Halfland's Fairy God-Brother: Jeff Gatesman

Can you tell how warm and sincere this individual is? How about how fully-loaded with professional
filmmaking know-how he is? Jeff Gatesman, Director of Photography, newly met, talent to spare.

I see wings of kindness on this artist with an eye for capturing emotional imagery.

After a conversation on the beach Easter Sunday, my friend Riayn asked some industry-pro friends of hers if they knew of anyone who knew stop motion in LA. One of them asked another of them, who then suggested Jeff because of his experience in shooting a children's web series that involved a mix of live action/cgi/stop motion. I can't thank the whole chain of people enough for the perfect suggestion.

Part of my delay in actually shooting Halfland scenes was a.) my love and comfort with fabricating puppets/sets/props, b.) my assumption(s) over what software I would have to learn to use to assemble frames and make a majority of edits with.

Jeff, within 10 minutes of discussing my animation workflow, had blown all of my "facts" out the nearest window and blown my mind with his wholly different approach.

That would have been enough, but he then proceeded to spend a few hours here walking me through the process from frames to render, including a clever solution for outputting in the proper codec.

I took notes. And posted his later instructions on my wall, like sacred text. He checked my computer for competency, tipped me to which cloud backup he used, shopped external RAID backups with me, being careful to cover what I needed but not more than I needed to keep costs modest. Jeff made excellent suggestions for lighting and scrim material as well, all of which was enormously helpful.

It's like being lost in the dark and having a kind, patient person lead you to your path. I can see how to get where I'm going now. Thanks to Jeff and the people that sent him over.