Big Pictures Media, Inc.

01/10/2025

This may be the first time in history someone has gotten her hair touched up while also receiving an eye exam!

11/14/2024

Jewelry heist? No, just our great wardrobe person handling some important details during our commercial shoot last week - like the fact our two leads are married - and thus should have wedding bands!

10/08/2024

🎥 In our ongoing series "Kids Playing with Expensive Cameras", our young actor takes his turn behind the lens from our DP Ryan. Sometimes the best performance takes a bit of bribery beyond edible treats: "If you don't look at the camera now, you can look through it later!"

10/04/2024

Help please! We are producing a commercial that requires some footage of a kids soccer game - preferably mixed gender, or girls. 8-12 or so years old. We are looking at stock footage, but might also shoot it ourselves, since this will give us more control.

Does anyone know anything about the local kids soccer world here in the Denver area, and if there are still games being played this late in the season? Anyone have a kid on a team, or know someone who does?

Any insights would be most helpful. Thank you!

09/24/2024

🎥 The Big Pictures team took over a bar and a few other spots in Breckinridge last week to shoot a spot about NOT drinking, or at least not drinking too much!

Building Hope Summit County

09/05/2024

Three years ago we got a call from ESPN asking us if we could do this top secret project at a top secret location in Denver helping to figure out where Peyton Manning might launch a new show.

It would be an experiment where he and his brother Ely would sort of narrate Monday Night Football games. We needed to evaluate this really cool garage filled with like a billion dollars worth of antique cars, a giant man cave really, and do some tests with our crew, and brainstorm some ideas.

So we did. And they liked it!

Well long story short, it looks like the experiment worked. Manningcast is now a wildly popular show about to launch its 3rd season. Looking forward to seeing what these guys do this year!

NFL

08/22/2024

Congrats Bo Nix for earning the starting QB spot for the Denver Broncos. Looking forward to working with you more!

08/15/2024

🎥 Scenes from a super fun shoot for On Tap Credit Union right here in Golden, Colorado!

07/31/2024

🎥 to the day our entire crew got to touch Missy Franklin's gold medal (oh yeah, and work with her too!) What blast!

07/30/2024

There's nothing like capturing a POV shot with an expensive camera when an Olympic level boxer is sparring with you! We've had the pleasure of working on all kinds of Olympic feature stories over the years - here's one of them...

On the day Muhammad Ali passed away, we happened to be in the boxing gym of the Olympic Training center in Colorado Springs. Our mission was to capture footage of two young boxers heading for the Olympics - Shakur Stevenson, and Carlos Balderas.

The news of Ali’s passing spread quickly, but the boxers went about their business as Ali’s poster hung in inspiration on the wall outside their gym.

Shakur, a 19-year old bantamweight fighter, had secured his bid to the Rio Olympics in December 2015. By the time we met up with him in early June, his energy and excitement exploded out of him with every punch - as we filmed him working out and sparring in the ring.

Special thanks to USA Boxing for allowing us access, Carlos and Shakur for their tremendous patience (can you hit that again please? Okay just one more time...), our client Bleacher Report for the opportunity to work on this feature, and Cameron Lowder who came out to put it all together.

07/29/2024

Did you catch Stephen Spielberg's "Land of Stories" open for the Olympics?

What a beautiful tribute to storytelling, and a perfect way to set the Olympic table!

"I'm drawn to stories about everyday characters who you wouldn't even notice passing them on the street. But, when they encounter a huge obstacle, it can change them into the kind of people you like to call heroes."

Most of the work we get to do is about "ordinary people" who are somehow thrust into the extraordinary. Whether it's a man's battle with addiction a, dairy farmer carving out a living by going organic on her farm, or a young lady trying to find a career with purpose, every video we make is deeply steeped in story.

This is done with intention. Why? So people will watch them! And feel them, and remember them later.

No one cares about the cameras we used, the drones we flew, the size of the crew, or what the video costs.

They care about what happens to the characters the video allows them to meet.

And believe me, no matter what kind of video you need to make for your brand or organization, there is a way to enrich it with story so that your target audience will want to watch it again and again!

You can watch "Land of Stories" here - https://buff.ly/4frCo2n

07/25/2024

to when we found ourselves in a pool with eleven-time Olympic medalist Ryan Lochte and still photographer Matthias Clamer re-creating that iconic Nevermind album cover for ESPN Magazine’s – the Music Issue.

The first time I heard Nirvana’s Nevermind album from start to finish, I was driving to a location scout in Southern California for an Isuzu Rodeo commercial. You may remember the campaign – directed by Barry Sonnenfeld – where the kids refuse to stay between the lines in class, and later on the road in their mud-eating Rodeos. Ryan Lochte was about eight years old at that time, and probably already wreaking havoc between the lines of every swimming pool he entered.

For this issue, they convinced fourteen athletes to recreate some of the most memorable album covers ever – including Allyson Felix as Beyonce, Josh Freeman as Michael Jackson, and Ryan Lochte as the now famous baby on Nirvana’s Nevermind album.

Instead of the baby, now it’s Lochte reaching for that dollar bill.

And unlike the baby, Lochte is sporting a Speedo.

07/24/2024

🎬 3 Tricks to Perfect 2-Camera Interviews

Two matching cameras can add a lot of value to single person interviews, but are absolutely vital for interviewing 2 (or more) people at once. Here are some basics:

1) Both cameras need to be on the same side as the interviewer, otherwise the shots won't cut together. So the order is usually KEY LIGHT - INTERVIEWER - CAMERA A - CAMERA B, or in reverse. The cameras can be close together of far apart for different angles, but must be on the same side.

2) For two or more people being interviewed, once camera can be a fixed wide shot, and the other camera can be chasing singles depending on who is talking. If one only person is being interviewed, the second camera can be a side angle to provide another shot to edit with. These two shots should look different enough - wide/tight, or different angles - so that when you edit them together it doesn't look like a jump cut.

3) The cameras must match. And the best way to make this happen is to shoot in LOG. We have a Sony FX9 and an FX6 that match perfectly, when we shoot in SLOG 3 and grade them in post.

Reach out if you need help making your interviews look great. We've shot like a million of them, so got it pretty much figured out!



Hope you like my fabulous sketch below. DM me if you want a signed print 😜

07/19/2024

Where do different types of videos fit into the customer journey? I just attended a fantastic webinar put on by Vimeo and LinkedIn that explored just that.

🔼 Top of the Funnel - Brand stories, brand awareness videos, branded content. These videos should anchor to a universal truth. Apple does a great job of this with it's Apple at Work series. In this case, the universal truth is that we are all busy. Everybody understands and appreciates that, so you begin with that common ground.

We recently created a series of brand films for Rocky Mountain Health Plans that celebrates their collaboration with community partner organizations throughout the state. Each one is anchored in a universal truth - something we all can relate to - like loving your children, struggling to take care of our aging parents, healthcare security, and even feeling outcast from society, You can check them out in the link below.

🔼 Middle of the funnel - These are centered more around problem statements. My problem is ______, and I need _________ to solve it. Here videos and commercials can get much more specific. I need to find a way to make my work more portable. The Apple iPad is the solution.

🔼 Bottom of the funnel - Now you are asking your customers to take action. These have more CTA's, and fit well into the buying journey because at this point the customer knows the brand, knows it will help them solve their problem, but just needs to decide if it's time to buy.

The point is the creators of videos for businesses and brands should know the exact purpose of these video for their clients, and know how they will fit into the lifecycle of their target audience's sales journey.

Our members are our neighbors, friends, and fellow Coloradans – real people overcoming real challenges.  At Rocky Mountain Health Plans, we are right here with you, rolling up our sleeves to do what it takes to reach better outcomes.  We work closely with local doctors, non-profits, county and s...

07/16/2024

when we took over the courts at the Denver Athletic Club to shoot this branded content series for Under Armour many years ago. These were the early days of the Phantom camera, and we had one on set to capture the shoes hitting the court at 300 frames per second, which was a huge deal back then!

I wrote in our blog at the time: "When Phantom Camera Tech Kevin Zanit first revealed the high-speed camera, we all gathered around - many seeing it for the first time. It’s essentially a cool looking box with a lens on one end and a cable wrap on the other end leading to a computer. The 8 gigabyte version captures twelve or so seconds of footage at 300 frames per second into its internal high-speed dynamic ram. It then takes twelve minutes or so to download the footage from the camera into the computer’s hard drive, thus freeing the camera up for another take."

Of course the Phantom workflow has improved greatly since then, but it was sure fun to be on the cutting edge!



Phantom High-Speed from Vision Research
Under Armour

07/15/2024

Have you ever watched your dog smell things, and wondered what they are getting from it? I mean our dog Tasha can spend forever in one area, smelling each blade of grass, or little berry on a bush. It's like she's reading a book or watching a movie.

A quick Google search gave me some fascinating facts:

🦮 Dogs have up to 300 million olfactory receptors, or smell receptors, in their noses, which is 10,000 times more than humans.

🐶 Dogs' sense of smell is so powerful that they can detect a single teaspoon of sugar dissolved in a million gallons of water, which is the equivalent of two Olympic-sized swimming pools.

🧠 Dogs also have a part of their brain that's about 40 times larger than a human's that's dedicated to analyzing smells.They can use their sense of smell to detect cancer, predict seizures, identify people with low blood sugar, and sense fear and anxiety.

I think dogs actually smell in "color" and can not only tell who or what was there, but how long ago and maybe even what they were doing and why.

Honesty I'm a little jealous - like she's in on something I'll never be privy to!

But why did they evolve these gifts? It all comes down to story (you knew I'd get there!)

The information a canine gathers through smell tells them stories that help them survive, and has for centuries. Same with people. Our stories are not just entertainment, they are about survival. I

'm reading an excellent book called "Sapiens" that proposes the very evolution of humanity evolved around our ability to tell stories.

🎥 So what does all this have to do with filmmaking? (You knew I'd get there!) Every film we make - from the simplest corporate video to the most complex feature film - is loaded with elements of story (or at least should be.)

A well done video should hit the audience deep in our story-loving soul, and make us stick around like a dog sniffing a fire hydrant!

[Tasha is a member of DAG (the Dog Actor's Guild) and gave us permission to use her nose for this story 🙌 ]

07/11/2024

It's Wimbledon time! 🎾 I love tennis. I love playing it, and I love watching it. And I'm much better at the latter than the former.

So in honor of the Wimbledon finals coming up this weekend, here are some pretty cool moments when my career has aligned with my love for tennis.

In the Edward R. Murrow Award-winning short film (below) that I shot for ESPN a hundred years ago, we feature tennis phenom Andrea Jaeger, and her journey from becoming world #2 at the age of 15, to ultimately giving up tennis and becoming an Anglican Dominican nun in order to continue her work to help children with cancer. This inspirational film was narrated by the great Tom Rinaldi. Note that it's over 10 minutes long - a HUGE amount of time for an ESPN feature.

Below is a sample clip. You can watch the entire film on our Big Pictures YouTube channel - https://buff.ly/3RT9yOg

I've also gotten to work with Martina Navratilova (on a feature for Oprah), Andy Roddick, and Chris Evert. And very early in my career, I shot a commercial in San Diego for Pro Kennex with the legendary Rod Laver.

So if you are a tennis fan like me, I hope you enjoy the upcoming finals. Our family tradition for Breakfast at Wimbledon is bagels and lox, and of course berries and cream.

07/10/2024

Sometimes you gotta improvise a sound studio out of couches, like today with Darius Rucker, AKA Hootie of Hootie and the Blowfish. Backstage before his show today. Listen for his work tomorrow night on the ESPY’s.