. This book is around 170 pages. I expect the finished one to be around 250 to 350 pages if I include a few images.
I used the publishing service at lulu.com. I just ordered two copies on Feb 13th, one for me and one for Danny Woodruff. These particular ones won’t be available to anyone else because they are totally unedited, often difficult to read and possibly libellous in places. I will produce a real one, with every interview when the film is finished. At the time of writing the books hadn’t arrived so I made a few mock-ups, as you can see in this post.
Late January 2013, Update
It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted.
I don’t have a lot to show from the work I’ve been doing on this project over the last couple of weeks. Danny Woodruff has transcribed the last of the interviews that I shot last year and he’s waiting for me to shoot more. The reason I haven’t shot any more just yet, is that as well as setting up reliable backups and other post production tasks, I’ve been working on new ideas about the questions I want to ask the guys at the shop. I hope that the new angle to the interviews will be much more interesting and further away from the standard tattooer interviews that we’ve all read or watched many times, as well as being more interesting to the interviewees. Hopefully it will be stuff the guys at the shop like to talk about too.
So there’s something interesting to look at in this post, here’s a teaser I put together with some footage of tattoos (for a change)
As soon as I shoot new interviews I’ll put short clips here along with updates on the progress of the film.
Maybe the next post will be about the slightly less exciting part of which software, apps, hardware and equipment I’ve set up to deal with the myriad of tasks making a film requires.
In November I mentioned transcribing interviews. When it became obvious I wasn’t able to do it on my own, I posted on Last Sparrow Tattoo asking for help from that community.
Quite a few people responded and offered to help – for which I’m very very grateful.
I now have a ‘reserve list’ to call on in the future – thank you all.
A long-time customer of mine emailed me with an offer to help transcribing the interviews. I sent him a couple of audio files of interviews just before Xmas 2012 and on New Year’s Day 2013 he sent me back the first transcription. His name is Danny Woodruff. I guess he’s the only other member of ‘staff’ on this project so far.
I couldn’t have been happier with the results of his work. He did a much better job than I could have, naming each speaker, marking laughter and audio problems etc. He even managed to deal with multiple accents. My northern English, Chad’s north eastern USA and Alex Reinke’s German accents didn’t seem to phase him.
It’s a hell of a lot of work, with more to come but all this effort will pay off when it comes to the editing stage.
Danny is away from the UK so he and I are keeping track of files and our progress using the project management site trello.com – it’ working great so far. I can sign in with my gmail details, attach files within the online software or link to files stored with Dropbox or Google Drive. The checklists there really make communicating remotely much simpler than doing it via email.
Here’s a glimpse at the “Transcriptions” folder on my hard drive. You can see the interviews Danny has transcribed and the ones he’s still got to do. In the coming months the “To Do” folder will get fatter too. I just need to make sure I update the boards at trello.com each time I finish an interview.
Here’s some close-ups of the transcription pages from Alex Reinke’s interview.
The eagle-eyed among you might notice that these are the bits from Alex’s Blog Clip last week.
The blank boxes to the right of the sheets are for my notes while re-watching the clips. Then I select the sections I want to use, cut them out and assemble a ‘paper edit’. I’ll use the paper edit to assemble the first cut of the film, so this project is still in the very early stages.
Thanks for reading,
Stewart.
More Valerie Vargas!
Here’s more stuff from the dusty hard drives I’ve been moving over.
I think this is the first interview I did. I probably sat myself in front of the camera to test it was working but that doesn’t count.
This short (very roughly edited) interview was a screen test for me to check equipment, workflow and editing software. We did it in April 2012. My questions were vague (mostly the usual crap about influence, reference and favourite tattooers) and my interview technique left a lot to be desired. I learned a lot from this interview. I’ve learned a lot from every interview and shoot so far, but we always have a special place in our heart for our first. This interview gave me the confidence to interview people I wasn’t so familiar with.
The only equipment I still use from this shoot is the camera body and SD card. Everything else, the lighting, microphone, recording device and lenses have been replaced by higher quality versions.
I’m showing it here as behind-the-scenes footage for those who care about that stuff.
Valerie Archive Interview (April 2012) from Stewart Robson on Vimeo.
Valerie Vargas Lion Backpiece
I mentioned in my last post that this project originally had a slightly different focus. Also in this post too.
Over the last few days I’ve been migrating files from my laptop to a much more suitable editing computer. While I was moving them I had to check what some of them were and I found some old clips I’d made to help me get used to editing and filming with the equipment I use now. This clip doesn’t have the same feel as the stuff I’m shooting now but I still like it. Rather than it never see the light of day except in my household I thought it might be interesting here.
I hope to post some more older stuff soon too.
Time-Lapse Experiments
I doubt these clips will work their way into the finished project. So think of them as sort of bonus features.
Early in 2012 when this project had a different focus, I tried a few different time-lapse techniques.
Trivia Bit:
The footage was shot in May, June and July 2012.
There’s a couple of clips with me in the foreground and Valerie tucked away at the other side of the room. There is a couple of just me and my clients then there’s wide angle shots of Chris and Will from VICE filming us (for Valerie’s TattooAge episodes) while we work and then interviewing me.
Tech Bit:
I’ve done a little time-lapse before with my iPhone but I wanted better looking results and more control over exposure and focus.
- First was with the GoPro Hero2 but the angle is a little wide and gives the feeling of CCTV footage.
- Then I tried Valerie’s Nikon J1 which worked well but I found it difficult to set the aperture manually to a setting I wanted to use for a time-lapse shoot. Also the lens is only available with 3.8/5.6 aperture which often is not wide enough for what I wanted.
- Finally, using the Magic Lantern firmware hack, I tried a Canon 600D (which is what most of this project has been shot with so far). This meant that I could use the lenses I already have, with their wide aperture and wide range of focal lengths. (most interviews so far were shot with 16-35mm f/2.8 and 24-70mm f/2.8 or occasionally a 50mm f/1.8 prime) I compiled the image sequence using QuickTime Pro and exported from there.
All these attempts can be seen in the video above.
I haven’t totally abandoned time-lapse, but if I use it, I’d like it to be more than a gimmick.
Soundtracks in progress
Instead of posting another video clip this week, I’ve decided to post some in-progress soundtracks that I’ve been working on. I will try to use as much original music as possible in this film. Mostly because I don’t have the budget to license music I like from artists and record companies but also because I want to avoid outside control wherever possible. Once I begin licensing music or archive footage, the licensee has some sort of say how it can be used.
Each of these still needs work and I do need to write some soundtrack music that isn’t as gloomy or intense, for the light-hearted and positive moments.
Keep your eyes peeled next week for a short clip of Frank Carter explaining how he came to be part of the Frith Street family.
Dante Di Massa
I’m not sure how to introduce Dante Di Massa (Danny) He’s the owner of Frith Street Tattoo. He’s very heavily tattooed and he deals in some of the finest tattoo supplies and equipment available. He’s much more than that – He’s a great friend and possibly the main reason Frith Street Tattoo is the way it is.
He can be an intimidating figure when you first meet him but soon you come to realise that he is indeed a ‘clown’ as almost everyone I’ve interviewed so far has attested to. Here’s a very small sample of the photos he’s made me take of him over the last 5 and a half years.
Miles Chaperlin
Miles has been tattooing for over 20 years. He worked at Frith Street Tattoo a couple of times.
The first was from around 2004-2006. Then from 2010 until August 2012. He has been friends with Danny, owner of Frith Street Tattoo for over a decade.
Miles is the reason this project happened as soon as it did.
I had been planning a video project of some kind, since February 2012. Originally it was to be centred around Valerie Vargas and myself and the trials and tribulations of creating custom or bespoke tattoo work every day. Much of this work is large scale bodysuits or at least backpieces and sleeves.
Then Chris Grosso got in touch with Valerie.
I knew that whatever Chris did with Valerie’s Tattoo Age episodes, it would touch on some of the themes that I wanted to use and the Vice team would do a great job of it. Chris interviewed and filmed me for Valerie’s Tattoo Age, which I was and always will be proud to have been part of and I love the way it turned out. I also learned a lot from being on the ‘wrong’ side of the camera.
I didn’t want to make a second-rate version of Tattoo Age, so I expanded my scope to include the other tattooers at Frith Street. In turn, I found myself wanting to interview tattooers who sit in for a short time and to guest artists.
I was content to spend the rest of 2012 refining my ideas, themes and learning the myriad technical aspects of making a digital film: From cameras, lenses, white balance, lighting techniques, audio and microphone techniques, to digital file organisation and dealing with large media files, to finding a narrative in documentary footage, whether to use a dramatic or poetic narrative, etc, etc.
Then I discovered that Miles was leaving England at the end of August 2012.
I knew I had to interview him and capture what he had to say about the history of Frith Street Tattoo and the history of tattooing in the UK before he left.
I learned a great deal of technical information on this shoot. Actually, I didn’t learn much, I discovered that I knew nothing of interview techniques, Audio recording, lighting and remembering everything that needs to be remembered when setting up a shoot. I learned the technical information later.
So far, each shoot has thrown new problems and challenges at me, so I make notes and make the effort to remember to prepare for those challenges next time. Hopefully this effort will pay off with a watchable, enjoyable, informative portrait of the workplace I call home.
FST: On the Shoulders of Giants 