I recently wrote about my experience shooting my short film HAUNT, which you can read about here. One of the coolest things about my job working for Fotodiox Inc. is that they allow me to borrow any gear I need for my personal projects as long as I make videos discussing how I used the gear. Here’s a video I recently put together for Fotodiox’s YouTube channel discussing what gear I used to make HAUNT, plus some of the tricks I came up with to create certain shots.
HAUNT: A Short Film
I’ve always loved Halloween. Any day that celebrates imaginary monsters and the telling of scary stories is alright by me. When I was young my folks didn’t allow me to trick or treat because of Halloween’s pagan origins, but as they matured in their Christian faith, they began to realize that the holiday had become a harmless celebration of imagination. By that time though I was too old to participate, so for me Halloween has the added allure of a holiday I never really got to be a part of. This allure has influenced the stories I tell–I keep returning to horror themes in my short films. My senior thesis film used werewolf imagery to represent humanity’s sinful nature and my first major short out of college was a subversion of the slasher genre, where the masked stalker was the one in danger. Now I’m at it again with my new short film HAUNT.
Trick-Or-Treating or Home Invasion?
Every year around October I try to shoot a couple Halloween themed videos for my YouTube comedy channel. Here’s maybe our best one so far. It was a really simple set-up, shot with my Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera with a Cosmicar 12.5mm C-mount lens and a RODE video mic. We tried to do one take, but ended up shooting two, plus a couple cuts in post for pacing. I’m really pleased with the improv both actors delivered, and I find the final product pretty funny. I hope you do too. Happy Halloween!
Visting New York in Autumn
The mornings are all of a sudden freezing, the trees are gilded and beginning to strip bare and I’m reminded of my trip to New York City in November 2008. It was my first time in that city and I was awed by it. It was so loud, dirty and obnoxious, yet it felt so elegant under it’s grey skies and cold rain, illuminated by yellow leaves and green mold.
Shooting with the iPhone VHS App
VHS Camcorder is a new app from Rarevision that makes your iPhone video look like it was shot on a VHS tape…that was then stored in a cardboard box in a garage for twenty years. It’s not the most faithful emultaion of the VHS look, but it’s a nice option for filmmakers who don’t want to mess around with a lot of filters in post. I downloaded this app recently and shot a video with my friend Scott–here’s the result.
Again, this is less a faithful emulation of the VHS look and more a nostalgic, overly degraded filter, but it’s still a nice effect in a pinch. I hope Rarevision release an update with more quality options because I’d like to be able to turn down the amount of degradation in the footage. Also, every time I restart the app it resets to the original settings, which is super annoying. I hope they fix this too. I probably won’t use this app very often, but it was definitely worth the $3.99 price tag.
If you want to try this app for yourself, check it out here.
Making GoPro Footage Look Like Black and White Film
I love shooting motion pictures on small gauge film, and I’m also starting to love shooting video with GoPros. Just like a Super 8 camera, the GoPro is tiny and portable with just a few buttons. It doesn’t have a viewfinder, but if you point it in the general direction of your subject, you’ll get your shot. Unlike most Super 8 cameras, the GoPro has a very wide angle lens, but it’s actually a cool look and makes handheld shooting and movement a lot less shaky.
Pine Ridge
For the past two years I’ve had the opportunity to go on two mission trips to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, home of The Lakota people. My home church has a heart for the Lakota, who face many challenges including poverty, alcoholism, and a lack of good housing and jobs.
River Road: Capturing A Magical Place
I’ve lived most of my life near the Des Plaines River in Gurnee, Illinois, and it’s always fascinated me. Its meandering waterways and muddy floodplains are like a tiny sliver of jungle running through our concrete civilization.
Summer Suburb
As a single bachelor, I have a lot of free time on my hands, and one of the things I enjoy doing is going on long walks. Last summer I moved into a new house and this summer I discovered a new walking route, a must-find for anywhere I live. It winds from one small town to another, across roads and train tracks, through an ever-changing road construction zone, under low hanging bushes and past the back ends of new housing developments and old block neighborhoods. It ends up, of course, at a little ice-cream stand–not the healthiest of goals, but I assume/hope I’m burning the extra calories on the walk itself.
I brought my camera along last month and tried to capture the essence of this route. As a follower of Christ I find poetry in the most common things, and I tried to represent the broken beauty of those things in this video. You can be the judge of whether or not I succeeded.
NEW MAN: a test film that became a short
I love shooting on small gauge film! In fact, my website used to be called 16mman.com, and this blog still bears part of the name. In film school I shot my class projects almost exclusively on 16mm, and I’ve also played around with Super8. I love the jittery movement of small gauge film, it’s rich grain structure and the timeless feel it can help generate. In this age of super sharp, super detailed digital video, it’s nice to shoot in a lower fidelity sometimes.
Dusk and Water
Water becomes beautiful at sunset and dusk. This film is made up of some test footage I shot for the company I work for, both at a Lake where I live and a bay up in Door County, Wisconsin. I used a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera and various retro 35mm film lenses.
Shooting Retro Video with Holga Lenses
The Holga is a cheap plastic film camera with a plastic lens that captures dreamy vintage images. I own both a 120 and 35mm Holga and I shoot with them extensively. Below is an image that I captured with my 35mm model.
Pine Rows
The pine woods by the house where I grew up have always fascinated me. I used to go there by myself and wander for hours, padding quietly over the soft floor of needles through the gloom, staring at the crisscrossed fallen branches and the textures in the bark. The trees in this wood were originally planted for lumber, and they stand in surreal ordered lines, like the columns of an ancient church. They inspired me to write a narrative poem about vikings and a script idea that became my Senior thesis film. In high school I shot a silly horror film there, and I’ve returned several times since to shoot other projects. A while back I returned to these woods to shoot a short demo video with a Sony NEX 5 and a soft focus lens adapter. I love the look I got with this set-up, and I hope to recreate it for a future short film. For now, here’s the demo video.
Variable ND at the Beach
It was extremely cold and windy yesterday, but nevertheless I headed to the beach to shoot demo footage with the Fotodiox ND Throttle, a lens adapter with a variable neutral density filter built in. This filter allows me to shoot stopped down even in bright sunlight–most of the footage in the video below was shot at f/2.8–giving me an extremely shallow depth of field.
The Children of Space
I had the opportunity to teach a film acting class for an after-school drama group this winter, and the result is this film. I’ve always wanted to make an old-school science fiction film with miniature model work in it, so that’s the script I wrote for my class, with the cheesy title The Children of Space.
Gary Fraptious
My friend Scott McElroy has created a strange character named Gary Fraptious. He’s a bearded, aviator glasses wearing 20-going-on-60-something with a thick southern accent who speaks mostly gibberish. Scott and I put our heads together a while back and decided to feature this character in a series of unrelated skits on our YouTube comedy channel. Here are a couple of our favorites.
The Aches – Two Live Performance Videos
The Aches recently entered NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert Contest, and they asked me to shoot two live performance videos of them to submit to the judges. Because I only have one Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, and we wanted to capture the performances entirely live, I used my Canon T2i as a wide angle and reserved the Pocket for close-ups. I still have a lot to learn about the Pocket’s color science, and matching the footage from the two cameras was quite a chore, but I managed to get them pretty close. I used my Zoom H1 to record the sound. It’s a surprisingly great little audio recorder and the band was very happy with the quality I managed to capture. Below are both videos.
A Little Blackmagic
There’s a new camera in my life! This summer Blackmagic dropped the price of their little Pocket Cinema Camera, and I snatched one up. It’s incredibly powerful for it’s size and delivers a much higher quality image than my Canon DSLR ever did. I picked up a vintage C-mount lens from the antique store–a Bausch and Lomb 26mm f/1.9–and with the help of a Fotodiox C-Mount to Micro Four Thirds adapter I shot a quick demo with it. Here’s the result: