Robert Primes

Here is another series of images from the ongoing advertisements for Clairmont Camera. This ad will be featuring Emmy winning Cinematographer Robert Primes. Bob earned Emmy Awards for Felicity and My Antonio, and a third nomination for Harrison: Cry of the City. Bob received the ASC award for the series MDs, the first digital show so honored and has had ASC nominations for Felicity and the Reasonable Doubts pilot.

While setting up at location, we found these great big drums of used film. I thought it would be awesome if we could shoot Bob fooling around with some of it. When he arrived on set we started to collaborate and kick some ideas around. I told him about the film idea and he said he was willing to try anything. I get so stoked when someone with obvious talent is willing to explore some of my creative ideas.

We started by giving Bob some film to hold, but that didn’t last long. Bob is a real funny guy. While we were shooting, he started throwing the giant bunch of film around, including at me.

It was starting to look great. I wanted more film in the frame so I had Curtis on camera left and Laurie on camera right start to throw big bunches of film into frame. The timing wasn’t always right but I knew we were onto something great.

Some of the shots were hysterical, like this one above. It looks like a giant wall of film is about to devour poor Bob. Bob never lost his genuine enthusiasm during the entire time we were shooting. At one point the film swallowed him whole.

I was shooting with Profoto strobe packs. The flash durations on these packs are really short. It does so well at freezing the action that the film started to look like a crazy sculpture. It really would not have been possible with any other lighting system. The other great thing is to shoot tethered to a capture computer. The ability to review the images on the fly allowed us to shoot until we were sure we had the shot. Below is the final image used for the Clairmont Camera ad in the International Cinematographers Guild magazine and the American Cinematographer magazine.