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
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.
Making a Magnifying Glass Lens
I’ve always wondered what using a magnifying glass as a lens would look like, and this summer I decided to give it a try. I’ve seen people online hold a magnifying glass up to an exposed camera sensor or lens for trippy freelensing experiments, but I really wanted to see how close I could get to building an actual lens. The build was super simple: all I did was tape a magnifying glass to a macro tube and attach it to my camera. Here’s a tutorial video I made for my company, showing my process.
Grayslake Pinhole: Shooting Pinhole Video with a Homemade Body Cap Lens
Pinhole imagery has always fascinated me. I own a Zero Image medium format film pinhole camera that I shoot with occasionally, but other than my weird pumpkin camera obscura, I’ve never tried shooting pinhole photography with a digital camera. I find the precision made digital pinhole lenses that you can buy online just a little too expensive for the results you get, so the other day I finally did the homework and made my own pinhole lens from scratch.
Sony A7R II at the Shedd Aquarium
Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium is a beautiful and relaxing place to visit, and last week I was able to take a camera there to shoot some video. I used a Sony A7R II, two Canon FD lenses–a Vivitar 20mm f3.8 and my Dad’s old 50mm f1.4–and a Rokinon 7.5mm Fisheye lens, all mounted on the camera via Fotodiox adapters. I shot half the video is 24fps and the other half in 60fps for the slow motion effect. I was going to shoot in a flat profile but I really love Sony’s built-in color science so I ended up going with the standard picture profile and layering on a film emulsion LUT in post. Here’s the video I shot:
After shooting with the A7R II for a little over a year now I’m still regularly surprised by how beautiful it can render photos and video. It’s not great in low-light, but if you have a fast lens mounted on it and stick at ISO 800 or lower, its powerful little imaging device. I guess it should be for the price. I’m so thankful that my work lest me borrow it so frequently!
Fisheye In The Bog
I grew up going on hikes with my family at Volo Bog State Natural Area, and it’s still one of my favorite places to visit in Illinois. A bog, especially in the vanilla Midwest, is a magical place, and when you get out in the middle of it, after crossing acres of quaking ground and floating dwarf trees on a narrow boardwalk, you feel like you’re in another world. This January we had an unseasonably warm stretch that felt just like Spring, and one Saturday I couldn’t help but grab a camera and head out to Volo to check up on an old friend.
Probably Okay: The Pie Problem
Here’s the latest video from my sketch comedy YouTube series Probably Okay. My writing partner Michael Golus and I have been stepping up our game lately with more complex ideas and polished cinematography, and it’s helped to elevate the material, which is, as usual, entirely mad. Probably Okay is all about jokes without punchlines, and this video is no exception. When Mike and I write these scripts, with occasional help from the rest of our fluctuating team of actors, we like to play the “what if” game and go as far as we can with it, which ends up generating some pretty bizarre ideas. This alternative humor isn’t for everyone, and I’ve encountered plenty of of people who just scratch their heads when they see our videos, but from those who understand the humor, we’ve been fairly well received. We’ve been making these video for 7 years now and we’ve never really generated a large audience, but for Mike and I it’s never been about the amount of views or the likes. We just enjoy creating funny videos that surprise and hopefully delight the viewer with their unexpectedness, and if we’ve done that for even just a couple of people, we feel like we’ve succeeded.
Chicago, Ice and Holga Lenses
Even though I generally shoot with Full Frame Sony cameras now, there’s just something about lo-fi video. One of my favorite lo-fi digital setups is my trusty Canon Rebel T2i paired with my Holga EOS mount lens and Holga Wide Angle adapter. The images this lens/camera combo creates are dreamy and lo-fi filmic, reminiscent of the Super 8 home video look, and I find they work well for short video essays like this one.
Star Wars Holiday Special 2: My Homage to the Strange Side of Star Wars
What I loved about Star Wars as a kid was the vastness of it’s universe. I read the Thrawn trilogy and all of the encyclopedias, concept art and source books I could get my hands on when I was 13, and then proceeded to dive into the dizzying array of Star Wars comics, cartoons, toys and video games thereafter. It felt like such a big place to explore, and what I liked most was the weird stuff: the off kilter design elements on the edges of the frames in the movies, the weird characters and creatures from the cheapo 80’s cartoons and Ewok movies, and all the ditched concept art and strange pixelated video game characters and locations. To this day I still love to try to find new details in old Star Wars Playstation and N64 games, read old drafts of scripts and even books on the designs of such bizarre Star Wars detours as Shadows of the Empire and the much maligned Star wars Holiday Special.
Autumn Leaves, Close Up
I love autumn! Its colors, sounds and smells have always appealed to me on such a basic level, and a lot of my art tends to be inspired and often centered around the season. This November for work I had the great pleasure of shooting some macro photos and video of autumn leaves, and here are some of my results.
Shooting with a C-Mount Lens on a Full Frame Camera
Sometimes retro lo-fi lenses are just too fun to leave on the antique store shelf. A couple years ago I picked up this amazing little C-mount Baush and Lomb 26mm f/1.9 lens (pictured above), and since then I’ve used it on multiple projects with my Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, which has a super16 sized sensor that is very similar in size to the 16mm film the lens was originally meant to shoot on. You can read more about my experiences with the camera here, but this past summer I started experimenting with mounting the lens on a Sony A7R II, a camera that has a much larger full frame sensor. Shooting on a sensor size that this little lens was never meant for adds a lot of distortion and vignette, but I kind pf like the effect, especially after a couple of tweeks in post.
Joy and The Shadow
In Autumn 2013 I was asked to teach a film acting class for the Lake County branch of Spotlight Youth Theater. I jumped at the opportunity and quickly realized what a great opportunity it was for me as a filmmaker–not only could I teach students how to act naturally in front of a camera, but I could also create a fully realized short film in the process.
River Trail
Sometimes when I’m testing a new camera or lens, I like to go somewhere and just shoot. This week I had a Sony a7R II and a Leica M lens to test, and I was drawn to one of my favorite spots in Lake County. I also wanted to experiment with adding film grain to video, as well as doing a post anamorphic conversion. Here’s the result–nothing special, but a very enjoyable and relaxing exercise.
Prodigals Music Video
Christiana and Colin Flanigan approached me last Fall with the proposition of creating a music video for their
band, The Aches. I’m a personal friend of theirs–I made silly videos with Chris in high school–and I’ve
done photography and video work for their band before. We decided to make a video for Prodigals, a track
from their newly released EP, Your Broken Hand. Not only is it my favorite song of theirs, but it’s also the
most energetic and driving track on the EP, and when I listened to it I envisioned the duo relentlessly walking
towards the camera through an urban environment while singing.
Lo-Fi Imagery and the Digital Harinezumi
Probably due to the fact that I’m a child of the 90’s, I’m beginning to develop a deep nostalgia for lo-fi digital images and video. My first true digital camera was a keychain camera I bought at Walgreens for $20 when I was 16. It produced the tiniest and dreamiest pixelated images–almost painterly in quality–and It was pure magic.
I wrote about my obsession with these types of cameras years ago here but I’ve since almost entirely lost interest and focused on more professional quality gear; that is until a couple of months ago, when I finally bought a camera I’ve been eyeing online for years: the Digital Harinezumi.
Shooting with the Sony a7S II
I recently rented a Sony a7SII to test it out, and I have to say that I’m officially in love with this camera! The full frame imagery it produces is beautiful, and the built-in image stabilization means you can shoot stable handheld video with just about any lens, old or new. Here’s a video I made for Fotodiox, taking a closer look at the gear I used for my shoot.
Green Town: A Video Tribute to Ray Bradbury
I grew up in Waukegan, Illinois–learned to ride my bike on it’s sidewalks, developed my first friendships and crushes on it’s playgrounds, began to love nature in it’s parks and preserves. I also learned to love reading in it’s downtown library, a sprawling and boxy 1960’s artifact filled to the brim with dusty old books and strange statues. It was here, around the age of 12, that Ray Bradbury stole my heart. I picked up one of his collections of short stories of the shelf–maybe it was October Country?–opened it and was hooked. His poetic prose and vibrant imagery were like a drug to my young mind, and I devoured most of his writings in the space of a couple months, immediately aping his style in my messy notebooks, desperately trying to write a story as exciting and melodic and moody as one of his.
Winter Forest Gimbal Video
I grew up next to Lyons Woods in Waukegan, Illinois, and to this day I’m still drawn back there. It’s a beautiful forest full of grand old oaks and strange rows of pine trees, and I know every inch of it. I recently had the opportunity to test a new brushless gimbal for GoPro cameras, and I knew where to test it.
I shot this video with a HERO4 Black set to 4K and Protune to give me extra grading flexibility in post. I reduced the focus in post to counteract the HERO’s sharpness, giving the footage a more cinematic feel. The poem in this video is one I wrote in high school, and is inspired by a winter walk I took in these same woods years ago.