Archive for the ‘.My Blog’ Category
Just Posted, New Demo Reel
Friday, July 16th, 2010
I just finished updating my reel. Check it out.
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Yet, another day at the office
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
Each season of Hell’s Kitchen gets bigger and bigger. Here is a photo of me at our latest location, can you believe this view! Now where am I going to get power from?
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iPhone
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Is it now possible to update my blog from my iPhone? Because if it is that means I can upload photos of me at Waikiki beach body surfing, from the beach!
This also means I can send posts from set giving you back stage information before anyone else!
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Red Bull BC One
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
Red Bull BC One is the world’s stage for 16 of greatest B-Boys to compete against each other in 1 on 1 battles. BC One has traveled the globe and on November 18th 2009, BC One came home to New York City, the birth place of Hip-Hop.
This show presented many challenges one of which being an international cast and crew, with dancers from over 16 different countries.
For this ambitious and exciting shoot I had 10 cameras, one jib, a dolly, a stedi cam, a super slo-mo camera, and one 3D camera, which was used for a promotional video for Red Bull. It was cool to have the 3D camera but it took up valuable real estate on the floor.
One item I felt was a must was a super slo-mo camera, now there was a lot of talk about using the Red camera for its slo-mo capabilities but I decided to use the Sony HDC3300R
HD Super Slo-Mo Camera for multiply reasons, the deciding factor for me was that I needed a camera that could be incorporate into my live line cut, which was being broadcast not only to the live studio audience but was also being uploaded to the web. The Red camera is a non-synchronous camera and at the time of our production the HD-SDI output of the camera only did a character out, which would not work in my line cut. I also felt that because of our short turn around using the Red, which requires a massive amount of render time to turn R3D files into a file format that you can start editing with would just use up to many resources and time.
The way the Sony camera works is it takes three HD SDI streams and feeds that to an EVS which records the three separate signals and then with some computer magic combines the three signals to create an impressively smooth 180 fps HD signal, which is a little more then three times slower then real time. Since the camera is taking three separate 1920 x 1080 HD signals I was able to DA one of those real time signals and use it in my line cut, but enough talk here is what it looks like…
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Are You Ready for Some Football!
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
NFL Channel here I come.
Currently, I’m Technical Directing the news for the NFL channel and I love it. This is one of the coolest control rooms I’ve ever seen, with six 50″ plasmas screens as our monitor wall and a 4 ME switcher, connected to the largest EVS server on earth it feels more like the helm of the U.S.S. Enterprise then a TV control room. The coolest thing about this place is the large server which occupies the center of the building full of more football footage, past games and highlights then anyone person can handle. I’m amazed at how fast the producers can access a clip or sound bites and then be able to incorporate it into the show.
At the helm of the NFL Channel
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The Agony and the Ecstacy of Shooting Red
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Shooting Red
I’ve just finished directing Big Brother 10 and am now finally getting back to working on some more personal projects. This last weekend I had the opportunity to direct a few scenes for my friend Melodee Lynn‘s acting reel on the RED ONE Camera. After shooting with the Red One I must tell you I love this camera. The images this camera captures is awesome. I was totally blown away by the hole experience, working in television as a director I come across a lot of different cameras and tape formats and out of all the cameras I’ve used this is the closest video camera that I’ve seen that actual looks like film. For this shoot we used my friend Jim Mathers camera and lenses, although we didn’t change lenses much but instead used his optima 200mm-60mm zoom lens. Not changing lenses aloud us to move quickly from set up to set up as we tried do shoot 3 locations in one day.
At first the concept of not having a physical tape at the end of the day is a little unsettling, but you get over that thought quickly once you are screening your dailies over lunch. We had a laptop on set that was down loading files to a back up drive and I was able to take that home that night.
Well I’m on to editing now all I need to do is figure out how to convert the 4k files into ProRess 422 files.
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4 Dollars a Gallon!
Friday, August 8th, 2008
Have you seen how much gas is lately?
When I see gas prices this high it makes me think of George Lucas‘es film American Graffiti and how high fuel coast would totally change the dating landscape for the American teenager. That got me thinking about how great of a film American Graffiti is and then it made me think of what would a modern day American Graffiti be like and that is how I got this great idea for a short film. Now with the coast of gas being what it is, the logical assumption is that gas is only going to get higher in the next couple of years, which makes the distance a person is willing to travel to date another person will get much, much shorter. Back in 2004 when gas was hovering just a little over $2 dollars a gallon, it was completely reasonable to live in LA and date someone who lived in Long Beach. Now with the price of gas so high it becomes a much bigger deal, a date will now cost $40 bucks just to get down to Long Beach and then you have to add dinner, a movie, and once you add the trip back home after the date to the cost of the date your looking at $150 to $200 dollars a date. I really think there is a funny short in all this, and it might be a clever and quirky way to address the political and social events happening at this moment in time.
I don’t have all the details on the short film just yet nor do I know who could afford to shoot a short with prices of gas being so high.
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When Puppies Attack
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
I assume every pet owner claims that there dog is the cutest but I think I actually have proof that mine is the cutest. To prove it I’ve created a film of her chasing a ball.
Told you she is the cutest puppy on earth. Her name is Madeline, but we call her Maddy for short.
I’ve been working non stop on Reality TV shows for the last 7 months with two back to back seasons of Hells Kitchen and then Big Brother, in saying that all I really mean to say is, I’ve been working 12- 16 hr days 6 to 7 days a week. In what little spear time I have I’ve made two short puppy videos which I hope you enjoy. In the near future I would like to incorporate this adorable puppy into some sort of a narrative short film. This is what I have come up with, as I was walking Maddy around the block hoping she would poop I noticed that she is always chasing after and barking at this squirrel who lives in the tree right outside our apartment. As I was walking Maddy it made me wonder what was the in sighting incident between Maddy and the squirrel to make them arch enemies?
Stay tuned and watch the story unfold in Maddy’s next short film;
Puppy Vs. Squirrel
Tags: ball, cute, dog, puppy
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News in Oklahoma
Saturday, October 6th, 2007
Over the Wall is News in Oklahoma
Who would have thought that making a short film was newsworthy? As you can see from this news segment people can hardly wait for the next film from Cowboy Monkey Ninja. Now that the summer of Tony is
over, I’m focusing more of my energy into my feature film script which I am scheduled to shoot in Oklahoma next summer.

The project is currently Untitled and I’ve been extremely top secret about it. But what I am willing to tell you is this: my untitled project is going to be a Film Noir/Detective/Comedy film that takes
place in 1996.
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The Summer of Tony
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
I know that I’ll always remember the summer of ’07 as the “Summer of Tony.” This appellation is fitting because for the months between May and September I had three shows on network television; Big Brother 8 on CBS, Age of Love on NBC and Hell’s Kitchen on Fox. Big Brother 8 was on three nights a week and won its time slot more often than naught. Hell’s Kitchen and Age of Love both aired on Monday nights at 9pm with Hell’s Kitchen shellacking Age of Love according to the faceless suits at Neilson.
This was my fourth season of directing Big Brother. To save you from ripping out your hair in frustration as you try to guess what a director for Reality TV does, I’ll tell you straight out what I do: each week there are three multi-camera events, which normally include two competitions and a nomination ceremony. For each of these events I stage the set pieces and direct the cameras in order to capture certain shots and tell the most compelling story possible. In addition, I direct a segment of the Thursday live show which feeds real time to the East Coast.
I must say it was thrilling to see my hard work on television 4 times a week. It was quite challenging to keep up with it all. Of course, just having three network TV shows on the air doesn’t necessarily denote success. Instead success is gaged by something else out here in Hollywood, and its not money, or accomplishing goals that you’ve set out for yourself, or even making people happy. No, success for a reality TV director is when The Soup on E! decides to make fun of your TV show. You know you have reached the height of your career when Joel McHale uses your show as a punch line, and I’ve had the honor of having all three of my shows bashed by the Soup almost weekly, all summer long.
Now that The Soup has insulted my work, I can receive no higher honor in television (well, maybe an
Emmy).
Summer is over, and The Soup will have to ridicule someone else’s shows. I on the other hand will go back to the festival circuit to screen “Over the Wall,” and continue to work on my screenplay.
Thanks for the good times, Joel McHale.
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