The Big O

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"Oakley Photo Gallery"

Shooting from a helicopter in Super 16 and 24p, James Masters captures mountain bikers at work for Oakley.

At first you don't notice the python, and frankly he seems doomed.
This is really no place for a snake, his terrarium shoved on a shelf
next to the Arri SR-3 chassis, just below the wide angle zoom. The room
is draped and dim, with no windows. A big Sony monitor dominates the
back wall; the Smoke is surrounded with stacks of sky-blue tape boxes
full of great athletes caught in Digibeta, film, and HD. A black foam
couch is covered with tapes too, and various Oakley paraphernalia, all
of it highly designed, with flashy streaks of typography and color.

This is Edit Bay 1, a warren-like space that occupies one small
corner of the extravagant Oakley headquarters. The building's vast
lobby is starkly decorated in jet turbines and ejector seats. A single
slash of red and yellow hangs from the far wall: the first Oakley funny
car, Scotty Cannon's Nitro Mater. The sprawling gymnasium, spotless
warehouse, and cutting edge design facility say Silicon Valley circa
1998, except the food in the cafeteria is not as trendy. This is the
house that Jim built, and it reflects his passions for airplanes, race
cars, and video.

Oakley's iconic founder Jim Jannard is a photographer himself and a
savvy judge of moving images. Yet Oakley has no broadcast commercials.
It does have a lavish chamber that serves as the projection theater,
where shareholders cram the steeply raked seats and stand in the back
and spill into the huge lobby to watch Oakley's annual image video
— a 4-minute joyride and their reassurance that they are
investing in continued cool. Oakley salesmen carry a few technology and
product comparison test videos. Occasionally, when Oakley is courting a
new athlete, sports marketing will send the image videos along to tug
at the heartstrings.

In total, Oakley's annual video output is relatively small and for
internal use only. But behind these few DVDs are hours of shooting,
cutting, travel, and adventure for James Masters, whose title is visual
alchemist, and whose job is to be Oakley's video department.

For the past four years, Masters has operated without a budget or a
business plan. Jannard bought him some Beta SP gear, some Digibeta
gear, a couple of nice Canon zooms, the Arri Super 16, a couple of
Zeiss primes, and an Angenieux zoom, and more recently, the Smoke, the
Sony F-900 and the deck to go with it. Masters has a nicely stocked
studio with a little stage and a moco rig. He uses the studio for
product segments and to shoot the company's brochures on his trusty
Hasselblad.

Sculpture or technology? Many of Oakley’s product testing devices appear larger than life in its high-tech videos, which often create abstract images from manufacturing and testing processes.

If you can catch Masters in the office, he's wearing Oakley scuffs
and shorts. He'll either be sunburned because he just returned from
shooting motocross dudes in Florida or icy pale from too many hours in
Scott Sevcik's telecine bay at the swank Post Logic facility in
Hollywood.

Masters asks and receives permission to travel to various Oakley
events to cover the athletes in action. He reports directly to Jannard,
and collaborates with his fellow Oakley anarchists in a nonlinear
process that overlaps design, sports marketing, and even manufacturing.
How do people know exactly what their role is and how to execute it?
“You can't really explain it,” Masters shrugs and quotes
the Oakley mantra (and the reason there's no voiceover on the videos).
“If we have to explain it, they don't get it.”

Masters combines action sports footage and Smoke effects to produce Oakley’s kinetic image videos. His annual big project is the shareholders’ video, created to wow the company’s investors.

Somewhere in Zion National Park, high above the red Utah rocks,
Masters is hanging out the passenger side of a Bell Jet-Ranger muscling
a Super 16 camera with a 35mm Angenieux zoom bolted to the front like a
Howitzer. Just behind him, two Canadian shooters from Freeride
Productions are doing much the same thing with a pair of old Arris, all
trying to keep track of Cedric Gracia as he races across a knife-edge
ridge, off buttresses, and down crevasses on a 50lb. Cannondale
mountain bike. The low-hanging sun breaks the Utah dust into clouds of
fire, and later in the telecine bay it's all there in Masters' footage:
the Kodak 7245 looks beautiful, and so does the HD — clean,
steady, and tinged with suspense and a little romance. The Freeride
footage is nice but not the same. Masters says the difference is more
technology than skill. Sure, the older Arri cameras show their age, but
there are philosophical differences as well.

“A lot of times the action sports guys are athletes
themselves, shooting a sport they know well, for an audience of other
athletes that knows what they're looking at,” Masters says.
“So they pretty much go for the wide shot and maybe one other
angle because that's enough to tell the story.” But Masters is
shooting for another audience — the kind of people who want to
know how it feels to be Gracia. They need angles, framing, and multiple
post effects to get the intensity of the experience. “We don't
want them to think ‘Wow that's cool.’ We want them to feel
what the athlete feels, and think ‘Holy s — t, that guy's
insane.’”

The inhouse studio at Oakley corporate.

Brian Ferguson, who coproduces and shoots with Masters on nearly
every outing, remembers the moment he realized that Oakley was not an
ordinary gig. He was shooting manufacturing footage at the inhouse
factory when someone over his shoulder said, “Can you zoom in
tight, so you can't really tell what you're seeing? Can you make it
darker?” It was Jannard, and what he wanted was abstract art:
undulating waffle soles that look like volcanic moonscapes, machines
that look like sculpture, rubber stress tests that look like the
Stargate opening. “All my other clients want to be able to
identify their product in the picture,” Ferguson says. “He
wants to know ‘What's your f-stop?’”

Like Masters, Ferguson started as a still photographer and then
worked under Mike Karbelnikoff in the early days of HKM. Like Masters,
he is now an HD fan, especially if the choice is 16mm. “I still
really like 35mm,” Ferguson muses, “but honestly the F-900
is the first time I've ever really wanted to buy my own camera.”
He remembers shooting at the drag races in midday sun, trying to catch
the difference between the asphalt, the tires, and shadow under the
wheel well. “I kept irising down and incredibly the blacks were
still holding. And on the wide shots we could literally tell what
people in the stands were wearing.

Photo by Joe D'Orazio Masters (front seat) shoots Cedric Gracia from high above the Utah desert. Later when Masters edited and finished the piece using the Smoke, he composited the footage with an Oakley print ad to create a complete image (at bottom).

“Maybe it's just that we're going through a phase where we're
surprised that video can look so good,” he says philosophically.
“I'm used to being disappointed by video.”

In the end, what Ferguson likes most is the reality and immediacy of
HD and the cost. There's no contest between film and HD on the budget
side, and it's only incrementally more expensive than Digibeta for
significantly better results. The hard part, he says, is the learning
curve. Some of that is real (he needed to be told to shoot 23.98fps
instead of straight 24), some of it is perceived (if a client has one
bad experience with sound that won't sync they give up, especially if
they're looking for reasons not to change), and some of it is Sony.
“Back in the day they really supported 3/4 inch,” he says.
“We haven't experienced the same kind of support on this
deck.”

Ferguson describes his work for Masters as high-end guerilla
documentaries. High-end because of the rigs they carry: the Arri Super
16 and the F-900, which Masters currently uses with his older Canons, a
5.2×9 (his favorite lens) and 8×20 that were bought for the
Digibeta. He suspects that once he's finishing in HD (he plans an HD
upgrade to the Smoke later this year), he may have to change his
improvisational approach to lensing. He's already salivating for the
Zeiss HD primes that debuted at NAB.

But even with the fancy gear, most of the time the job is more like
seat-of-the-pants journalism. “It's not like a typical commercial
shoot where someone's in charge and an AD's barking orders,”
Ferguson says. “We're not in control of situations we're going
into at all. At the drag races we're there like any other journalist.
When we're in Utah, we've got athletes risking their lives in the
middle of nowhere — for fun really, or for a pair of sunglasses
— so we can't really yell at them. Sometimes we're sharing the
field with the action sports shooters who may or may not be willing to
get out of my shot.”

On the road, Masters usually tapes over the F-900's logos, rendering
the camera virtually indistinguishable from the Digibeta. It's good
theft protection and helps maintain rapport with less well-tooled
colleagues. Ferguson drives a big Ford Econoline that used to be a
Doubletree Hotel courtesy shuttle, judging from the faint outline you
can still see. He got it at a tent sale, replaced the three back seats
with speed rails and had himself a killer production vehicle. It's just
the right mix of utility and downmarket cool to fit in with the Oakley
road crowd. Even so, travel might just as easily include the Oakley
jet. Last year Jannard took Masters and Ferguson along to follow the
drag car circuit from Gainesville to Pomona.

Masters builds CG product images and effects using the Smoke. Masters says he is planning an HD upgrade to the Smoke next year.

On the day of the shareholders' meeting, the road leading up to the
Oakley mothership is lined with roughly a million dollars in silver
cars — Volvo wagons, assorted BMWs, a handful of
prototype-looking Mercedes CLs, plus a couple of 2-ton Oakleymobiles
(also silver) parked rakishly across the front door. Inside, the crowd
is diverse. There are lots of shorts and Oakley shoes, but there are
also middle-aged women with macramé handbags and rayon pantsuits,
a handful of kids, Hawaiian shirts, the odd pair of well-pressed
khakis. No ties, no business suits. It's casual — even down to
earth.

This year, the image video is different. Masters fought the post
9-11 tone for weeks before he finally downloaded Nickelback's
“Hero” track and started to cut. The resulting video is
nearly perfect, and very different from its raw and unruly predecessors
where Masters went for sheer visceral rush. This time he intercuts
Oakley president Colin Baden pacing the stage in shorts and basketball
boots talking about how Oakley can never be mainstream. He wears out
the Smoke with crossfades and dissolves, overlaying Oakley's gorgeous
print ads with the footage he and Brian captured in Utah, Florida, and
on the drag race circuit. The bosses are pleased, the shareholders are
moved, the job is done.

What now? Vice president of sports marketing Scott Bowers says the
Oakley video is only in its infancy. The company has never been
interested in broadcast commercials, which are, as Bowers says,
“too commercial.” But lately, the proliferation of video
distribution formats — mini DVDs, cinema commercials, web video,
even video hang tags and trading cards — all suggest
possibilities that are more Oakley's style. Bowers searches for the
word and comes up with “editmercial,” which like a print
advertorial is meant to tell a story and impart a piece of the
company's culture rather than hard sell a product. Bowers talks about
keeping the brand “discoverable,” and says that for the
first time video might offer the kind of intimate,
relationship-oriented communication that Oakley likes.

The 2002 Oakley image video blends film and HD footage with slow crossfades and layered graphics.

“The emotion of an athlete in the heat of competition gives
the brand authenticity,” Bowers explains. “There's no
better way to get people involved with that emotion than to blow their
minds with video. Print is not really a great way of capturing
imagination, and it's so hard to be different in print. What intrigues
us about expanding our video message is the ability to capture
competition in a more mindful, emotional way than you can in
print.”

For Masters, it can't happen fast enough. He's already won the
chance to shoot more original footage, and he's chipping away at
another practical problem — getting access to musical rights so
he won't be limited to inhouse applications. One thing he's counting on
is Oakley's do-it-yourself work ethic. There's no third-party video
production company or even an agency looming on the horizon. This is a
company that doesn't like to delegate. Oakley prefers to produce its
designs, its products, and its video within the thick walls of its
fortress, which is full of people Jim Jannard trusts to not be
mainstream.

Monty (the python) has been adopted by a local school. Masters has
cleaned up Edit Bay 1. This year he finished the shareholders' video at
5 p.m. the night before the meeting, instead of 10 minutes before, and
went home to play with his four kids. If that's mainstream, that's OK.
Next week he'll be on a boat to Tahiti shooting the Oakley Surfriders
in HD.