The Origin and Idea

You guys have been so supportive that I decided to write a few more entries about the history of this project. I thought a good place to start would be the origin of the idea.

I don’t want to go too far back, but a little background might be good. I’m a texture guy, I studied painting and “fine art” in college initially before deciding to double major in film at Savannah College of Art and Design. I love the texture of canvas and paper and the way it interacts with paint and drawing mediums. Something is lacking in a lot of digital media, and I think it’s texture. Texture describes the recording process, it connects the artist with the viewer. There is a huge difference between shooting on film and shooting compressed video, and I think part of that is the texture. This is going to be a gross generalization, but I find when shooting on film, people tend to focus on the details, nuance, and craft of each shot, and when shooting on compressed video we tend to focus mostly on the concept. I think this is because, at least subconsciously, we know that a lot of the detail will be destroyed by the compression. There has been a lot of good writing about how “concept is king” and I don’t intend to dispute that, but I feel like the best products come from a harmonious relationship between the craft and the concept. This sounds obvious, but how many times on set have you heard “If the audience is looking at the ____ we failed to do our job as story tellers”? The texture of a fuzzy couch binds the audience with the actor who is touching it. When a fuzzy couch looks like an amorphous blob we connect more to computer animation than we do traditional photography. This is what H264 has taken from us: the ability to touch things in our mind’s eye. I hope the raw revolution helps foster filmmakers who are passionate about the craft as well as the concept and helps produce cinematic moments we can feel. Perhaps that balance will restore some of the connection between filmmaker and audience that I feel is lost right now.

Before I graduated college I sold everything that wouldn’t fit in my car and bought an Arri 16mm film camera (16BL). I worked as a DP for hire from 2002 – 2008 and I shot almost everything on 16mm film. It was a great choice for almost every project because it had much better image integrity than SD video, and it was half the cost of 35mm film. I loved the tonality and texture of the image, I loved the grain, I loved the presence of the film itself in the image. I also loved the way the cast and crew respected film. When you have only 10 rolls of film for your entire short or music video you treat it like gold; every frame matters. And more than that, you have the sense that you are capturing a moment that can only happen once.

This is an example of a short film I shot in 2003:

“A Funny Thing Happened at the Quick Mart”
Written and Directed by David Yarovesky
Starring Joey Kern and Rachel Nichols
Cinematography by Joseph Rubinstein

In 2006 Panasonic released the HVX200, and over the next two years I stopped getting 16mm projects. I bought an HVX and I shot a couple of projects on it including a feature, but for me the magic was gone. I am not intending to speak ill of the HVX. It was, and is, a great line of cameras that was revolutionary for its time, but I didn’t love it. I didn’t have that feeling anymore. Filmmaking was becoming more of a job than a passion. Around the same time, Canon had released the original 5D, a 12.8 megapixel camera, and I found in digital still photography what I had been missing in digital motion picture cameras. It was still a little too clean, but it had the textures and I could achieve the looks I liked when shooting raw. So I slowly transitioned away from filmmaking and towards still photography. Even then I dreamed of a digital motion picture camera that could simulate the look and feel of shooting 16mm film.

It was a time when social networking was really just beginning to take off and everyone needed pictures of themselves that didn’t look like they came from a mall photo studio. My business partner, also named Joe, and I realized that if we could provide a service that brought the photo studio to where people already congregated and the photos looked cool enough (for people to post online) we could find a business model in there. We literally started in our backyard. We had house parties where we setup sexy / raunchy photobooths and then posted the photos online for people to download. These are from one of our first parties…

The popularity of our parties doubled every time we threw one. People wanted to know where our friends got their photos and how they could get theirs. By our fourth party, attendance was over 500. We knew we had to get this out of our backyard and into the world. We booked two club events in one weekend. A few days later we got an email from Camel Cigarettes asking us if we would be interested in bringing our booth on a 20 city tour with the Black Keys! Up until now we had been shooting several hundred photos a night and doing all the post processing by hand over the next week or two before posting the photos online. For the tour we would have to take twice as many photos and process them in 24 hours. It was quite a challenge, but we figured out a good method which included passing off cards during the sometimes 8 hours of shooting so that by the time we hit the tour bus, a lot of the post processing had been done already. It was massively labor intensive though, even with Photoshop actions.

I wanted to create custom software that would do all of the things we were doing manually, but the quotes I was given were over $100K and there was no way we could afford it. So we started with a combination of Apple scripts and Adobe scripts to achieve what we wanted. Then our next challenge came. Svedka Vodka wanted to book us, not for a 10 city tour, but for bar promotions in 10 cities simultaneously! At this point our setup was insanely complex and it was very hard to teach even experienced photographers how to set it up correctly. We decided that if we were going to take this on, we had to do it right. We had just under 3 months to create a custom hardware and software system so that someone with minimal training could setup and run one of these things thousands of miles away from us. This is what we came up with…

And this is a foam mock up…

The task seemed overwhelming, and we only managed to get the first 3 done by launch time, so we launched with 3 cities, and added more each month until we got to 10 cities. This is what the original Polite in Public Photobooth looked like…

Over the next three years we kept developing and integrating new functions and new pieces of software. I don’t want to bore you with all the gory details, but we automated skin retouching, color adjustment, graphic overlays, dye-sublimation printing, dynamic slideshows, custom Facebook galleries that populated in realtime, an email client, advanced client tracking and ROI reports, and of course Twitter integration. In 2009, several clients requested a video booth. We weren’t prepared at the time to even try this, but we did anyway. It was like starting all over: we were back to the crazy hours and labor intensive post process because none of our automation would work on quicktime files. Many of our clients were film studios and all of our clients had video presence on the web. A video booth seemed like a natural next step, but we had invested so much time and money in the photobooth software we couldn’t just throw it away. We needed a camera that would give us the same files we got from still cameras, just more of them much faster. The central question in my life became: where do I get a camera that can shoot 24 frames per second in a raw format for under $5K (so we could afford to build it into a booth)?

Of course the answer was nowhere. So in early 2010 I started researching what it would take to make the camera ourselves. I don’t remember the date, but I remember the day. It was an average Monday. I had come back from a week of shooting to catch up on my email. And there it was. An email from a camera developer (to remain nameless) about the custom camera project. Thanks to new off the shelf sensor tech, not only was it possible to build the camera I had specced out, but we could afford it. Somewhere deep in the back of my mind there was a tingling, a memory of the guy who dreamed of a camera like this in 2006. A bunch of people from the office went to lunch together that day as we often did, and I said to Joe, “we have to make our own camera.” The idea wasn’t new; we had talked about it before, but this was the first assertion of the idea. He said, “okay, but you have to come up with a killer name for it.”

This is what the Polite in Public Photobooths look like today…

These are the designs the new bot is based on…

And finally this is my beloved Arri 16BL…