Sean’s Top Nine for 2023

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Here are my top nine most liked photos on Instagram for 2023. They’re fairly representative of my year, from shooting lots of photos with my various Holga cameras to experimenting with Polaroid film and some new point and shoots to collecting rare cameras and celebrating our first wedding anniversary! It’s interesting that some of my most low-contrast, funky color film photos got the most love. I get it guys, you like that retro film look :) Thanks for all the support this year! – Sean

Check out my Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/seanandersonmedia/

Star Wars Holiday Special 2: My Homage to the Strange Side of Star Wars

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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.

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Green Town: A Video Tribute to Ray Bradbury

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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.

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The Spiritual and the Mundane Side by Side

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South Dakota Sunset

As Christians we are told by our Savior that those who seek a sign are a wicked generation–but the spiritual gifts given at Pentecost have not gone away. Last summer my roommate prayed for a pain-stricken woman who was instantly healed, and one of the students I help lead encountered a demon that was beaten back by prayer and dependence on Christ’s power. Neither of these instances involved spiritual power being wielded by humans, but simply followers of Christ depending on His power for providence and protection.

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HAUNT: A Short Film

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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.

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Photography Season

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November is almost here, and with it comes bright cold days and bare trees reaching towards perfectly blue skies. Everything is brown and grey and purple and seems swept clean for a moment after the leaves have fallen and before the snows begin. It’s a season of Holidays and family get-togethers, full of football, feasts and long walks to burn them off. My family loves to wander over bone yellow prairies, through oak savannas and down rocky ravines, exploring twisty stony forests after they’ve lost their cover of green. We visit abandoned military forts, old bridges and river overlooks, admiring the way the sun reflects off old stone and trees curve over and reflect in the brown water below. This is photography season, the best time for carrying a camera, either film or digital, and capturing all the joyous romping and beautiful scenery. Here are some of my favorite images from this season.

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Visting New York in Autumn

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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.

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Pine Ridge

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Badlands II

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.

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Summer Suburb

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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.

Pine Rows

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Pine Whirl

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.

Longing for 16mm

Posted by sean

There’s a moment where I received an old camera in a musty box. It waited under my lecture hall seat and I opened it after in the crowded lobby, full of nervous energy and marveling at the weight of the thing. My friend was quickly informed and we toyed with it in his dorm room all that warm Autumn afternoon.

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Streaming Culture—The “Air-Conditioned Nightmare” Realized

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I’m thinking about canceling my Netflix subscription. Why? Why not a little history first?

Years ago people would dress up to go to a stage play. Attending the theater was a special occasion, a way to relax after a hard week, or even month of labor. With the advent of cinema nothing much changed. Most people treated movies like they treated theater—as a special night of entertainment. Going to the movies was still at most a once a week event, and people still dressed up.

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A Little Blackmagic

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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:

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Police Stories

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Every few weeks a story come out about a police officer getting in  a fight with a photographer. Generally the altercation begins when the photographer tries to capture a shot that the officer deems unfit. The resulting aggression seems to stem from a basic misunderstanding of the law: what a photographer is or is not allowed to photograph and how much authority a police officer has over such actions. As a filmmaker, I’ve encountered my share of police officers while out shooting, but most of my encounters have been humorous ones.

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