Trying out the new Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K

Posted by sean

I’ve been a huge fan of Blackmagic Design cameras since I purchased the original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera over a decade ago. They’re a company that knows how to make an incredibly powerful and versatile cinema camera at an affordable price for an indie filmmaker like myself, and using their cameras to make my short films look more filmic by adapting vintage lenses to them and using all sorts of color grading methods has been a real pleasure. Recently I was able to demo Blackmagic’s first full frame camera for Fotodiox, showing off some of Fotodiox’s L-mount adapters in the process. Here’s my full demo video:

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I was really impressed by the quality of the BMCC6K’s image, and I loved the full frame open gate look. It felt a bit like shooting in IMAX. Like all cinema cameras, there are some limitations. It’s not the easiest camera to hand hold without a stabilized lens, and it works much better on a tripod, but I’ve been meaning to shoot in a more locked down style anyway :)

Here’s a demo video I shot with the Cinema 6K and a 14mm Rokinon lens.

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As much as I love this camera, I’m still pretty happy with my Pocket 4k and Sony A7S II, although I may consider using one in the future. It was a great experience shooting with it for a week!

31 Scary Movie Mini Reviews 2023 – Part 1

Posted by sean

Last year I reviewed 31 scary movies, one for each day of October. This October I’m doing it again! Today is halfway through October, so here are the first 15.

Scary Movie Mini Review #1: Kiss of the Vampire (1963) Directed by Don Sharp

This lesser Hammer Horror film has a garish poster that promises “giant devil bats summoned from the caves of hell to destroy the lust of the vampires!” Not surprisingly, the bats are normal sized cheesy rubber puppets on fishing line. Despite that, this movie has a unique tone to it, something surprisingly magical and haunting that’s abandoned in the goofy and rushed climax. 

A newlywed couple are on their way by motor car to their honeymoon. They break down somewhere in the German mountains near a castle, and of course there’s a menacing man watching them from a castle window. They end up at a strangely empty inn and are invited to sup with the wealthy doctor and his children who live in the castle. Unsurprisingly the doctor and his children are vampires, but they’re a different type, more satanic personality cultists than undead blood suckers. The young wife is slowly lured into this cult’s clutches, and the husband and local Van Helsing wannabe must save her. All this is rote cliché, but what stands out as unique is the slow, menacing pace and tone, the texture of long gray rainy days and gloomy moonlit nights. These vampires remind me more of the secret society in Eyes Wide Shut than the Draculas in countless vampire flicks, and their menace is more in the way they corrupt your soul than your blood. It’s a pity that the ridiculous rubber bats flap in at the end and ruin everything.

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Shooting Video with a 90’s Black and White Toy Video Camera

Posted by sean

A couple years ago I bought a Tyco VideoCam on ebay, a black and white toy video camera made for kids in the 90’s to shoot videos in their living rooms with. At long last I have it up and running and have been shooting some shorts with it. It helps me create maybe the strangest lo-fi look I’ve come across, a weird mixture of bad VHS tape and black and white super 8 film. I hope to use it on some more ambitious projects soon, but in the mean time, here’s a video I made for Fotodiox about how I shoot with it.

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Queen Anne: Shooting a short film entirely on pinhole

Posted by sean

I’ve always been fascinated by stories set in one location. When I was young I was startled by the old time radio dramatization of Sorry, Wrong Number, a twisted tale about an invalid woman stuck in her apartment bedroom who slowly realizes one evening that she’s being stalked by a killer. I also had the idea growing up that if there were ghosts, they stayed in one place, way out in the middle of nowhere in the cold and dark, alone and unmoving. I’d look out the window on starless winter evenings driving home from my grandparents’ farm imagining lost souls in the black tree lines miles from the road, standing motionless in the sharp cold, listening to the trees creaking in the wind.

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Ultra-Wide Point & Shoot Cult Camera – The Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim and Its Clones

Posted by sean

In college I became obsessed with film photography, and one of the first film cameras I started shooting with was a Superheadz Black Slim Devil, which was a clone of the cult Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim, a cheap plastic point and shoot camera with a fantastic 22mm wide angle lens.

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Capturing Spring with the Lensbaby Sol 45

Posted by sean

Lensbaby Sol 45 - Bahai Temple II

This Spring Lensbaby reached out to me to demo their new lens, the Lensbaby Sol 45, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience! The lens is a 45mm fixed f/3.5 lens with built in tilt controls. All you have to do is twist the lens to unlock it and tilt it to adjust the focal plane for subtle to extreme tilt focus effects.

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Hequet: Horror in a Silent Film Style

Posted by sean

Hequet is the fourth episode in my web miniseries Summer Stories, and my latest attempt at telling a story with images and sounds only. With this silent style of filmmaking, strong composition, music cues and actor’s movement and facial expressions are key to telling the story. This style of film storytelling has always appealed to me because it places so much emphasis on the cinematography and forces the viewer to engage with the story in a creative way–they have to piece the story together themselves rather than it being handed to them on an exposition platter. I’ve always enjoyed mystery in stories, leaving some of the big questions unanswered, and Hequet is no exception. What happened to the man’s wife? Is the statue really a supernatural entity or just in the man’s head? Who is the mysterious masked woman? Well, that question at least can be answered by watching Summer Stories Episode 3.

I hope you enjoy Hequet, and maybe even get a little spooked in the process! It was certainly a joy to create.

July Flame: Capturing Summer in Northern Illinois

Posted by sean

My whole life I’ve longed to capture the essence of the world and seasons around me. All of my short film projects incorporate this desire to some extent, and when I can watch one of my projects in the dead of winter and get a faint whiff of the heat of summer baking blacktop, I feel I’ve at least partially succeeded.

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Sword and Suburb: My Newest Loner Narrative

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Loners have always fascinated me. Being a part-time loner myself, I’m compelled by the narrative force of a character who is alone by choice or necessity, striving to accomplish a goal by their single strength or choosing to do nothing and fade into obscurity. There is both a flaw and a strength to the loner. On one hand their absence from others shows their selfishness and fear, but on the other it shows their discipline and focus. Loners are more likely to become delusional and do foolish things because they have no one to correct them, but they’re also able to take risks that others wouldn’t take.

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Summer Stories: Penguinarium

Posted by sean

Here’s episode 2 of my new miniseries Summer Stories. In this episode I wanted to capture the essence of 1940’s and 50’s horror with silent film storytelling. I shot the entire episode on my new Sony A7S II with a vintage Canon FD 20mm lens for a slightly surreal, off kilter look, and I chose a penguin to be the antagonist because they are inherently funny. Actually, this is an example of a prop inspiring a script. I found a retro plastic penguin statue at my local antique store this spring and the script just kind of fell into my head.

Summer Stories: Make Films Until They Don’t Suck

Posted by sean

Prolific indie filmmaker Jay Duplass once said “Keep making shitty short films until one of them doesn’t suck one day.” So I took his advice and earlier this year my friend Jeremy and I began shooting a series of shorts film scripts I had written. Originally I intended these shorts to be self contained, but as I looked over them I realized they all had some basic elements in common: they were all set in the Midwestern suburbs in the summer, and they all involved slightly paranormal occurrences. Now I’m releasing them about bimonthly on YouTube as Summer Stories, my first ever miniseries! Summer Stories is a loosely connected series of short films about the strange and mysterious things that can be found just around the corner in the summer suburbs. It’s also been a great learning experience for me, and I plan to continue writing and shooting the series into the winter, although I suppose I’ll have to change the name to Winter Stories at some point.

Here’s the first episode in the series, which I released last week, just in time for Halloween.

And here’s the trailer for the series, containing clips from some upcoming episodes.