Day 284

284/365, originally uploaded by Aaron LaRue.

UCSB is surprisingly good at winning contests. The students are really good at promoting/voting on things for whatever reason. My freshman year we won a free Death Cab for Cutie concert. This year, we won a contest to have a movie premiere at our school. The movie, Your Highness, is a stoner comedy starring James Franco and Danny McBride. Today I learned the difference between people who star in movies and Movie Stars.  


Danny McBride was awesome. He's funny, laidback, and was really cool with the students and especially cooperative with the photographers. I was in the press box, shooting with a bunch of Hollywood photographers who cover events like this for a living, so it was a pretty crazy experience. People were excited to see Danny McBride because he stars in movies. 


But people lost it when James Franco came out. You can see the girls in the picture, the one on the left looks like she's going to pee herself and the girl on the right looks like she's ready to faint. And it's because James Franco is a Movie Star. First, he made the crowd wait. McBride and the Director of the film, David Gordon Green, came out together, talked to the crowd, talked to press, and generally warmed everyone up. Franco was "getting his make-up done," which I think is code for "making you wait." But when he did come out, everyone went nuts. He brought a bunch of disposable cameras with him and just started taking pictures of the crowd. He was toying with everyone and he got a HUGE reaction. 




It was actually a pretty cool thing to shoot. I learned some stuff from the other photographers too. One guy, whose name was Andreas, got there early and we were kickin' it. I asked him for some tips and he told me to use a flash if I had one. He was using a strobe dialed down about 1 1/3 stops to keep the shadows in check on the people's faces. I'd never done anything like this before, so I took his advice, and I'm glad I did. It made a world of difference. It did feel weird shooting with a flash at f/18 though! 


Today was chaos. I've never seen so many people in a frenzy like this on campus, and I've never been in the middle of it, or in a position to shoot it. So today was pretty rad. And with a Minotaur like this walking around, how can you have a bad day?