Last month I was commissioned to shoot a timelapse film of San Francisco for the track ‘The Bridge (Pt.1)’ by John Daversa. Three weeks of shooting, two weeks of editing, and roughly 20,000 stills later a unique portrait of San Francisco emerged. Enjoy!

Earlier this month I shot the first video for San Francisco based ‘High Society’ with my good friend Greg Thomas. Three locations in San Francisco and Oakland in two half-day shoots. Day one took us to our ‘creepy forest’ location in the Presidio District, and to the prepped ‘basement party’ location.

We worked with all natural light in the forest–luckily the canopy cover combined with the typical SF fog gave us relatively even exposures. For closeups we utilized silks above our actors to knock down any unwanted highlights. I chose to light our party scene almost entirely with practicals found in the space. I used warm LED Christmas lights strung around the rafters to create a uniform fill light, and augmented the space with china lanterns outfitted with regular medium base tungsten bulbs rated between 100-150W.

The second day we shot on location in Soundwave Studios in Oakland, CA. After some initial confusion with booking at the venue, they agreed to let us shoot in a warehouse space under renovation on the back of their lot. The space worked perfectly, with lots of natural light coming through several massive skylights. I opted to utilize the light, and augmented it with an open face 1K gelled with full CTB for fill, and an ungelled theatrical PAR lamp clamped in plain view as a backlight.