Phoenix, AZ

Stepping off the plane, Skip picked me up and we heading to downtown Scottsdale, AZ to shoot some scenic shots of the area. Immediately I noticed the difference in the landscape and I could not help noticing the red mountains in the background of the city. Something else was missing that made this place feel unique, ah ha, no grass. Along the streets there wasn’t much greenery like I was used to being from the east side of the country. Here there was just a lot of red rock. I still wore a jacket as being in a t-shirt was still a bit chilly. With the lack of greenery, cracked wood, and cactuses, I could tell that some days this place could get hot!

Skip and I spent the afternoon shooting timelapses and scenery. I got a chance to learn more about how to shoot timelapses and I learned more about the Mattebox.

The matte box is the big square that fits in front of the lens of the camera and allows you to put various filters in front of the lens. The filters are usually glass and can be rotated in place. We used this technique at a rock formation. Getting a wide shot with the sky and rock formation can be tricky because the sky is many times brighter than the rock or shadow areas in the rock. We place a graduated filter in the matte box to shade the sky area of the frame. Skip was able to rotate the filter to line up where the sky transitions to the rock in the frame. You can actually see transition in the frame but it definitely looks pretty cool.

The next highlight of the weekend was an interview with the Daytona 500 winner, Trevor Bayne. Thankfully we had a long time to set up this interview and Skip had a pretty awesome idea for the background.

We went to Home Depot and bought 6 sets of 8ft fluorescent light fixtures. In the Interview room, we rewired the fixtures so the the fluorescent tubes would turn on while standing vertically in the room. Skip positioned these glowing vertical tubes throughout the room as a background and foreground. The challenge was that the lights were so bright that it made it a bit tricky to actually light Trevor. But Skip is pretty awesome and I think the finished result looks absolutely awesome.

Here is the final video: Trevor Bayne Interview

Back at the track we continued to shoot various footage of the cars in the garage. The cars are so unbelievably loud this close up. I made sure to always pay attention so that Skip or myself wouldn’t get run over as the cars would make their way to the track and back for practice. But sometimes they would get close.

Cars pulling out of garage

 

Finally race day came and we shot more scenic and time lapses of the race for the Fox to use for future use. It was a much shorter visit than Daytona but so far I definably liked Phoenix.

I was right there when Taylor Bayne spun out, I felt bad it happened for him after winning Daytona.

When we were at this posiiton, a crash occurred and the cars slid against the wall right past us! The smoke covered us and after it cleared Skip looked at me and said in a nervous tone “That’s never happened (In front of me) before”.