Chris Vongsawat: DP

Here’s another slow motion test/moving headshot I did with actress Elizabeth Lee.  

My original intent was actually to shoot Liz in a thunderstorm.  I thought it’d be pretty epic to get a shot of her by the water with some lightning in the background.  The weather forecast said it was going to rain, but it didn’t.  Hell, it wasn’t even windy.  So much for that.

Of course, that’s no reason to not shoot.  Just look for another opportunity.  

I started grabbing some basic slow motion shots of her walking around South Street Seaport.  There are some giant spotlights on the rooftops there that light that cobblestone walkway at night.  I thought maybe I’d use them as rim lights and interesting background.  After shooting a couple of takes in the area, it just wasn’t working out.  There were too many people.  The angles I was getting weren’t forming the right relationships.  The ideas for shots weren’t jumping out at me as anything really interesting or spectacular and I was forcing the shots.  In other words, I was forcing pre-conceived notions into the space that didn’t fit and I wasn’t letting the space give me ideas.  I think in general, that’s the mark of a good location, it inspires ideas organically and effortlessly.  It’s full of answers.  

South Street Seaport is a great location, but I just wasn’t in the right place.  So we headed over to a small alley that I know about near the side entrance of the Seaport Museum.  When I shot the first take, I knew we were in the right place. Things started to come together and I was getting ideas for images and what I wanted Liz to do.  I’ve seen her play parts as a disturbed/frightened woman so I felt that the dark character of the place at night fit her, and from there it was fairly easy to come up with and play with ideas.  I didn’t have a structured narrative in mind per se—these slow motion tests and moving headshots, to me, are more about interesting compositions and gestures mixed together with flattering close ups.  But I did have a general idea of how I wanted the piece to feel, and I got a lot of great material from watching Liz inhabit the space and work with the architecture.  

This was shot with just ambient light, no reflectors, on a 24mm f/1.4L and 50mm f/1.2L on a 7D.  Contrast was set to the lowest level and I took saturation down two notches in the picture style.  A lot of the work gets done in post with color correcting and color grading to get the images to really pop.  I also had to apply a denoising plug-in to deal with grain from when I had to shoot on 1600 ISO.  As good as a video might look coming right out of the camera, good color correction and grading adds a ton of production value.    

This video was shot during American Apothecary’s E-Commerce Launch Event during New York City fashion week.  

This was a behind the scenes video I shot and edited during a test photo shoot I did with Frank Bonfante.   

When I shot the video I was looking for action.  For every action there is a beginning, middle, and end.  So when someone was doing something, I’d try and figure out, what would an establishing shot look like?  What’s the middle?  (It’s usually the action itself.)  And lastly, what shot would give a concluding feeling?  On the fly, this isn’t very easy to do.  Some shot lend themselves naturally to this idea, others, the beginning and end are subtle or even hidden.  They have to be found or constructed later in the edit.  Sometimes I’ll just keep switching angles and ideas and hope that later on one of the shots fits somewhere in a little three-act narrative.  Or I’ll just grab whatever shot I can and then hope it just fits into the video later somehow.  Essentially, I try to just keep the interest high by continuously moving through these micro-narratives.  But as you can see, in the edit it doesn’t end up being a series of three act sequences.  The ideas flow into each other and I use however many cuts/shots feels right for the flow of the piece, especially when I sync it to music.  I try to be non-linear when I can, but in this case the video was pretty straight forward.

Shot with various lenses on a Canon 5D MKII.

Originally this was mean to be more of a screen test.  I was inspired by two low light tests in Chinatown that I saw on Vimeo here and here.  I thought I’d grab one of the many actors I know and do something similar just to see what I’d get.  

I wanted to shoot some footage inside of Jing Fong, the epic dim sum restaurant on Elizabeth street.  I ended up collaborating with actor Sean Hudock, and after talking about it for a little bit, we decided to try and come up with some kind of narrative.  We started off with the idea of him being chased but ended up on him being lost and wandering for some reason.  I had this image in my head of Sean on his cell phone by the lion statues in front of Jing Fong.  I figured we could use the image as a metaphor for strength, like at the climax of our narrative he somehow gains the upper-hand.  I ended up coming up with the idea that he’s fighting with his girlfriend and at the end she calls him and apologizes.  

So we meet up on Canal street.  I’m armed with my 5D MKII and a 50mm f/1.2 prime L-series lens.  I start looking around for interesting ideas, playing with height and scale, running through a gamut of close-ups, medium, and long-shots.  I do a couple of shots through the window.  We start making our way down Canal street towards Jing Fong’s shooting anything interesting along the way.  I had it in my mind ahead of time that I wanted a strong rack focus shot from something prominent in the background to Sean’s face, so we got that.  I wanted some colorful bokeh.  We got that.  It was like an informal check list.

My main goal in looking for shots was symbolism.  I was looking for stuff that could be interpreted as being representative of some inner turmoil or plot point.  I didn’t know exactly what the symbols would represent, I figured that I would construct that in the editing.  I wanted pregnant symbols, essentially, something that would give birth to ideas later on.  So I shot dirty snow, the hanging flower light, some signs, subway entrances, trash, slaughtered animals, steam, anything that I thought could be used later to construct a narrative.  The whole “plot” was lose enough where we could construct ideas on the fly.

The night came to a head when we realized that Jing Fong’s was closed.  Great.  My centerpiece denied.  We ended up ducking into a small restaurant and worked with what we had available.  We took a break when the food came and I just shot a lot of different ideas.  The entire time we were shooting, I was thinking about the edit and how I might tie different shots together.  My experience with photojournalism and looking for shots infused with narrative and meaning I think played really well into this kind of situation.  For the close-up on the cell phone, I switched over to my 100mm Macro f/2.8 prime lens.

I had no idea how to shoot the ending, so I shot Sean against a bunch of different backdrops that I could choose later on.  I shot him on his cell phone in front of a giant map (maybe he’s found his way), in front of signs that said different things (they were all too literal), and in front of different buildings far in the background that had interesting bokeh effects.  I ended up choosing the shot I did because it looked nice enough and I didn’t really like the other options.  I figured the closeup shot of the lion would supply the visual message that the tables had turned and I didn’t need to rely on anything like that in the final shot.  

I shot the whole thing wide open at f/1.2 and something like 640 ISO.  I put the visual settings on the lowest contrast and a little less saturation to try and prevent strong reds from blowing out the color channel like they usually do.  The whole shoot only took a few hours, including dinner.  Very laid back.  

I shot this in Prospect Park with comic/actor Karen Summerton.  I shot it on a 7D with a 70-200mm f/2.8 L-series lens and a light tripod.  

I’ve always been interested in the idea of a moving headshot.  While I think one day that sort of media might have value on par with photo headshots when it comes to getting actors into auditions, I’m mainly playing around with the idea right now strictly on an experimental basis.  I’m curious what I’ll get.   

In particular, I liked what Jake Davis was doing with his screen tests on Vimeo. But I think his emphasis is more on style and fashion. While I think I’m still borrowing pretty heavily from him, I’m more interested in exploring gestures and some kind of narrative.  I got the idea for the white border from Austra’s music video “Lose It”  There’s one very fast sequence where the singer is in a white border diptych.  I was a little worried that the white border might be taking the whole “headshot” thing too literally, but what the hell, I like it.  

I didn’t use any lights or reflectors making this video, though I think it looks like I might have used both in some of the sequences.  It’s all just a matter of finding the right spots where you can control the light using architecture.  I’m a big fan of feathered light, so any time there’s a transition from sunlight to shade, like tunnels or awnings, you’re going to get some good lighting effects.  Otherwise, you hope for a cloudy day, but sometimes cloudy days don’t give your mid-tones and highlights the right punch.