TPS owns a couple of shots in the new 2012 showreel from Sagafilm, the film company we cooperated with shooting the video for the 2012 Icelandic Eurovision song. Not bad seeing our shots next to James Bond and Christopher Nolan´s Batman Begins, not bad at all…Check out the showreel HERE.

Photo courtesy from Jørgen Emil Marchmann-jensen

A german article focusing on an art project a friend of mine did. A collapsable chair here at the coast in west Reykjavik, Me and Balli (the artists boyfriend) made the video featuring this art project.

Check the article(german) HERE or watch the video below.

Tomorrow I´ll sit a meeting with specialists from the artificial limb company Össur, where we will dive into designs and ideas of a pair of new leg braces for me. Current braces are ether stiff or loose, so walking is kind of awkward. The new desing is going to be a Stace-controlled KAFO(Knee-Ankle-Foot-Orthoses) where the knee joint flexes in every step. The system has 3 different settings, locked, loose or on automatic. Allows for a much smoother walking and gait pattern. And hopefully with time, loose the crutches, one by one.

I took some shots of my newest build, the suction cup HDD gyroscope car-mount gimball aka “The Gimball” Check them out below.

And last but not least I just bought a retro German “91″ Burstner trailer, ready for the road. I was planing on buying one in Germany but came a cross this one here in Reykjavik, which is quite lucky. It was imported from Holland in 2006 and in fine shape. Now all I have to do is to mark our logo on the sides and drive away. A big part of this summer is going to be spent on the road with the goal of finishing the shooting for my film HEILD and My Own Road, a documentary from my spanish amigo, cinematographer and filmmaker Enrique Pacheco. His film focuses on how we shoot HEILD while I´m fighting a severe spinal cord injury. Meanwhile I´ll do some jobs here and there. I plan on editing and doing most of the post production on HEILD in the new TPS Studio which is the trailer below. I want it ready and premiered in december 2012.

Exiting to be back to the origin with TPS. What beats living in a mobile home anyway?

Just before this job I managed to get my newest gadget ready, a motorized HDD gyro stabilized car-mount, aka “The Gimball”. It is a mount where the camera sits on two different floating axes, (tilt and pan). Mounted on both of them are old 40Gb 7200 rpm hard drives, which serve as gyroscopes, hence let the mount “float”. The system is powered by a 12volt battery and sits on a three-piece triangle vacum suction cup made to hold heavy glass. The gimball also mounts on a tripod with normal 1/4 inch threads. I wanted to use this mount to film Látrabjarg and other interesting locations from the sea on the ship that is our two day ride from Patreksfjörður to Stykkishólmur next week. But I made it also to use on the hood of a car to shoot “drivelapses”. We shot the first one with my new sigma prime 24mm 1.8 at night driving super slow last night. This test shot was not glitch free but features some nice moon lit landscape, stars and northen lights. I´m happy with the results although the mount might need an upgrade. As of now it´s a prototype. But overall it performed well, apparently the HDD´s work as gyros. Cheap and effective.

We were hired by Sagafilm to shoot some timelapse material for the 2012 Icelandic Eurovision music video, the result can be viewed HERE. Or below

Finally I sold some footage from the short “Herbstwald” to an Axe Deodorant advertisement, made by a company in Singapore, the ad will appear online, in TV and cinemas somewhere around Asia soon. Got to love easy money like that.

Photos of “The Gimball” and some general BTS footage is scheduled soon. When time is a little less of the essence.

In between we´re  shooting for our long term project, the first Icelandic non-narrative film HEILD, like last night were we set up a 2-axis timelapse shot at the pond in Reykjavik center. I´ve been waiting months for this special location that I had in mind as the conditions had to be just right, I wanted clear night skies with moonshine, on a Saturday night when people party and no wind as the pond had to be calm to mirror the city lights. Last night we got all of those elements. (Not easy here in Iceland). So hopefully the shot turns out as a winner. Additionally after finishing up the 3 hour+  shot at 5:30 am I went solo to Kársnes, Kópavogur to get a fresh angle at Reykjavik during night time and later around 7:00 am shot footage of night turn into day, In beautiful morning light.

I updated the V3 motion dolly as well the other day down in the garage, the on-tripod mounts were not very handy and a little awkward to handle, so I removed them and welded new more durable plate-mounts on the tracks with tripod plate threads so the plate just screws and slips right into the tripod. A big time saver and makes setup much easier. I also altered the main power cable on the V3, I soldered a new cable into the existing one to power the Orion head from the 12volt battery, instead of powering the head from 8 AA batteries. Now the whole system is run by the same big battery, much more reliable and if the 12v battery runs out of juice the AA batteries serve as a substitute. I did a testdrive of the new modifications yesterday, everything worked as expected so I shot a little video of the V3 in action..

I think that´s about it today…some links, pics and videos coming soon..

TPS went to Siglufjördur in north Iceland last weekend. We were hired to direct, shoot and edit a 10minute short film about the snowboard event taking place there. Directed and edited by Addi Additionaly to the shooting, we had amazing fun over there. See the video from SigloSession HERE. Or simply below:

We´re still dealing with Fjallabræður choir for a two week roadtrip around Iceland to shoot an epic nature music video to their newest song. If we go as planned we´ll departure Reykjavik next weekend or the 18th of February. More news on this after next TPS meeting with Fjallabræður on thursday.

Few shots of some tests and tools:

There are two other projects on the menu now, one where I´ll be the DOP in a graduate student´s short film this weekend. He is finishing his film studies at the Icelandic filmschool. And another much bigger project is coming up in febuary, An epic nature/music video for an unconventional choir of 50 men and two bands called Fjallabræður or “Mountain Brothers”. This video will be filmed in a 10 day roadtrip around the country. Looking forward to shooting this thing. There is talk about other projects as well but nothing clear on those yet.

Finally a status on my physical state, I´ve retired the wheelchair outside of my home, I´m always on my leg-braces now walking around with cruches, for me this configuration works better and is of course the road to the ultimate full recovery of my T-12 incomplete spinal cord injury (SCI) I suffered from a year ago. Also in process is applying for the first electric stance-control orthoses in Iceland which allow me to bend my knees while walking controlled by sensors and a micro-processor, a true game-changer for me. I found them in USA after extensive research on the internet, I thought they didn´t exist but fortunately they do. More on them HERE.

Below are a few shots of a nightshot session with my brother Loftur a while ago..

I´ve sealed the deal with Red Marble Media and sold them circa 45 seconds of footage, a mix from older videos and short films. Also in the process of selling some forest footage to India, nothing confirmed yet though.

The winter has come here in Reykjavik, Iceland. It´s snowing everywhere, and snow has been lying here in Reykjavik for more than two weeks now and it seems that we´ll have white christmas for a change. A nice suprise. There is one downside to the snow.. my wheelchair, a pain in the ass to be wheeling around in the snow so I´ve kind of retired the chair, I use my braces with a pair of crutches most of the time now when I go out of the house, it´s nicer anyway to be standing up, and walking is of course the way to my complete recovery. I´ve also got my hands on new “wintershoes” for my car Baltasar, Bf Goodrich mud terrain, should come in handy in the snow and the mountains. There is going to be a winter sequence in my film HEILD and I´m looking forward to shooting it.

Last but not least Marry Christmas everyone!

Below are a few shots from this and that

Watch the sparkling new Trailer for this film below, in HD of course!

As mentioned earlier my Sony SR1 died the other day after 5 years of serving as a top notch workhorse. It was sad and I started to wonder how my brother Loftur was going to finish the documentary about me making my film, as it was shot entirely on the SR1. But that problem has solved because a few days ago I received almost the same camera from a friend that wasn´t using it at all. It´s the Sony SR11, smaller with bigger hard drive and stuff…. Nice one and much appreciated. I uploaded two photos of these bad boys..

I cant seem to get the bullet-time idea out of my head, I think it´s a sign it has to be done, but as I looked deeper into the idea I found a few problems that go with building a bullet-time/ timeslice rig, they are:

• You need 30+ dslr cameras obviously (30 for a one second shot, maybe 1.5 sec if post frames are made)
• You need to trigger them all through the remote shutter socket, not the usb (means you need a control board with all the shutter cables and a master switch)
• You need to be able to connect them to a computer to store the shots in one place, through usb?
• if usb, then you need an usb hub which runs(if it works) 16 cameras, so you need at least 2 of them. This + shutter wires means a lot of cables. (30 cameras = 60 cables)
• You need to point every camera to the exactly same point if you want a smooth outcome, could work with a “cold shoe modified” laser.
• You might need a multi-camera software for changing parameters in the camera as well as storing and saving the data to the computer.

So far I´ve supposedly resolved 3-4 of those problems. I still need to find a solution of transferring and storing the data on the computer. It is possible to change parameters on every single camera and shoot to the cf cards put in the long term that´s a pain in the ass. I have a copy of a program called Dslr Remote Pro, having many copies open at the same time works so one might have one open for each camera, I tested this with two cameras (photos below). No idea if this works with 30+.  There is another software out there from the same company called multi-camera, but it costs thousands of dollars, even more than the camera array itself, which sounds ridiculous to me, but probably because the service of making bullet-time is very specialized.

Below are a few photos of this and that.