2011 already seems a lifetime ago. A harsh winters chill has enveloped New York, and no amount of protective clothing seems capable of keeping it out. Sitting in a dark studio at 4:30 in the afternoon seems the perfect time to write the first post of 2012, featuring a 2011 summer road trip through the hills and valleys North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Jim Brown’s International Lone Star Harley Davidson | Caldwell, OH
The New Cruelty was commissioned by Fathom Communications in Chicago to shoot a portfolio of images of owner/drivers and their International Trucks. The images were to be used primarily for the 2012 International calendar, but also for web and all forms of social media.
The call had originally came from Chris Tag, a creative director at Fathom – and also the man behind DefyBags and a fellow Rush fan. The first stop was in Charlotte, North Carolina , where TNC teamed up with Chris (and account exec Lizzie Chybowski) to photograph the immaculate team trucks at the Ernhardt Ganassi and Roush FenwayNASCAR racing teams, both near the town of Concorde, NC. For photographer and TNC creative partner, James Bareham, it was his first return to a racing team headquarters since his work for McLaren Mercedes Formula One Team in the UK, and a welcome opportunity for a petrol head tour of the huge workshops and facilities of Ernhardt Ganassi.
From Charlotte, the team moved onto Pennsylvania, and then on into Ohio, visiting cities, small towns and truck stops; from Pittsburg, Monaca & West Middleton in PA; to Athens, Caldwell & Bethesda in OH. At each location, James and photographic assistant Brandon Kornprobst (Fathom AD Andrea Bettinardi joined them for the shoot in the university town of Athens, OH) spent time with each driver to find the right locations to give the images the authentic feel required. This shoot was not just about capturing the majesty and sheer presence of these trucks; it was also to document the real characters of the owners and drivers, many of whom spend up to 14 hours a day driving, and live in some of the most recession hit areas of the US. Two weeks is a fairly long time to be on the road, but the hospitality, patience and the general sense of good humor of these drivers was nothing short of inspirational. And the trucks were totally mega too.
Rich Powers’s International Lone Star | Monaca, PA
Jeff Kovaks International Lone Star | Saint Claire, OH
Earl Lee’s International Lone Star Harley Davidson | Athens, OH
At this time last year, I wrote “I seem to remember writing last year, the Holiday Season has, once again, pounced on us and has caught us completely by surprise. Our excuse? The last couple of months have seen an unprecedented amount of work come through our studio.” This year, it is doubly true – it’s been incredibly busy – so once again, we’re a little late with the December update.
In short, 2011 has been much more than just a busy year; it has clearly been a significant year for The New Cruelty.
The continuing development of our integrated video and stills productions culminated in our epic late summer project for Chevy, The Ride of Your Life. This has since proved to be THE definition of a concept that we have been steadily working on for the last two years, and its ultimate success is in no small part testament to the trust and belief placed in us by the teams at rehabstudio and Goodby Silverstein & Partners – big thanks.
2011 also saw the final delivery of nearly 600 images to Citi. The result of almost two years work – up to and including selected photographs from a commissioned shoot with models shot on location in San Francisco earlier this Spring – these images represent the foundation of a rights-purchased photographic library that is now available for usage across all of Citi ICG. We will continue to grow and develop this work during 2012.
These are just two examples of some of the eclectic range of work we have undertaken this year. There were also some small big changes in 2011. Producer Kyle Kramer moved onto accept an incredible invitation to become Executive Producer at Vox Media (home of SB Nation and our friends at The Verge) and Jana Flynn joined us our first digital producer – ‘bon chance’ and ‘welcome’ respectively.
Yet perhaps most significantly, 2011 has been the year in which we defined exactly how we intend to grow and develop in the future. 2012 will be our fifth year in business, and we sincerely hope that we will look back on next year as the year we truly defined exactly what The New Cruelty is all about.
All the remains is to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday and a fabulous New Year. We will be closed from Friday December 23rd and we will re-open on January 1st, 2012. I may well use some of the time off to design next years holiday image so that I don’t have to use the same one again for the third year in a row.
Our brief, from rehabstudio creative director Tim Rodgers, was to create ALL of the different video and photographic elements needed to build the Chevy ‘Ride of Your Life’ web experience – and all through one fully integrated production.
Commissioned by Goodby Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, the ‘Ride of Your Life’ site web site incorporates Google Maps Street View, Google Places and Facebook Connect to enable you to take a personalized ride through your life driving one of six classic Chevys – such as the ’53 Corvette, ’57 Belair and 69 Stingray – whilst listening to one of six iconic music tracks on the ‘radio’.
The visual content requirements for this ambitious project fell into three distinct areas of need; video, stills and Iybrid Moving Pictures. The video component came in two parts: Firstly shooting exterior and interior details of each of the six classic Chevys, as well as footage of each of the cars out on the road. Secondly, capturing bi-coastal B-Roll footage of roads, signs, landscapes and general road trip details – this specific content would be used by rehabstudio to link the footage of the cars and Google Street View together.
The photographic and Iybrid aspect of the production comprised of shooting precise 180 panoramic shots of the car interiors (to create a virtual drivers eye view) plus stills and Iybrid Moving Pictures of each of the six classic Chevys, as well as details shots of their radios, interiors, badges etc
Iybrid | 1953 Corvette
Iybrid | 1948 Chevy Pickup
1957 Chevy Bel Air | Dashboard
1948 Chevy Pickup | Radio
The production began with a three day combined video and photographic shoot in the leafy surroundings of Grosse Pointe, Detroit. TNC EP Stuart Hart choreographed one single seamless production that comprised of a location car ‘studio’ for the 180 degree interiors; a video production shooting static details, atmospherics and driving footage from a camera car rig (with Medhi Zollo handling the DP and directorial duties) and finally Iybrid ‘portaits’ of each of the cars – which mainly involved photographer James Bareham lying in the street with camera poised whilst waiting patiently for the wind to gently waft through the trees. All of this frenzied visual content creation came under the enigmatic creative direction of Tim Rodgers and the creative team of Megan + Margie from GSP.
Once the shoot in Grosse Pointe, Detroit was wrapped up, a condensed creative production team – comprising of Zollo, Tim, Hayden (AD rehabstudio) John (Flug), TNC Producer Kyle Kramer and GSP digital producer Sharman Ordoyne – embarked on an adventurous road trip to shoot video B-Roll. Their journey that took them from Detroit to the deserts of Las Vegas, and from there to the mountains, valleys and costs of Northern California.
By the time the shoot was complete, hundreds of hours of footage had been captured. The un-enviable task of editing, grading and After-Effects work fell entirely on the shoulders of the rehabstudio team back in London, but with one exception. Zollo was asked to edit a 30 second trailer to play on YouTube to promote the site, a task he embraced with gusto.
Without doubt, ‘Ride of Your Life’ is one of the most significant projects that we have ever undertaken. It brought together every facet of our visual creative expertise which we wrapped into one, integrated production. During pre-pro phase, it had quickly become apparent that our previous experience of working together with Tim and the rehabstudio team was going to be immensely valuable, both in terms of preparing us for the almost overwhelming amount of content that needed to be created, but also by giving us a deep understanding of the unique challenges of creating bespoke content for digital. In other words, ‘Ride of Your Life’ proved to everyone – ourselves included – that truly integrated video and photographic productions aren’t only possible, they’re the way of the future.
We also want to take the opportunity to congratulate Mark Levy – drummer and rock DJ – on the creation of National Metal Day – 11.11.11 on Facebook. A long time friend of the The New Cruelty, Mark brilliantly took the very simple idea of designing a few iconic rock t-shirts to commemorate todays date, and combined it with curating a collection heavy metal videos. By harnessing the power of Facebook, he created a fan page with over 7,700 fans (at the time of writing) – which will probably be way over 8,000 by the end of today. We’re currently working with Mark on some exciting ideas for creating visual content to develop his new venture, but regardless of where it goes from here, it’s a hell of an achievement so far – respect.
UPDATE: We weren’t even close! National Metal Day – 11.11.11 has in fact attracted just shy of another 3,000 fans in one day. Rock on.
We’re thrilled to have a genuine exclusive for our first blog post of the Autumn.
On a hot, sticky day last August, we were invited to the offices of SB Nation on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, to shoot a complete set of portraits of Joshua Topolsky and the entire team behind one of the most eagerly anticipated consumer technology web sites to launch to date: The Verge.
The Verge will be an authoritative and comprehensive source of news, reviews, journalistic features and product information covering the world of consumer technology, headed by Josh along with a roster of the industry’s leading writers and editors. The idea was to create images for the site that had a great ‘techie’ feel, inspired by the early advertisements for IBM and science editorials of the 70′s and 80′s – think pictures of Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak in the garage – or early editions of Omni. But it was also important that these pictures retained the sense of the humor, as well as evoke the unbridled passion for technology that permeates everyone who is part of The Verge. You only have to listen to the irreverent Podcasts by Josh, Nilay and Paul to get a sense of what what drives the whole team.
Though everyone is currently working on the interim site, This Is My Next prior to the launch of The Verge, many, unsurprisingly, work remotely. The specific date for the shoot was chosen as it was one of the few days that everyone from the east coast, the west coast AND Europe was actually going to be in same room in NYC – some for the very first time.
With the brand new painted logos as the main focal points, the office was turned into a makeshift studio and photo portrait set. The props were sensational – vintage technical gadgets of all shapes an sizes, including a mint condition Apple Newton and some truly huge mobile phones. The choices for wardrobe were eclectic in the extreme – think MadMen meets Wired – and everyone managed to come up with their own individual look, even if that look was to look like they didn’t have a look.
Now, in a departure from our normal Blog posts and in honor of The Verge’s huge following, we thought that we’d give a short technical outline of the shoot:
For this particular project, we chose to use a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR, shooting on the RAW setting – even though the final images will predominantly be used within the digital realm, it’s always better to have the flexibity of raw files for back-up. The 5D is ideal as it has more than enough pixels; it is small and light, and takes lenses that are wide enough to capture a large group of people within a tight space. The portraits were shot on the 100mm 2.8 Macro, one of the sharpest lenses known to man. The group shot was taken on the 16-35mm 2.8 EF lens. Though the 16-35mm is a zoom and therefore isn’t as sharp as the equivalent prime lenses, the ability to rapidly recompose a group shot was far out weighs a modicum of barrel distortion. The lighting came from the ProFoto Acute 2400 with two heads – the first acted as main light (shooting through an umbrella) and the second provided fill bounced off the ceiling.
Having captured the individual portraits and group shot(s), we returned to Williamsburg and from the relative clam of our studio, we selected a range of pictures to retouch in Photoshop (CS5). The first step of retouching any collection of images is to define the color balance and grading parameters. The tonal range of The Verge portraits was inspired by the warm tone Kodachrome portraits of the 70′s. Once we had created a master set of curves, the retoucher simply dropped them onto each file, cleaned up any blemishes and then tweaked the masks and levels to best suit the individual. The final part of the process was to apply a high-pass filter to the flattened file – which helps to define hair and general detail in any image posted online.
Remarkably, the main group shot is comprised of only two final frames. We cut out three people from the one frame to replace themselves in the other – though in the interest of debate we’re not going to say which three, that’s up to the readers of The Verge to guess. Like all great group shots, the success of the final image can be directly attributed to the wide variety of expressions on the different people within the group. Not least in this case, the expression on Josh. He managed to keep a stoic expression throughout the entire take; he never once broke into a smile on camera. In fact, getting him to break the expression in the portraits was the greatest challenge of the day.
Here are a small selection of pictures from the shoot, and a few more images from the shoot can be seen on our Facebook page. A full gallery of images will be posted on new cruelty.com after The Verge goes live.
UPDATE: We’re humbled by the incredible response to the pictures and love some of the comments on ThisIsMyNext. Due to popular demand, Nilay requested we posted hires images sized for screen – and we thought that we’d post them here too. Click here for 2560 x 1440px and if you’ve got a 30inch Monitor, click here for the 2560 x 1600px
This is a truly sad day. Yesterday, October 5th, 2011, Apple announced the death of Steve Jobs.
Since I first turned on my Macintosh Classic II back in 1992, I have been unashamed to call myself an Apple fan, and to count Steve Jobs as one of my greatest inspirations. Steve (somehow I feel I should call him Mr Jobs) always struck me as a man who seemed unconcerned by what was commonly considered possible, or even probable. Even after being thrown out of the company he founded, the possibility of failure, or that he could possibly be wrong, never seemed to occur to him – and I was envious of that. However for me, it was his intuition, his innate understanding of the value of simplicity, and his passion for usability, taste and design that really defined his genius. And I don’t use that word lightly. Steve was a true genius, the personification of a word that is so often used to describe people who are anything but.
So much will be written, Tweeted and posted over the coming days and months about Steve and his legacy. President Obama eloquently wrote “The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.” This post is really not about Steve’s legacy, for that is all around us – quite literally in our case as every computer in this office is an Apple and all of the work on our website was retouched, edited or designed on a Mac.
No, my reason for writing this today is not about being a fan, or eulogizing Steve (OK, maybe a little), it’s much more personal. It is to simply say thank you to a man I never met, but who has been a profound influence on my life. Thank you for inspiring me to keep it simple, to trust my instincts, to strive for perfection and to never settle for second best. Thank you.
“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” – Steve Jobs. He later went on to say “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
