I was recently hired by an ultra high-end private airport terminal to make an "experience" film about their services at Los Angeles International Airport. It's called "The Private Suite" and you can read an article about it here in Vanity Fair.
The article mentions a gallery of my hummingbird images (previously mentioned in my Steemit blog) at the terminal: If the mood in LAX is base panic, in de Becker’s suite it’s sublime peace. To that end, there’s a small art gallery filled with photos from Gary Yost, a series of olive-green Anna’s hummingbirds feeding their young.
To make a long story short, they hired me to produce a video that shows how, if you're a celebrity and you want to avoid the paparazzi in the public terminal, there's a way out. You drive to a highly secure area, have a private suite of your own to wait in, you get your own private TSA and CBP customs officers and you're driven directly to the plane to board at the last minute. There are good reasons for doing this... putting celebrities in the public terminal at LAX causes a huge hubbub that's distracting and unsafe due to the celebrity-obsessed culture we live in. Sign of the times.
The entire film was shot on very simple equipment: Panasonic GH5 with the Panny 12-35 lens, a small Zhiyun Crane gimbal and a little travel tripod. Given that I had no control over lighting, I'd say that dealing with the light was the most challenging aspect of the shoot. Mid-day sun on the tarmac is unforgiving and dealing with the extremes of low light inside the suite vs the bright sunlight outside was brutal. The experience of driving around those big jets on the runway was kind of nuts... and required massive security clearances. All-in-all, a fun shoot and a big learning experience on many levels.
Here are some stills from the shoot.
My wife was the Assistant Camera Op on this shoot and here we are with the star of our film in front of the hummingbird gallery.
(Tony was actually the head of US Customs in LA for 20 years.)
And me on the roof with Ross... 7' tall (and I was slouching a bit to emphasize his height). The staff is full of some of the most capable, friendly people I've ever met.
We actually had to call LAX airport security first to tell them that we were going up on the roof so they didn't get freaked out.
What a world.
Thanks for watching.
I have a long history of inventing tools for animators and also making films and photographs. My wife, daughter and I live at the foot of beautiful Mt. Tamalpais on the San Francisco Bay and I've been using technology to tell complex stories for a long time. My biggest claim to fame? Leading the team that created Autodesk 3ds Max... the most popular 3D animation tool of all time. When I sold the Yost Group to Autodesk at the end of the last century I jumped headfirst into pursing my original love... photography and filmmaking. Now I spend all of my time exploring the mysteries of my world with my cameras, and revealing what I find in my images and films.
