Michael Grecco's video: Michael Grecco s Directors Reel

This was the first challenge involved in creating this new website: coming up with a director’s reel that incorporates all the things that I do as a fine art and commercial photographer combined with my work as a director of cinemagraphs and commercial spots. Having directed a documentary feature film released by Warner Brothers, I have built a team of editors, motion graphic professionals and crew that I love working with on projects. For the first part of the reel, I wanted to create a new Cinemagraph with the portrait of Tim Montgomery shot for the cover of Wired Magazine. We looked at actually shooting the tree with my special effects team and having my motion graphics/after effects artists composite the two. That became prohibitively expensive because of the danger associated with shooting fire in a studio. During the shooting process, I had my DP directly involved in the production and he had suggested we make the fire in CGI. After much research to find the best CGI fire artists, we created the Cinemagraph for the lead of the reel. The next task was finding the right footage and images to put together to get a sense of what I do and have done for so many years. Our final challenge for the project was getting the color to match the still as Photoshop files when they were laid in the final video. The challenge here is keeping a color sync environment between stills and video and dealing with video compression and how it affects the stills in the production. To lend their expertise, my friends at X-Rite color management helped my editorial team get the color workflow right to make the stills look as good as possible in a video. We would love to know what you think. http://www.michaelgrecco.com/