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.
Two summers ago I had a lot of time on my hands and not much to do, so I spent it with a single lens, a borrowed camera and captured as much of summer in northern Illinois as I could. I visited all my favorite stomping grounds – bogs, beaches, lakes and dusty trails – and captured them all as similarly as possible. I decided to limit myself to static, shallow depth of field shots with my subject always positioned near the middle of the frame, with the intention of cropping to a vintage squarish aspect ratio in post. I also added film grain in post, which I knew showed up much clearer in shallow depth of field footage.
My lens of choice was a vintage antique store find, a Soligor 135mm f/2.8 T-mount lens mounted on a borrowed Sony A7R II with a Fotodiox T-mount to Canon EOS adapter, which I then double stacked onto a Fotodiox Canon to Sony ND Throttle adapter. The variable ND filter built into the ND Throttle allowed me to cut the light entering the lens so I could shoot most of the video wide open at f/2.8. This helped me achieve a cinematic shallow depth of field, even when shooting in bright sunlight.
Okay, boring technical stuff aside, this was one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve ever created. It was a combination of vising and capturing the places I love the most, and the look I was able to achieve was so close to what I initially wanted! The fact that musical artist FLORA gave me permission to use her cover of Laura Veirs’ “July Flame” in the video was icing on the cake. It’s one of my favorite summer songs and was a big inspiration for the project to begin with.
If you’d like to learn more about how I created this short, check out this video I made for Fotodiox.