Postcard From Earth at the Sphere Las Vegas

From searching out the world's oldest cinemas over the last several years to one of the newest entertainment venues and a screen 20x bigger than the largest IMAX. Here are a few highlights from a screening of Postcard From Earth at the Sphere in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Adventures Across the Western USA

And thus concludes another road trip. 

From snow-covered mountain top resort towns to a reunion in Vegas to winding remote passes and an alien Trump on the outskirts of Area 51 ... this latest round of travel shoots covered over 7000 km through Montana, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington.

 

I was light on the sneak peeks this time largely due to a lack of downtime, but I can assure you there will be a lot of highlights ahead. As always, I appreciated the recommendations and concerns over the last few weeks. Everything was totally fine - albeit a lot quieter than usual. 

Stay tuned for new previews soon. 

It's good to be home.

Your Cinema Needs You at the Paramount Theatre

My thanks to the Kamloops Film Society for selecting my documentary, Your Cinema Needs You for a series of screenings to help celebrate the 70th birthday of the historic Paramount Theatre in downtown Kamloops, British Columbia last weekend. 

Seeing this project travel the world and play in so many unique and historic venues has been the cherry on top of what we saw happen back home with the Monarch Theatre. 

Thank you so much for the continued support!

Generative AI & the Movie Theatre Documentary

With generative AI trending heavily this week on the back of some new Chat GPT updates, I set out to do a few experiments to see if I could learn more about the process - and hopefully, produce some hybrid results from original images that were created and restored during production of Your Cinema Needs You. 

Instead of simply generating content, what I wanted to see is if I could use an archival image I restored, an illustrated image of the Monarch I commissioned, and an image I photoshopped myself into - and experiment with how those elements could be combined and fine tuned. 

While the image of me in theatre was a simple Chat GPT conversion of an existing image, the wide shot of the theatre is a hybrid combining generative AI, hand drawn elements by my friend Jess, and "tests" where I photoshopped specific details of the theatre to further stylize and manipulate the results. Everything is increasingly falling into a new gray area. 

I personally still want to work directly with artists, particularly because, even here in a simple test, collaborating with Jess is what made this fun and gave our approach a point of view. 

All that said, did I like the result? Yes. Do I still have concerns about what the future of AI means for original content? Every. Single. Day.

Online Release of Your Cinema Needs You

The wait is finally over! After 15 months since the premiere that reopened the Monarch Theatre and the extended international film festival tour that followed, Your Cinema Needs You is online and available to screen Canada-wide right now. Click here.

Hawaii, a Bentley, and a Magazine Cover

Back in the early days of my professional travel shoots (once it became a full-time gig) I felt like I was making up for lost time. This resulted in some questionable business decisions.

Jump cut. Oahu, Hawaii.

So much potential. I have a laundry list of locations I plan on documenting across the entire island. This is going to be amazing. But you know what would make it even better? Keeping it low key in an incredibly ostentatious Bentley Continental GTC.

I was watching a lot of Top Gear at the time. I could already picture the edits. I got in touch with a luxury dealership in Honolulu and worked out the details for my shoot. 

Now, at the time, I knew I'd have to sell a lot of the content just to cover my overhead and that, frankly, I was doing this first and foremost to have a story to tell.

I sold a few images after that trip, but not nearly enough to turn a profit on the shoot. Not exactly surprising.

Two years pass.

I have multiple galleries from the Oahu shoot online collecting casual hits. Out of the blue, I get a message about licensing from a marketing firm in Australia.

We chat. We hit it off. The idea expands. Another month passes.

I get an email notifying me that my Oahu shoot has turned into a multi page spread and that they'd like to offer me the cover story for the winter edition of the Qantas / Jetstar in-flight magazine. Highlights of that little road trip I took is now going to be in every seatback in Oceania.

Needless to say, the shoot finally turned a profit.

Seinfeld Restaurant in New York City

Tom's Restaurant, the location made famous as Monk's Cafe on Seinfeld, is still attracting crowds of fans from its heyday in the 90s. Only used for exteriors on the TV show, Tom's is still incredibly familiar and fits nicely into a pop culture walking tour of New York City.