_DOUBL3UP on @orb

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22222 $BONSAI
72h

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Last summer when I moved into a new place in a new neighborhood of Tokyo I immediately went exploring. It’s important to know your surroundings and become familiar with them, programming the map into your mind. While searching for a coffee shop I stumbled upon this gem called Alley Cats and was greeted by an English speaking Japanese girl who happened to be from my friend’s neighborhood in Portland, small world stuff. Turns out the burger is the best in the country with a runner up not even close. I found myself hanging out here multiple times a week, maybe more if just popping in for an espresso. After getting to know the owner and passing translated phone passages back and forth, who is also the only chef, he began to fulfill my request for a double burger. In fact, I’ve heard through the grapevine he denies the request to others lol even though I’ve told multiple people to ask for one, whoops. One day he presented me with one of their branded hats, such a kind gesture and one of which in Japan you should probably reciprocate. I decided I should utilize my skillset and make him something useful so my brain started churning about what I could do. The lighting from the hanging overheads at the counter was sooo good and the counter itself was very old school NYC diner style so I knew I had to take advantage of that. Some of my favorite work I’ve ever done for clients, with freedom of creative control, have been stop motion animations so I leaned towards that and commenced planning. I didn’t have much to work with in terms of film equipment being that I traveled with my small pelican case and only the essentials, so I was going to have to get crafty. I went to 7-11 and bought two rulers (they were much shorter than 12”) and a pack of rubberbands. I banded the two rulers together to extend so that it could rest across the gap in the two lights and I could attach my camera to it, suspending in the air pointing directly down on to the counter at 90 degrees overhead angle. Then I banded the camera itself to the ruler and found the sweet spot nice and aligned. Thankfully most cameras today come with an app for remote control so I was able to not touch it once in its perch. Many handful a frames and two burger patties later we had a stream of stills that would show the progression of burger construction and demolition. We shared it as a collaboration post on IG and he’s kept it at the top of the feed earning almost 30k views now. There are few times today when I feel such gratification for creating something for free but that’s mostly because of what’s expected in America as charity work, an ideology that has completely taken over the creative world (and become very easy because kids from money know no better). Between the planning, production, and later sound design I ended up spending quite a bit of time on this and therefore want it to live forever on chain here on Lens.

@bonsai @lens @creators @photographers #GRAMSDIDIT