Gray Jones There’s a scene from the 1980 comedy film “Airplane!” that utilizes what Hollywood calls rear projection. Actors Robert Stack and Craig Berenson are in a moving car. But the car is clearly stationary on a soundstage, and projected on the screen behind the car is a winding road as seen from the vantage point of a car traveling it.   The “Airplane!” filmmakers make fun of the projection process as the footage unnaturally speeds up and then cuts to a dirt trail with men on horses from an old western film chasing Stack and Berenson.   Since then, rear projection has improved, evolved and grown, and Valencia resident Gray Jones is playing a part. He and his wife independently produce “driving plates,” which are 360 degrees of video that, when projected around a stationary vehicle on a soundstage, looks so real that audiences can’t tell the difference.  “It’s much cheaper to use driving plates because the typical method before that would be to have a car on a trailer, and you’re pulling that trailer,” Jones said during a recent telephone interview. “But what that means is, every single car that’s driving on that street has to be driven by a driver, and you have to have a police escort. It’s a very expensive endeavor.”   Jones, 53, has worked most of his career in postproduction as an editor and colorist. He began photographing his driving plates in 2018. He and some engineer friends and family members modified a vehicle with a camera system he created, and then he and his wife, Sherrey Jones, started taking trips around the country and capturing various cities and rural locales.  The camera car that Gray Jones and others made is ready to shoot driving plates in September at Dillon Lake, Colorado. Photo courtesy of Graham and Sherrey Jones Jones has currently amassed around 48,000 clips showing 20 different major cities, including 15,000 clips of rural areas from all over North America. That collection, he said, is continuously growing and available for filmmakers and videomakers to purchase and use via DrivingFootage.com.  Jones said he keeps prices for his plates low to drum up business. It’s because he’s a “mom-and-pop shop” that he so heavily relies on word of mouth and thus pays for that word of mouth.   “So, if somebody refers us to a buyer,” he said, “we not only give them 10% of that purchase, but also everything the company buys for a full year, which can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. One email could literally make somebody $20,000 richer.”  Gray Jones prepares for a shoot with his camera car earlier this month in Valencia. Photo courtesy of Graham and Sherrey Jones And with that, Jones’ plates are becoming more and more popular. They’ve been used on NBC’s “The Hunting Party,” Netflix’s “The Residence,” the upcoming season of Fox’s “The Cleaning Lady” and others. And he’s constantly figuring out ways to gain increasing awareness and further his expertise.  Born and raised in the province of Alberta, Canada, Jones developed an analytical mind early. When he was in middle school, he placed top in the province for math and ranked 24th in math in the country for his age group. Later in life, he scored 172 on an IQ test (scores over 140 are considered genius or nearly genius) and he learned to speak, in addition to English, French, German and Spanish.   When he was 14 years old, Jones read a book about George Lucas. That’s what made him want to get into the movie business. His plan to get there: He attended York University in Toronto, Canada, graduating in 1994 as a dual major in screenwriting and film and TV production.   In 2000, Jones found an opening for an editor’s position and made that his goal. But he felt he didn’t know enough about TV, and so, he did some research on the company offering the position. He found the manual for the editing software they used, read the entire thing the night before his interview, and he went in and gave it a shot.  “I showed up to the interview, and I just said, ‘Sit me at an editing console and see how well I do,’” Jones said. “And basically, based on how I was doing, they gave me the job.”  Since then, Jones has edited 325 TV episodes, he was a colorist for 135 episodes, and a sound editor for 60 episodes.  In 2000, Jones started dating Sherrey Buffie, who he’d met a few years earlier at a church basketball game. The two got married the following year and have two kids and a grandson.  Gray Jones, right, and Sherrey Jones during their wedding on February 17, 2001, in Toronto, Canada. Photo courtesy of Graham and Sherrey Jones Jones would continue to plug away at anything he could do in the entertainment business. He entered the world of podcasting in 2008 with “Chuck vs. the Podcast,” a show for the NBC TV series “Chuck.” He and his co-hosts did over 100 episodes of the pod, recording their last episode in March 2012.   Gray Jones visits actors Zachary Levy and Joshua Gomez in September of 2009 on the set of NBC’s “Chuck.” Photo courtesy of Graham and Sherrey Jones Jones did another podcasting project in 2010 for Script magazine called “TV Writer Podcast,” a show where he’d interview writers, showrunners and other people related to television writing.  But he felt he could do more. Something was holding him back. In 2013, he and his family moved from Canada to Santa Clarita so that he could try his luck in the American television industry. The Canadian TV industry, he said, had its limitations.  “The pay was fairly low there, and the working conditions were not very good,” Jones said. “I’d come in on a Sunday, work 15 hours and not get paid for it. If that happened in L.A., there’d be a class action lawsuit and it’d be changed. The industry in L.A. was a much healthier industry that offered much greater opportunity, and they paid quite a bit better, especially in reality TV.”  Jones gradually picked up work in the States while continuing to work remotely on other projects he’d previously started in Canada. America was a little trickier than he thought, though. He said it wasn’t just about who you knew in Hollywood, but who’s worked with you and could refer you. In other words, Jones had to start at the bottom again and work his way up.   He eventually got back to editing episodes of television, all the while taking any opportunity to build up his credits.   One opportunity to expand his skillset came in 2014, when he was moderating a panel at San Diego Comic Con on how to write a television pilot. A panelist approached Jones with a suggestion.  Gray Jones moderates a discussion in July of 2014 at San Diego Comic-Con. Photo courtesy of Graham and Sherrey Jones “He said, ‘Hey, you’ve amassed all this material. Why don’t you write a book?’ And so,” Jones said, “my first book was ‘How to Break in to TV Writing.’”   And while Jones continued work in postproduction, he wrote other books. His latest work, which came out earlier this year, is called “Capture If You Can: How to Preserve Videotape Before It Goes Extinct.” It came from work he was doing on the side, importing and transferring audio and video tapes to digital.   According to Oliver Monroe, owner of Imagine Video Services in Los Angeles, a post-production company that provides video digitizing services for film and television, Jones is an expert on the subject and has provided his “technical wizardry” on hundreds of projects for Imagine.   One of the projects Jones did with Monroe had close to 17,000 pieces of media that needed to be digitized and optically upscaled.  “We had, I think, two and a half months to do all this,” Monroe said. “His (Jones’) ability to synchronize all this together, set this up so it runs seamlessly, and then his special scripts that then correlate to the files created — that’s pretty much the magic special sauce. If something is out of the ordinary and needs to be figured out, he has the ability — from a technical standpoint — and the smarts to do that.”  There was also another book Jones wrote about stock footage. It’s called “Make Six Figures with Your Smartphone: 2023 Guide to Selling Stock Footage,” and it stems from all the work he did in post-production when he’d have to locate stock footage — generic film or video, such as shots of a bustling city, for example, to be used as an establishing shot or b-roll in film and video projects.  Around 2010, when Jones was working as an editor on a TV series called “Weird or What” with William Shatner, he was seeking out stock footage for the show and decided it might be easier to shoot his own.   “I realized, especially back in 2010, that there were big holes in the catalogs,” Jones said. “So, I’d just shoot my own and bring it to work. And that’s how it started. I realized, ‘Hey, if I’m doing it for this show, I could do it for other shows, too.’”  From then on, Jones began to build his own general-stock-footage catalog. And it was in collecting that footage that he came across driving plates — around 2017 — realizing it was a specialized niche that, again, had a lot of holes, more holes than he found in general-stock-footage catalogs.  Now, Jones is busy building his driving-plates library. He and his wife are about to embark on a trip the next couple months to shoot 10 or 11 different cities in the South.  Gray Jones prepares for a shoot with his camera car earlier this month in Valencia. Photo courtesy of Graham and Sherrey Jones It’s a new world when it comes to shooting actors in vehicles. Jones has certainly played a part in elevating an idea — rear projection — that was made into a joke in the movie “Airplane!”   “There’s still terrible rear projections today,” Jones said. “There’s stuff that I’ve seen on recent episodes of big-budget series that looks as bad as an ‘Airplane!’ If it’s done right, though, you’d be hard pressed to figure out that it wasn’t really driving.”  Know any unsung heroes or people in the SCV with an interesting life story to tell? Email [email protected].  The post Faces of the SCV: Valencia man shifts rear projection into high gear  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.