Some of you know that I’ve been working on this personal short about a team of amazing foley artists in Uxbridge, Ontario for four years now. With the world being upside down the last few months, it allowed me to finish it. I am happy to release this trailer for Footsteps today, I look forward to sharing the entire 14 minute thing in the near future.

Thanks to Andy Malcolm, Goro Koyama, Sandra Fox and the whole team at Footsteps for being so supportive and generous with their time and at to Deluxe Toronto for helping me finish this. My old friend and Ryerson Film Studies classmate Kurt Ritchie for such a fantastic cut, Matt Bendo for the help with his great eye on my 2-camera days, Tyler Emond for the great score. Also thanks to Justin Lovell at Frame Discreet for the 4K scan of the 35mm release print of “Track Stars”.

Also thanks to Tom Comet and Matthew McLaughlin for the drone work!

As all the talented craftspeople in our industry await a return to work together again some day, I hope this love letter to filmmaking is a little beam of light in your day.

For a few months, myself and the team at Indy Mogul have been trying to coordinate an interview to talk Expanse shot breakdown. I was planning on taking a trip to LA to visit people – but the pandemic put a stop to that.

A couple of weeks ago we were able to do this interview remotely, me from our home in Toronto, Ted in LA. I am very impressed by the Indy Mogul team’s work in putting this together – this is super charged nerding out!

We are thankful to be home and safe and that our loved ones are as well while we all wait this out. Hope everyone is staying positive and productive, as much as they can.

UPDATE: Due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, this screening date was postponed to August 10th, 2020. We don’t know if that date will still happen. It’s up to Cineplex and government restrictions. Demand Film will provide updates via their website.

The feature documentary I produced and partly shot, directed by my partner Francis Luta – will be getting a theatrical release at Cineplex Theatres across Canada on April 6th, 2020.

Tickets are only available online via Demand Films’ website… see link below and a list of cities the film will be playing.

We are very excited to see the film we’ve been working on since 2017 find its audience. It will soon have an online streaming home, we will announce further news on that as our distributor Gravitas Ventures works out those details.

A little bit about the film: As the next logical step in his career as a professional explorer, Adam Shoalts sets out to cross the Canadian Arctic in a race against time that will last four months, 4000 kilometers, with no rifle, on foot and by canoe. He is the first to do this expedition in one season, alone. A companion piece to the National best selling book ‘Beyond The Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada’s Arctic’.

Get tickets here:

https://ca.demand.film/alone-across-arctic/

Alone Across The Arctic (trailer) from Francis Luta on Vimeo.

We have begun filming of Season 5 in Toronto, and expect to wrap in late February, 2020. We have been building so many new sets for this season, its going to be a lot of new places for our fans to immerse themselves into. Director Breck Eisner and I are cooking up a great first 2 eps right now! I will be joined by my co-DP Ray Dumas, csc, who will alternate with me for the season. Look forward to seeing the show in HDR and Dolby Atmos on Amazon Prime!

Here’s an official trailer for Season 4:

Last summer I worked on a new Amazon Prime series called “The Boys”. Jeff Cutter shot the pilot, and then I alternated with DP Evans Brown. We had fun coming up with some cool looks… we shot with Red Helium in 8K and primarily used Cooke SF Anamorphics. Check out the new trailer below; which is a mix of all of our work.

The Boys is an upcoming American superheroblack comedyweb television series based on the comic book of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. The show was developed by Eric Kripke, Evan Goldberg, and Seth Rogen. The series is set to premiere on July 26, 2019.^[1] In early July 2019, Amazon Video renewed the series for a second season ahead of the series premiere.^[2]

Amazon Prime dropped the first trailer for Season 4 at ComiCon San Diego this weekend, as well as the world wide premiere date for the new season – which is December 13, 2019. Check out the new trailer below. I am very excited for our fans to see the show in HDR for the first time… we wanted to go HDR in season 3, but the budget didn’t allow for it as it was not mandated by the broadcaster. But Amazon requires HDR as a delivery spec for all their original content. My colourist Joanne Rourke (at Deluxe Toronto) and I have worked closely together to bring the show into the HDR world – which I think is such a great thing for the immersive experience of Expanse. It really creates a greater sense of depth and drama in our gritty worlds of various grades of space ships, outer space and otherworldly alien environments. To me its the most exciting new tool in image making I have seen since HD.

Its so cool that now I’m going to have to get an HDR tv! For the record, we’ve been using the LG C9 television as a home reference model for HDR viewing… its what Deluxe uses. Compared side by side to the Sony X300 $40,000 4K OLED HDR (1000 NITS) monitor that Joanne and I grade with – the LG is very good, being around 800 or 900 NITS. So in terms of intense contrast and colour – the LG competes really well with the Sony X300.

I am currently deep into principle photography of season two Condor. Its an exciting new genre for me as I have never done a spy thriller before. New looks, fresh approach to lighting and framing… its always good to change things up. With Expanse having become such a major part of my work in the last several years; I have tried to do something completely different between seasons… and this is yet another opportunity for me to do that. I am shooting four of the ten episodes, currently working with director Ali Selim.

I am co-dping with American cinematographer Evans Brown, who I met when doing Amazon’s “The Boys” season one, last year. Its always great to share an episodic project with another collaborative DP so that you can really prep well for each episode.. and develop a rapport with the incoming director, as often times it may be the first time working together.  Evans and I have similar tastes, but different enough that I think we can riff off each other’s approaches to our own eps.

We are shooting in and around Toronto, using Alexa Minis with both Cooke S4 and S5 lenses.

Condor is an American thriller television series based on the novel Six Days of the Condor by James Grady and its 1975 film adaptation Three Days of the Condor written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Rayfiel. The series was created by Todd Katzburg, Jason Smilovic, and Ken Robinson.

Max Irons stars as Joe Turner in Condor

On February 20th, 2019, I remotely recorded a podcast interview for Mike Pecci, who has been doing these podcasts for a while now.

Here’s a link to the podcast site:

http://www.mikepecci.com/inlovewiththeprocess/…

On February 7th, 2019, we completed principle photography of season 4 of The Expanse. This season certainly was our biggest, baddest and most challenging one yet… in terms of scope of the story, ambitiousness and time frame. With Amazon stepping in to save the show last year, our ramp up time to start prep on season 4 was shorter than normal. I think this will be a great season, I start colour grading in March… it sounds like a fall or late 2019 launch on Amazon Prime world wide.

Here’s a fun video we made in conjunction with the Canadian Society of Cinematographers which shows how we handle practical LED lighting in our sets on the show.

The Expanse - CSC LED Lighting Walk Through [19:24]