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Dear Joe,

I am grateful of your offer to help Sandy and I shoot. Hearing that you are coming from New York, it is my inclination to have things as ready as possible so we can honor your time. Being able to send you this link via text seems like the best way to present the idea. I hope it can act as a worthy treatment.

We are ready but I would like to make sure everything is prepared, including me. A funny thing about our situation is that we are using all this technical equipment to capture the intricate painting process we are setting up, but just getting me and the house up to the level of video capture requires the help of Sandy and two other people. I love process and production because of what it accomplishes, the level it takes things to, and the caregiving and teamwork are meaningful, but it all requires extensive planning.

We have been using a Kessler jib to stabilize camera movements. It is like using a large field cannon, and we are not even to the poit where we can pull focus. We have recorded a series of paintings, and got the help of a second camera for one of those, another good fortune of a movie shooter, Mat Cerf, stopping by. So, we have a selection of footage to put together. The final piece on this round is what we could use your help with.

I figured out that if we hang a finished painting in its frame, from the ceiling directly above the apex of the jib, we can truck the camera back-and-forth around the painting at that center. In our tests, this camera movement shows the light refraction from the painting’s iridescent surface in a way that still photography cannot. It is also an interesting camera movement because of the parallax of the background elements, which we have been composing the past few days. I aim to put a couple of these shorts of the finished paintings on my webpage and possibly Instagram to show the painting’s surface. My hope is that, one of these jib arm shots of the painting in the frame, along with your handheld camera of me getting the shot, could also go into a final 30 second or one minute edit of the process end-to-end.

As with other technical camera tricks, I find people often don’t know what they are looking at. I am hoping that with your camera, you could reveal the set up, the dinosaur-like black jib arm in the black room, the painting floating from the ceiling at the center, the lighting and me reaching up, sometimes awkwardly, to rotate the jib while looking through the Shogun monitor to get the shot people just saw.

Your perspective would be the final part of a five or six shot edit. It is the painting in the frame that we need to finish it. What I am hoping to accomplish with this shot, is the most unconventional painting-in-a-frame finale we can muster. I think it is compelling when you look at a shot and you wonder, “What the hell is going on there?“ Here are a few still images from clips we have so far.

I am making a large photography soft box grid out of Gatorboard, to narrowly direct soft light in the dark studio.

Often, the geometric shapes of the soft box grid appear in photos, as in this reflection from a wet painting’s surface.

I made a smaller prototype grid using black foam core board. It has worked well and appears cleaner in photos than a fabric grid, but the foam core material eventually dented on the edges. As I planned this out, I knew Gatorboard would be the ultimate material in action, because of its composite wood fibers and polymer. I ordered a sample of Ultra Board and I like it, but I remember Gatorboard being stronger. Cutting it is the challenge for me. Gator-Board.com is going to help with cuts shown below.

Another benefit of constucting a rigid grid, instead of using traditional fabric, is that I can introduce an alternate structure, making for more interesting appearances, especially in these reflections.

Using the 3-D software, Maya, I iterated patterns and found rectangles that shift in proportion will be the most effective way to stylize this project.

Below, are the four different sizes to be cut from this single 4″ x 8″ sheet of all black 3/16″ thick GatorBoard.

The quantities and measurements are listed in text that can be copied, and in a graphic layout to help strategize cuts.

These quantities are the minimum number I could use but if there are extras, I will pay for them to be shipped too because I can use the material.

• Fifteen Pieces 39 13/16″ x 1.5″
• Seventeen Pieces 28 7/8″ x 1.5″
• Four Pieces 29 1/4″ x 1.5″
• Eight Pieces 48″ x 4″

Thank you SO much for your help cutting theses!

Jesse

I am working on a set of 6 shelves in the studio, two shelves are for a wall and four individual shelves are for windows. I am hoping Dunn Lumber in Seattle, Washington will help me to cut these from a sheet of 3/4″ MDF.

In addition to measurements in inches, I included centimeters to the tenth of a millimeter, because I am designing using a computer and those incriments keep me on track. In the physical world, cuts withing 1/4” of these measurements would fit into place easily.

2 Shelves (same)
Bedroom
72” or 182.88cm x 12” or 30.48cm

2 Shelves (same)
Drill Press Window and DJ Cart Front Window
53 1/4” or 135.255cm x 6 1/4” or 15.875cm

1 Shelf
Art Cabinet Window 54 1/4” or 132.715cm x 5” or 12.7cm.

1 Shelf
Kitchen Window 41 3/4” or 106.045cm x 5 1/2” or 13.97cm.

One thing Roxanne and I have been working at during the pandemic, is building a live streaming set up. It is almost done (-: The technology has taken a lot of research but it’s finally in place. The last thing I want to complete before streaming is a green screen, because as you can imagine, the visual possibilities are very exciting to me. I think it will be fun to explore graphic plains of metaphor in the room, and the in stream, which has become the sharing of our individual rooms and the realites we have constructed through our time of isolation.

I have been working with the 3D software Maya to plan the space and individual pieces. The wood pieces here, are part of a system I am designing which will hang the curtain track for the green screen. I have the track, which I ordered from a place called Chicago Canvas. The goal with this design is to allow the green screen to be pulled out and wrapped around the studio in a U-shape, and then gathered to the end of the track when we are not using it.

In the picture below is a wooden grid. This is already complete and mounted to our ceiling. That project took a couple of years. Thank you Chris, Motzo and Rob. I use it to hang lights and other equipment. Now, I am building off of it. The curtain track is the next step.

These hangers will allow some adjustment of the track in each direction. So, when it comes time to hang the track, there will be a little latitude for fine adjustments. I bought each of the corner brackets from Amazon and the measurements are accurate.

It makes more sense to work with wood for the larger support boughs in this hanger design, which you can see at the end, for lightness and customizability. I would like to make these out of oak in order support more weight and allow for some drilling in places without compromising much strength. I will need 11 of these pieces to be cut. The track will only require 10 of them, but I think we should have one extra for insurance.

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