In college I was tasked with coming up with a new film idea every week and writing it out on a note card. It was really just a creativity exercise, and most of my ideas were pretty poor. I still have the stack of cards, and it’s full of oddities like “a webcam comedy about an opera singing plant” and documentary ideas like “how to make swords.” One idea I had involved a character named the Vigilante Hunter who hunted down superheroes for the government.
All photographic undertakings require some artifice and trial and error. The photographer or filmmaker isn’t so much capturing the exact right image or moment as he is capturing many images and moments and looking for the best in the editing stage. This has always been the case. It reflects the fact that we’re not the creator so much as the created, trying to capture a piece of creation.
Last winter I had the privilege of helping my friends Colin and Christiana Flanigan with a photo shoot to promote their band The Aches. They specifically wanted an analog film look, so I used my Canon AE1 35mm film camera, along with a Polaroid Colorpack II instant film camera to photograph them. We headed out to a lakefront park in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which gave us a starkly beautiful view of partially frozen Lake Michigan.
Here are some of the shots I captured.
As always, it was a joy to shoot with film. I love the aesthetic of 35mm and instant film, and I didn’t even have to do much work in post to get these images ready for publication. Chris and Colin really liked what we achieved and they’ve have already incorporated some of these images into their Facebook page. Check it out here.
Oh, and they’re also an awesome band! You can listen to some of their music here.
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:
God bless Peter Jackson. He has a good heart and he clearly loves making movies. Nothing shows his love for this craft more than The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. It’s a film packed to near bursting with thrilling sights, passioned monologues and epic moments. Sad to say it has more in common with Dungeons and Dragons, a derivative version of Middle Earth, than it does with Tolkien’s original classic.
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My job requires me to spend some time on photography blogs and forums every week, and I’m consistently surprised by how much snobbery I run into. It seems everyone has a premium brand or model they swear by, and the predominate claim is “costlier is better. While I won’t argue that expensive lenses and sensors can yield great results, I still want to grab the internet by it’s collective shoulders, give it a good shake and ask it a few simple questions: does your camera have ISO, shutter speed and aperture control? Do you understand the basics of composition and subject matter? If so, you have the tools to be a great photographer. So cut it out!
Last summer I found a couple 110 cameras with expired, half-used film in them at a thrift store. I added to my arsenal with a Holga Micro-110 and a roll of Fuji 200 I purchased online, and I set out shooting.
Back in the day some guy named Cooper had this crazy idea for a film involving a giant ape. He got a guy named O’Brien to help make it happen, with some stop-motion animation that blew audiences out of their seats. Cooper made a few more films in the same vein, then the big monster genre kind of disappeared.
I found this little plastic camera at an antique store and payed way too much for it. I liked its weird look and ridiculously parallax circular viewfinder.
Opening it up, I found a used role of Pan 127 film, a very extinct format.
Finally finished: my photo reel for 2012.
Last September I made a film comprised of one video shot for each day of the month. It only half-worked. I missed half the days and the other half I ended up shooting more footage than I needed. This month I’m participating in a similar project, through a film event organized by a friend on his company’s facebook page.
I like shooting video essays. I learn new things about my equipment, practice new techniques, and end up with a compact, self contained film. Capturing the mundane and showing it for what it really is, the hidden magic of God’s beautiful creation, is one of my greatest passions. It’s what drives me as a filmmaker.
Remember when I said I was going to draw a comic a day and post the good ones here? Yeah. So here’s one I did last year but never got around to finishing until now. It’s about monsters playing baseball. Yeah.
One of my fellow university society brothers asked me to make a comic for our monthly rag. This is what I came up with, casting our unofficial society mascot as a humorously indignant cheater.
New comic. Not sure what I was thinking!
My goal this year is to create at least one piece of sequential art a week. Here’s my most recent attempt.
