May
14
Well for once I have a post that has nothing to do with jewelry! I did this video nearly five years ago, as an advertisement for the tattoo and piercing shop, Venus Body Arts, at 31 Avenue A in New York City. The concept was an homage to Man Ray’s photograph, “Ingres’s Violin” for which Kiki de Montparnasse was the model. He, of course, was inspired by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres but the purpose of the work was to objectify the model. In Man Ray’s photograph she was shown as a violin — an instrument that he could play. In my work, the model is also an object but in this case she is the canvas for the tattoo artist to draw his art. We had one of the resident tattoo artists pretend to tattoo the violin f-holes on to the model.
Naturally when we cast for this, we looked for a model that had just the right shape — a small hip-to-waist ratio to really accentuate the violin effect. We ended up casting Irene Josse as Kiki and she did a tremendous job for both the video and still shoots. Makeup was done by Tommy Joiner. The soundtrack is “Electric Fire” by EO. We did the shoot at Ruby Bird Studio which is a warehouse space in Brooklyn. The exposed brick wall turned out to be a perfect backdrop for this concept.
I’m still immensely proud of this video!
May
07
A radiant cut diamond ring video we recently did for Michael Austein.
Jan
04
Video Services by The Commercial Art Lab for Maria Tash Apparel
These are two apparel videos I did for Maria Tash. We did about 20 different looks for her new line of clothing they will be appearing on her new website when it goes live in a month.
Sep
28
I built a new rig for doing jewelry videos and it has two huge advantages over my old system. The first is that is incredibly smooth so I don’t need to use software stabilization anymore. The second is that it can be mounted upside down and it allows me to suspend items, for example earrings:
You may notice a little more sparkle in this video — my new secret sauce which is *not* added in post-production. Even though the turntable is smooth, if the room has any vibration it gets transmitted through the boom and string and it’s very hard to get the earrings to turn without becoming a pendulum. In this case I applied a lot of patience and a little software stabilization to damp out the swinging of the earrings.
The rig also has continuous speed controls all the way from full speed forward to full speed reverse and the controller is separated from the motor/gearbox so you can adjust the speed without producing vibration. I can also swap in a new motor if I ever want something a lot faster. I really want to try some handbags with this new system if anyone has one they’d like me to video… I’ll do the first one for free 🙂
Sep
22
Take a look at my latest jewelry video that I did for Delicate Gems:
This was a custom ring they made for a client. The main stone is Portuguese green amethyst and it is surrounded by diamonds set in a yellow gold band. I’ve been working on trying to get a little more movement in the videos — this one has three clips (two transitions) and in the last one I held the ring up with some double sided tape and then I panned the camera while the ring rotated.
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