Mini Reviews: 2015 Awards Season Films – Part 1

Posted by sean

Why do all the best films come out in the space of three months?! My wallet and I wish the studios would space them out equally over the course of a year, but there is something fitting about the quality of cinema climbing as we approach our holy days. Here are some mini reviews of the 2015 awards season films I’ve seen so far.

Sicario

sicario

Every once in a while I see a film that already feels like a classic, and Sicario is one of those kinds of films. Emily Blunt plays FBI agent Kate Macer who is frustrated by the violent drug crimes she encounters daily in her hometown.

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HAUNT: A Short Film

Posted by sean

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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

Posted by sean

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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November Message

Posted by sean

Haplessly trudging under weight
Across red clay bleeding in the rain;
Numb in warmth, stomach overfull,
Eyes shot in the glowing of the screen.

Disparaging the merits of my love,
Claiming happiness yours to withhold;
Soul too small, good not good enough,
Smile and laughter spent and cast to earth.

Shivering quickly between halls,
Taking shelter from November rain;
The wind that cast its leaves back to the walk,
Evergreen dancing in the cold.

The shared class and the smirking over trays,
Razor wit cascading over mugs.
Mistletoe haunts each barren oak,
Red clay dries to old veins on the walk.

Increasing terseness in your rapid text
Until silence reigned upon my head.
Torn asunder by a blade of mute,
False god but to leap and leave to die.

My skull become your ever azure sky,
My bones become the mountains that you love,
My lips a story that you ceased to tell,
my blood the clay you drink your coffee from.

Trick-Or-Treating or Home Invasion?

Posted by sean

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!

Mini Reviews: Cinema Double Feature

Posted by sean

I turned 29 this August and I was depressed so I went to the cinema and watched two movies back-to-back.

Irrational Man

10

I love how brazenly simple Woody Allen’s films are. He doesn’t care if his stories follow well-trodden paths to predictable endings–he just delights in the dramatic art of getting there.

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Visting New York in Autumn

Posted by sean

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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Old Bones

Posted by sean

There some old bones out on my front lawn. They been there a while now. Don’t know whose they are–maybe somejerk dumped ’em there. The grass was sure tall before the rain stopped and it all dried up. There were them old bones just layin’ there then, all dry and white.

Maybe they Edwardo’s bones? He use to come by and cut the grass till he stopped comin’ by. Too old to cut the grass myself. I got old bones too.

I don’t worry ’bout them bones much. Plenty more in the streets and all them houses ‘round me now–all them old bones, saggin in them old clothes. Lucky I was in the cellar when the rain stopped.

GoPro Slo-mo

Posted by sean

GoPro cameras are quickly becoming the go-to choice for documenting everyday life, which is kind of weird because they present a distorted, wide angle view of the world. That being said, they are nifty little cameras, especially the new HERO4 Black, which allows you to shoot at 120 frames per second in full HD. The compression is a little janky, but it still produces decent slo-motion footage. I’m a youth leader at my church, and last winter I took a HERO4 Black along on one of our youth retreats. Here’s what I captured, mostly in slo-mo mode.

Shooting with the iPhone VHS App

Posted by sean

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

Posted by sean

Hero and Bolex

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.

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Pine Ridge

Posted by sean

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

Posted by sean

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.

Mini Reviews: More Netflixing

Posted by sean

Summer–time for staying at home and lazily watching Netflix!

Blue Ruin 
2013. Directed by Jeremy Saulnier

Blue-Ruin

The family feud is a staple of classic American storytelling, but it’s hard to imagine the backwoods familial wars portrayed in, say, Huckleberry Finn happening in modern day America. That’s why Blue Ruin is so compelling–it tells a story of revenge and violence between two feuding families that you wouldn’t imagine could happen today, but in a totally convincing way.

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NEW MAN: a test film that became a short

Posted by sean

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.

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