The innovative thinkers Michael Sokol and Andrew Santamaria of Marketzero came up with a new character, Dr. Lung Love, and a clever parody that mimics Pitbull’s new music video, “Hotel Room Service”. Today, the Lung Cancer Alliance has their version called “Waitin Room Service” thanks to director/editor, Eric De Fino, of Raygun who created the music video:

Marketzero asked my team and I to help conceptualize the look for the Lung Love Website. We thought it would be great to continue the parody and reproduce the Pitbull album look. So, during the filming of the music video at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Atlanta, GA, my producer, Jamarie, along with my trusted photo tech guru, Trent Chau, set up a mobile environment to get the shots we needed in between takes.

Photo by Trent Chau

Given the type of shot we wanted the only place we could use was the hallway. We couldn’t keep our setup there for long since foot traffic was an issue.

Ultimately we got what we needed to create the composite for the Lung Love site. Of course, the nurse wasn’t wearing a camo set of scrubs so I had to add that pattern in post. Everything turned out perfect at the end.

Many thanks to the whole team!

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iStockPhoto selected the “Let’s Get It!” composite as a top 10 finalist for the Design of the Year award. Granted it didn’t win, but being a top 10 finalist is pretty darned good. You can find out more about it on the iStockPhoto Finalist page.

We had originally conceptualized the shot to be done at the exterior of a mansion in Atlanta. We were going to bring in a couple of luxury cars and boats, while integrating a few stock photos in post. But, after we were done thinking through all of the logistics, I felt it was more appropriate to try something else out instead. We ended up capturing the models in a studio and building a “getting it” scene around the featured players, using nothing but stock photography. Essentially, that’s how the following design came to be:

My team and I are grateful for the finalist recognition. And congrats to the winner!

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Imagine making a short film in 2 days, better yet, picture yourself conceptualizing, writing, shooting and editing that film in the same 48 hours. Well, that’s the 48 Hour Film Project (”48HFP”), an international contest that challenges filmmakers to complete a 4-7 minute film over the course of a weekend.

Out of the 70 teams who entered into the 2009 Atlanta 48HFP, our movie won Best Film along with four other awards. The best part of this story is, I’m not a filmmaker…

Let me first explain how the 48HFP works. All of the team leaders gather just before the 48 hour block of time begins.

70 Teams Gather to Compete

At the gathering, we were given three elements that every team needed to work into their film somehow. They were as follows:

Character: Ann Knight, Transit Co. Employee
Prop: Art Supplies
Line: “I think I can do it”

Every team pulls a unique genre from a hat…ours was Superhero.

It’s 7:01 in the evening on Friday. The film needed to be submitted no later than 7:30pm Sunday. As the details were revealed, everyone in the bar was on the phone calling their production teams. My team, Tannhauser Gate, and I worked out a different communication strategy. I knew that trying to keep a 29+ person team up-to-date throughout the weekend was going to be challenging, so everyone used Twitter to stay in touch and keep record of the event. You can relive our real-time Tweets here: http://twitter.com/tgate

Between 7:01 pm and 7:14 pm, I tweeted the required elements and genre to the group, who were poised and ready at our rendezvous point, an improv theatre. Instead of a gathering a bunch of brains in a room to figure out a story, I called upon the talented improvisors at Village Theatre to help get our Story Team’s brain cells churning. For an hour or so, the performers acted out sketches that played with with the elements we had to work with. Granted, we didn’t use “exactly” what they acted out, but it did lead us down the path to the story we ultimately wrote. All in all, it was an excellent experience to work with the gang at the Village Theatre and it started us off with a roar.

Photo by Mark Lewin

If there was one objective I had in making this film, it was to make sure that each member of our team was doing what they loved to do. Sure, you can say I “directed” the film, but what I really did was inspire every member of our team to be the best they could be. Yes, I did make us completely change the script at 3:00am in the morning. If you don’t know what utter disappointment, borderline hatred looks like, it definitely resembled the facial expressions I witnessed at that moment in time. Michael Sokol, our head writer, had the best scowl of all, that quickly shifted into a more hunched posture, as he leaned into another round of typing. Matt Odum played a combo puzzle slash 52 pick-up game with the story’s index cards and Trent made a blanket with the old script, while curling into a kitten-like ball at the edge of the sofa. Deontae took a long, lingering stare at his beautifully illustrated storyboards, that were tied to a story that we were no longer telling.

Photo by Mark Lewin

As the sun came up, our main actors, Kyle and Mehgan Walls, and day crew members started to arrive as Michael and I were finalizing the script. Thanks to Angie of Psycho Sisters, Montine and Kimberly Jo, we had an amazing array of costumes. They had been compiling them since about 2:00am and Nancy (our makeup ninja) was ready to go with everything we needed to pull the looks together. The rest our talented team of actors arrived shortly thereafter and were dressed and prepped.

Photo by Mark Lewin

Once Eric De Fino (our DP), Matt Odom, Ryan Rodinis and Eric Heinen and the production team finished blocking the script, we started shooting. Joey Appie and Eric Heinen were hustling to get our equipment where it needed to be and were stellar at making sure that our crew was operational. Of course, Jamarie (also my wife) was playing the role as AD, executing her meticulous plan to make sure that we were all doing what she planned for us to do, at the time and place we were supposed to be doing it.

Photo by Mark Lewin

Our first shot was around 10:00am and we were going strong until about 2:00pm. We used two Canon 5D Mark II’s to film this. Yes, we used DSLRs to film the whole movie in HD. Eric DeFino and Ryan even put together a special rig to hold the cameras:

Photo by Mark Lewin

Then, the dreaded first MAJOR issue occurred. We lost about 2 hours to a dead boom mic and eventually figured it out, after we ran around looking for a replacement mic and the “perfect” connector cable. We continued to shoot all day, outside in the heat, eventually moving to our interior shots, as the sun set and we continued shooting well into the night.

Photo by Mark Lewin

Again, I have to give a big thanks to everyone for hanging in there during that heat. Brian Wible, Kim, and Montine were doing as excellent job making sure that everyone stayed hydrated and fed, Luli Alonso was our watchdog and Mark Lewin was our stellar behind the scenes photographer. You can find his pictures here: http://bit.ly/DRtbs

Photo by Mark Lewin

We finally wrapped at 1:44am (according to twitter) and all decided to rest for the night, with the intention to re-convene around 6:00am. All the while, during our rest, Amy Puckett and Helen Thomas were converting our movie files, putting the shots in the timeline, and preparing the meat of our story to be mastered, upon the editing crew’s return in the morning.

Photo by Mark Lewin

Enter 9:45 am on Sunday…we all overslept!! In hindsight, this was probably a good thing, because it gave us the “rested” advantage, but at the time it resulted in tweets like, “@analogueamy are you coming in?” and “via @milkovic: My car smells like Red Bull this morning” The ultimate result was high-speed editing mode, which was evident in tweets like, “via @SupremeMcGriff: edit, edit, edit. render, render, render.”

Photo by Mark Lewin

Our music experts, Andre Krasich and Eric Mason, had prepared some scores for us to incorporate into the film. Ryan and Eric were making “blue balls” in their secret special effects dungeon. And Trent Chau, my co-producer, was calming me down as Eric De Fino was working in Avid faster than I’ve ever seen before in my life.

Photo by Mark Lewin

We were coming down to the wire and it was 40 minutes before we needed to hand off the film when we finally completed it. Our film’s run time was a mere 2 seconds over the minimum required time of 4 minutes. Now, we needed to put it onto a disk somehow. The only acceptable format we could configure FAST was a thumbdrive, but the movie needed to be rendered with a certain codec per 48HFP rules…and that would take another 12 minutes! Jeez. So, we rendered it on our editor’s machine at his studio, leaving us with 18 minutes to drop the movie off to a location that was about that far away. This would have been fine, but we still had to copy it to the thumb-drive which would take another 12 minutes. So, we attached Eric’s Mac to my Powerbook via firewire, copied the movie over, ran out the door and took the thumbdrive operation on the road.

Photos by Mark Lewin

My wife (and AD), Jamarie, was behind the wheel of the car and speeding like an absolute maniac (I know she loved it), running through one stoplight after another, while Ryan was the pace car, carving a path through traffic for us. About 1 minute into our drive, I get a disk error message on the thumbdrive. This pretty much spelled out the end of our hope to hand it over in time, but for some reason, that wasn’t our destiny. It somehow occurred to me to re-format the thumbdrive and the start the operation again. To my relief, the movie was finally copying over!

7:29pm, we pull up to the dropoff location, laptop still attached to the thumbdrive, as it pushed over the last little bits. I hit the eject button and handed the thumbdrive over at 7:30pm on the nose. The funny part of the story is that we never had a chance to see the film all the way through. So I had no idea what I was submitting.

Photo by Jamarie Milkovic

As we panted and hugged, a local reporter stuck a microphone in our face, exclaiming “We’d love to interview you!” We opted to share some of our joy, pain, and mostly relief with them. Look for us in their upcoming special about the 48HFP.

Photo by Mark Lewin

At our wrap party, we finally got to watch the film and enjoyed wonderful homemade treats from Luli and Montine (along with some much needed wine and vodka). We were tired, but happy.

Flash forward one month.
Trent and I get a message from the 48HFP saying “Mr. Amazing” is one of eleven films heading to the award ceremony. We just didn’t expect to win five awards. They are as follows:

1. Best Acting
2. Best Use of Line of Dialogue
3. Best Costumes
4. Best Musical Score
5. and lastly…Best Film.

Wow, we simply did not expect that at all. We are all humbled by the experience and honored by the recognition. I’m proud of each and everyone of our team members. I’m looking forward to working with them all again.

Photo by the Canon 5D Mark II we used

So, we made ourselves a movie… and it all started with a conversation on iChat. About a month before the 2009 Atlanta 48HFP, Trent Chau sent me a link to the 48HFP Website. Without being 100% sure how it worked, I paid the entry fee and here we are. I can’t thank the Tannhauser Gate Team enough for all of their incredible work on this endeavor.

The 5 Awards Mr. Amazing Won (Trophy Coming soon!)

And now, “Mr. Amazing”:

Mr. Amazing from Thom Milkovic on Vimeo.

Mr. Amazing will be screened at the Las Vegas Filmapalooza in 2010. Yeah, Vegas baby.

Full credits are listed on the Official Mr. Amazing Vimeo Page.

A deep heart-felt thank you to every individual who helped make this film a success!

Best,
Thom Milkovic

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Most all of the stock photos were from iStockPhoto, who just yesterday voted the photomontage as Design of the Week on their homepage:

Thanks! I appreciate the accolades because this was the most complicated of the Azizi Major’s Website photos.

I wanted the final composite to be “over populated” with images that would represent luxury, wealth and success while keeping Azizi as the main focus. At first, my team and I discussed coordinating a much larger photo shoot at a mansion in Atlanta and Photoshopping in various elements like helicopters, cars, etc. But we ultimately decided to shoot the models, Azizi Major and CEO on green screen and tell the rest of the story only through stock imagery. If we would’ve gone with one of the other stock sources, this final image would’ve been extremely expensive to put together. Therefore, iStockPhoto was the most logical choice for our budget.

In hindsight, I think it was a smart decision. If you want to take a second to check out all the images used in the composite, click here.

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View the 17,000 pixel wide panorama here. Click to zoom. Drag to explore. More controls are on the bottom. Be sure to check out Whistler on the other side!

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The model is Misha. A few weeks ago (early March), we decided to do a photo shoot in my rooftop pool that overlooks downtown Atlanta. My goal was to capture her in a seductive sense of luxury with a slight metropolitan feel. Trent Chau, another great fellow photographer, graciously helped out that night while I climbed into the pool to get my shot:

Image Courtesy of Trent Chau

Fortunately, the pool is heated and only 3ft. deep (yes, the camera is insured). And, no, I did not use the pop-up flash to take the shot. It was only used to remotely trigger the SB-900 (full power) to my left and the one directly behind Misha (1/4 power as a hair light). I could’ve used the 70mm-200mm f/2.8 from the other side of the pool, but I felt it was necessary to get this shot from no more than a few feet away. So, I wound up using the 24mm-70mm f/2.8 instead.

All-in-all, I think it turned out pretty well. The only problem was getting out of the pool. It’s frakking freezing when the cold March wind hits you!

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Wow. I was amazed to read this and I greatly appreciate Create Magazine’s comments. However, I wasn’t the only one involved in bringing the site to life. After conceptualizing the overall approach, filming and editing the green screen and designing Mike’s brand and look, I called upon Actionscript specialist Gregor Patterson to custom program an interesting blend of Flash, HTML and Javascript. This approach allowed the site to be SEO friendly as well as offer visual impact. We also called in design guru and CSS expert John Williams to create a blog in Wordpress and integrate many elements with Salesforce.com. Mike’s site wouldn’t be as simple and cool without them.

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Azizi asked me to create a “unique” site experience for his debut album, Vendin’ Machine Music. The final result is pretty revolutionary in the music industry. My team ended up developing a visual MP3 player that allows you to hear his entire album, as well as experience the music online. My business partner, Azizi and myself talked about various ideas with regard to putting his album online for people to listen to and be a part of. The fact that visitors can listen to the album for free online seemed to fit his business objectives and serves as powerful tribute to his listeners and fans. Given the quality of the experience and the availability of it to anyone, this approach allows the album to be felt and savored by so many people.

It was an adventure building the site. The overall development was fascinating, to say the least. From one meeting and conversation to the next, each scene began to take on a life of its own. Concepts that started out as sketches and ideas to chew on, evolved and morphed, becoming the strong arm of reality in this experience.

Numerous photo shoots were scheduled in order for me to photograph and direct all the scenes you see on the site, such as this final composite for the song, Beer Goggles:

Final Beer Goggles Composite for AziziMajor.com

I  had to merge seven pictures into one since each model had a great pose in different shots. Add some post stop motion flying beer, a roaring fireplace, some disco lights, and voila, you get Azizi’s lively sorority house.

Image Courtesy of Joey Appie

Professional models Krista Riley, Summer Moss, Asha Ahelia, Tamara DeShazor, Christina Wallace, as well as long-time friend, Elizabeth Hiott, were all part of building this great experience. I was impressed with everyone’s performance and appreciate their patience, as this is not a job for the weak of heart.

Video Courtesy of Trent Chau

The Beer Goggles, Let’s Get It and Hot Dogg scenes were all (insanely) shot in the same day. We started at the studio early in the morning and ended up at a mansion shooting the other scenes until late at night. Over the course of three days, we captured seven of the ten shots you find on the site, including the homepage (which is also the album cover).

Final Let’s Get It! Composite for AziziMajor.com

Some have asked me how I achieved the Let’s Get It scene. The concept for this shot braved the scores of changes and evolutions. We decided that it would be far more effective to keep each person and item in separate “layers” to give us flexibility with the final result. All the models, Azizi Major and CEO (who is featured on the song) were shot on green screen at the studio and placed into a composite image, collaboratively, with various stock photos that fulfilled the vision.

Video Courtesy of Trent Chau

Image Courtesy of Trent Chau

I cannot take credit for any of the styling or makeup. Makeup artists Marissa Kaye and Tameca Johnson did an amazing  job with each girl. As did Keysha Gauthier with the hair, especially in the Hot Dogg scene. Wow, what a creative and talented bunch.

Final Hot Dogg Composite for AziziMajor.com

Trent Chau, a good friend of mine and fellow professional photographer, graciously helped me with the lighting for many of the scenes, with the assistance of Joey Appie, another good friend and photographer. They were both invaluable. Joey, as a production assistant on the set, acted as the stand-in often time, as well as the comic relief:

Image Courtesy of Joey Appie

Misty Pinkston was an amazing production assistant throughout the entire process. This woman is hilarious as well! She has helped us on a number of projects and yet again has shown her amazing flying colors.

I certainly cannot forget to mention my business partner (and wife) Jamarie Milkovic. She rocks with the meticulously planning. From the beginning, she kept telling me that I would need to get suited up and be prepared because once the race began, there was little room to think, it is all about do, do, do. I suppose all of her wear in tear in the entertainment biz taught her that. I thank her for that knack. Without her keeping things on track from the get go, the site wouldn’t have been as successful. She puts up with a lot, smiling (most of the time) and I love her for it.

Image Courtesy of Joey Appie

Putting the actual Website together was an exhillerating achievement. In order to pull off creating a complex visual MP3 player online, I turned to animator and Flash programmer, Andre Krasich in LA. I knew his attention to detail would meet my idealist expectations. It’s rare to find someone else who actually “gets it” in the interactive industry.

After incorporating the photography into the final scenes, we moved on to implementing the design of the Website and discussing the animation ideas. Andre and I went through multiple iterations of each scene to land upon the ones you see today.

One of my favorite scenes is One More Time Again. Andre incorporated a subtle sunflare technique the infused vitality into the image and music. All-in-all, Andre helped bring the photography and UI design to another level with his talents and skills. I enjoyed working “virtually” side-by-side with him on this project.

Final One More Time Again Composite for AziziMajor.com

I am thoroughly impressed with the extraordinary group of people involved throughout each part of this project and thank them for their desire to make a great online experience.

( The team, sans me because I was behind the camera )
Image Courtesy of Trent Chau’s camera

CREDITS FOR AZIZIMAJOR.COM:

• Thom Milkovic: Creative Director, Brand Strategist, Art Director, Photographer, Retoucher, Interactive Designer
• Jamarie Milkovic: Account Executive, Brand Strategist, Project Manager, Production Coordinator
• Andre Krasich: Website Animation, Programming, 3D Design
• Trent Chau: Lighting Director
• Misty Pinkston: Production Assistant
• Joey Appie: Production Assistant
• Marissa Kaye: Makeup
• Tameca Johnson: Makeup
• Keysha Gauthier: Hair
• Krista Riley: Model
• Summer Moss: Model
• Asha Ahelia: Model
• Christina Wallace: Model
• Tamara DeShazor: Model
• Elizabeth Hiott: Model
• and of course, Azizi Major: As Himself

Many thanks to each and every one of you.

- Thom Milkovic

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Just wanted to say thanks for all of the support. A special warm felt thank you goes to my wife, Jamarie, who helped edit the book and build the idea with me. Without her, it probably wouldn’t have made sense and been full of grammatical errors.

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