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The Making Of Olivia Jean’s New Album Cover Raving Ghost

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The combination of music and photography can be magical. The authenticity and rawness of music is unparalleled. Musicians pour their hearts and souls into every aspect of their art. From the meticulous process of writing and recording an album, to the tireless effort of promoting it through tours, music is a labor of love.

That’s why we were deeply honored when Third Man Records approached us to design a set and photograph the cover art for Olivia Jean’s new album, “Raving Ghost”. We knew that she had invested countless hours and unwavering passion into creating it, and we understood how much trust she was placing in us to create something that visually represented the sound and theme of “Raving Ghost”.

Make any ordinary location look cinematic with these tips

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It’s great to be able to work in epic locations and make your photographs or videos look cinematic. For most of us, however, the reality is usually a little more underwhelming. When budgets are small, it’s quite common to end up shooting in less-than-perfect locations.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t lift those drab locations up into cinematic territory. With some lighting knowledge, interesting perspectives and good composition, you’d be surprised what you can achieve with even the humblest of scenarios. In this excellent behind-the-scenes video, YCImaging shows you how they shot a music video in an ordinary home. The results are spectacular and well worth a watch.

These are the ways vehicles are rigged for extreme destruction in the movies

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There’s nothing more exciting in the middle of an action movie than some good old destruction, especially of the vehicular kind. They’re the kinds of crashes and explosions that can often make real life seem a bit boring. That’s because most vehicles these days are built to pretty high standards of safety and security. The kinds of explosions and crashes we see in movies just don’t happen in the real world.

In this video from Insider, the team at JEM FX pulls back the curtain to reveal some of the secrets they use in order to make the crashes spectacular and cinematic for the movies. Some of these have been well-popularised in behind-the-scenes videos from movies, but this video really breaks things down – both figuratively and literally – to show just how choreographed and well planned out these crashes really are.

This is why food ads cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce

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We’ve all seen them thousands of times, the ubiquitous fast food advertisement flickering across the screen for 30 seconds while we catch up with our favourite series. But we rarely put much thought into how they are made. Or how much effort and money is put into shooting them.

Or normal people don’t at least. If you’re like me, the ads often fascinate you as much as the programs do. Trying to reverse engineer the lighting or camera moves in our minds becomes irrestible. This excellent video from Business Insider takes you behind the scenes at a commercial food production video shoot at The Garage in Brooklyn, New York, and it’s fascinating.

The BBC’s 2022 Winter Olympics commercial shows off amazing 3D printed stop motion animation

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Whenever the Olympics come around, the BBC always comes up with some fantastic promotional sequences for it – you know, just in case a single person in the UK forgot that the BBC was going to be covering the Olympics. Fortunately, The BBC’s Olympics coverage usually looks pretty good and often seems to be a testbed for new filmmaking tech, techniques and ideas.

This particular one is a technique we’ve actually featured here on DIYP before, stop motion animation using 3D printed models. While there is some CGI in this one from the BBC’s Olympics coverage, there are several sequences that were created by stop motion animation and 3D printed models of athletes doing their thing on the ice and snow.

Yes you can use your phone on a professional shoot, here are 5 ways

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I would put money on the chance that right now you have something powerful in your trousers. Of course, I’m talking about that little handheld device, the mobile phone that you keep in your pocket (what did you think I was referring to?). Image and video quality, and storage capacity over the last couple of years means that we are carrying more computing power around with us than NASA’s first space missions. Not to mention the tiny size and portability.

So it’s increasingly tempting to pull out the phone during a photo or video shoot, but will it make us look unprofessional, or is there a time and a place where it’s not only acceptable but actually a great idea? Ty Turner from Flash Film Academy gives us his thoughts on when it actually makes sense to use your phone on a professional shoot.

New “Hasselblad’s Home” documentary series reveals the X-series camera design philosophy

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It wasn’t until I watched this that it struck me that the Hasselblad X1D was announced almost five years ago now, back in 2016. It revolutionised what people believed digital medium format cameras could be with a new DSLR-like form factor.

Hasselblad has posted what appears to be the first episode of a new series of videos to their YouTube channel. It’s called “Hasselblad’s Home” and Episode 1 is a brief two and a half minute journey into the design philosophy of the Hasselblad X medium format camera system.

This is how special effects artists made the muscle and “fat” suits for Bill & Ted Face the Music

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Many of us will remember the original adventures of Ted Theodore Logan and Bill S. Preston Esq., and their long-awaited third movie was finally released last month. There was quite a bit of makeup and effects for certain parts of the movie, though, as… well, this post will likely contain spoilers so I’ll save it for after the jump.

But this 9-minute behind the scenes look goes through the process of how special effects artists like Kevin Yagher (who worked on the first two Bill & Ted movies, countless others and is also creator of the original Chucky) built the muscle and “fat suits” for Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter for various scenes during their reprisal of those two iconic characters.

The director of Chris Hemsworth’s new movie strapped himself to the hood of a car to film this chase scene

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People will do some crazy things in order to get the shot, especially automotive photographers and filmmakers. But this one really takes the prize. For a chase scene of Chris Hemsworth’s new movie, Extraction, director Sam Hargrave actually strapped himself to the hood of a car to hold the camera and film the chase scene.

And that’s not the only crazy filming technique used to create this scene, either. Netflix posted a behind the scenes look to Facebook of how the chase scene was filmed, along with the final edited result of what the camera saw, and boy does it look good!

Lok Cheung takes a trip through the Fujifilm factory assembling the GFX100 and now-discontinued X-H1

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While it might look like Lok Cheung is preparing for a viral outbreak in the image for the above video, he’s actually dressed to enter the cleanroom at Fujifilm’s Sendai factory in Japan, where they assemble the sensors for the Fujifilm GFX 100 medium format mirrorless camera.

Lok mentions in the video that this footage was shot a while ago when the Fuji X-H1 was still in production, but it still offers some fascinating insight into Fujifilm’s approach to assembling cameras, with much of the final assembly being done by hand.

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