Trying out the new Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K

Posted by sean

I’ve been a huge fan of Blackmagic Design cameras since I purchased the original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera over a decade ago. They’re a company that knows how to make an incredibly powerful and versatile cinema camera at an affordable price for an indie filmmaker like myself, and using their cameras to make my short films look more filmic by adapting vintage lenses to them and using all sorts of color grading methods has been a real pleasure. Recently I was able to demo Blackmagic’s first full frame camera for Fotodiox, showing off some of Fotodiox’s L-mount adapters in the process. Here’s my full demo video:

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I was really impressed by the quality of the BMCC6K’s image, and I loved the full frame open gate look. It felt a bit like shooting in IMAX. Like all cinema cameras, there are some limitations. It’s not the easiest camera to hand hold without a stabilized lens, and it works much better on a tripod, but I’ve been meaning to shoot in a more locked down style anyway :)

Here’s a demo video I shot with the Cinema 6K and a 14mm Rokinon lens.

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As much as I love this camera, I’m still pretty happy with my Pocket 4k and Sony A7S II, although I may consider using one in the future. It was a great experience shooting with it for a week!

Shooting Video with a 90’s Black and White Toy Video Camera

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A couple years ago I bought a Tyco VideoCam on ebay, a black and white toy video camera made for kids in the 90’s to shoot videos in their living rooms with. At long last I have it up and running and have been shooting some shorts with it. It helps me create maybe the strangest lo-fi look I’ve come across, a weird mixture of bad VHS tape and black and white super 8 film. I hope to use it on some more ambitious projects soon, but in the mean time, here’s a video I made for Fotodiox about how I shoot with it.

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Queen Anne: Shooting a short film entirely on pinhole

Posted by sean

I’ve always been fascinated by stories set in one location. When I was young I was startled by the old time radio dramatization of Sorry, Wrong Number, a twisted tale about an invalid woman stuck in her apartment bedroom who slowly realizes one evening that she’s being stalked by a killer. I also had the idea growing up that if there were ghosts, they stayed in one place, way out in the middle of nowhere in the cold and dark, alone and unmoving. I’d look out the window on starless winter evenings driving home from my grandparents’ farm imagining lost souls in the black tree lines miles from the road, standing motionless in the sharp cold, listening to the trees creaking in the wind.

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Fisheye Lo-Fi

Posted by sean

I’ve always been a big fan of shooting with fisheye lenses. I like how they give my camera a unique view of the world, shrinking almost every element in a scene into a vast landscape even if it’s right next to the lens, and giving an exaggerated largeness to anything close to the lens in the center. With the virus still in full swing this summer, I’ve spent a lot of time alone on bike trails walking through the forest preserves of my county, and this has given me the opportunity to focus on shooting quiet, meditative videos focused on the natural elements around me. I’ve been using my Lomography Experimental Fisheye lens, a lo-fi plastic lens that gives me a warm, soft image that screams cheap plastic home movies camera from the 70’s, and I love the lo-fi looks I’ve been able to get out of it.

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Love for a Summer Land Seen Through a Pinhole

Posted by sean
Me in the Forest

Summers in Lake County, Illinois are like heaven on earth. The light filters through the leave and dapples the ground with an animated display of green and white and yellow. The heat fills the yellow and green spaces between the trees, sits quietly on the blue and green water, with cicadas nobly droning over it all. I love capturing these summers on long walks through the forest preserves of Lake County, especially with non-traditional lenses that add an extra texture, softness and distortion to the final image. These lenses help me to visually express the magic I see in this northern Illinois summer world, by making the landscapes and close-up details of a normal summer day into something more.

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Sunglasses ND Filter Hack

Posted by sean

A couple summers ago I took my Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera to Door County, Wisconsin on vacation. To keep my setup super compact the only lens I brought along was my Olympus 15mm f/8 Body Cap lens, which was great until I realized that it was too bright out to shoot at f/8 and all my footage was overexposed. I didn’t have an ND filter with me but I soon realized there was another option: cheap sunglasses and tape! Check out this little tutorial video I made for Fotodiox showing how I used this hack to save my vacation video.

And here’s the video I shot.

My First 16mm Film in 4K

Posted by sean

2007, March: my best friend Mike and I trudge up a North Carolina mountain to a long narrow bridge over a rushing mountain stream. I’m carrying my newly purchased 1960’s Bell and Howell Filmo 70 loaded with 16mm black and white reversal film. It’s really heavy and I’m panting. We find a stone in the dangerously fast flowing stream for Mike to stand on, I wedge the heavy tank of a camera and flimsy tripod into a bolder on the shore, meter the shot with a Super 8 camera–I don’t own a light meter–set the lens’s focus and aperture, crank the camera’s spring motor drive and shout action! Almost 12 years later I’m finally releasing the short film we shot that day in the quality it was meant to be seen in.

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BLACK CAT HALLOWMAS – My Sophomore Effort Finally Finished

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After graduating film school in 2010 I spent a couple years trying to figure out what was next. In that time I worked in retail and spent long hours on walks and in libraries, mulling over and writing out ideas for short films. BLACK CAT HALLOWMAS was the first really strong idea I landed on, and in the Fall of 2012 my friend Jeremy drove up from Ohio for a long weekend of shooting.

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Blackmagic Pocket Home Movies

Posted by sean

Because my magical little Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera emulates the look of 16mm film so well, adding a lo-fi lens to the front makes for a perfect home movie camera setup. Here are a couple home movies I’ve shot with my Pocket and various lo-fi plastic and vintage glass lenses over the past couple of years.

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My Trippy Holga Cult Film

Posted by sean

I shot five short films the summer before last for a miniseries I’m making called Summer Stories. It’s hard to comprehend how I did this, considering that this past summer I only managed to shoot one short, but basically I just didn’t sleep much and spent every weekend on day-long shoots. Editing these films has taken much longer than shooting them did and I still have two shorts to finish up, but here’s my most recent completion, The Square of Grass.

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Capturing Spring with the Lensbaby Sol 45

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Lensbaby Sol 45 - Bahai Temple II

This Spring Lensbaby reached out to me to demo their new lens, the Lensbaby Sol 45, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience! The lens is a 45mm fixed f/3.5 lens with built in tilt controls. All you have to do is twist the lens to unlock it and tilt it to adjust the focal plane for subtle to extreme tilt focus effects.

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Hequet: Horror in a Silent Film Style

Posted by sean

Hequet is the fourth episode in my web miniseries Summer Stories, and my latest attempt at telling a story with images and sounds only. With this silent style of filmmaking, strong composition, music cues and actor’s movement and facial expressions are key to telling the story. This style of film storytelling has always appealed to me because it places so much emphasis on the cinematography and forces the viewer to engage with the story in a creative way–they have to piece the story together themselves rather than it being handed to them on an exposition platter. I’ve always enjoyed mystery in stories, leaving some of the big questions unanswered, and Hequet is no exception. What happened to the man’s wife? Is the statue really a supernatural entity or just in the man’s head? Who is the mysterious masked woman? Well, that question at least can be answered by watching Summer Stories Episode 3.

I hope you enjoy Hequet, and maybe even get a little spooked in the process! It was certainly a joy to create.

July Flame: Capturing Summer in Northern Illinois

Posted by sean

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.

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Capturing Photos and Videos with an 11 mm Pinhole Lens

Posted by sean

Last year I picked up a Wanderlust Cameras 11mm Pinwide Pinhole lens. Wanderlust no longer makes this “lens” so it’s a bit hard to find, but I managed to snag one on Ebay for a decent price. Unlike a homemade pinhole lens, which I’ve made and used in the past, the Pinwide is precision milled and 3D printed and creates a much cleaner and sharper image. It has a Micro Four Thirds mount, but I’ve mostly used it on my Sony A7S II with an adapter.

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Sword and Suburb: My Newest Loner Narrative

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Loners have always fascinated me. Being a part-time loner myself, I’m compelled by the narrative force of a character who is alone by choice or necessity, striving to accomplish a goal by their single strength or choosing to do nothing and fade into obscurity. There is both a flaw and a strength to the loner. On one hand their absence from others shows their selfishness and fear, but on the other it shows their discipline and focus. Loners are more likely to become delusional and do foolish things because they have no one to correct them, but they’re also able to take risks that others wouldn’t take.

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Summer Stories: Penguinarium

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Here’s episode 2 of my new miniseries Summer Stories. In this episode I wanted to capture the essence of 1940’s and 50’s horror with silent film storytelling. I shot the entire episode on my new Sony A7S II with a vintage Canon FD 20mm lens for a slightly surreal, off kilter look, and I chose a penguin to be the antagonist because they are inherently funny. Actually, this is an example of a prop inspiring a script. I found a retro plastic penguin statue at my local antique store this spring and the script just kind of fell into my head.

Summer Stories: Make Films Until They Don’t Suck

Posted by sean

Prolific indie filmmaker Jay Duplass once said “Keep making shitty short films until one of them doesn’t suck one day.” So I took his advice and earlier this year my friend Jeremy and I began shooting a series of shorts film scripts I had written. Originally I intended these shorts to be self contained, but as I looked over them I realized they all had some basic elements in common: they were all set in the Midwestern suburbs in the summer, and they all involved slightly paranormal occurrences. Now I’m releasing them about bimonthly on YouTube as Summer Stories, my first ever miniseries! Summer Stories is a loosely connected series of short films about the strange and mysterious things that can be found just around the corner in the summer suburbs. It’s also been a great learning experience for me, and I plan to continue writing and shooting the series into the winter, although I suppose I’ll have to change the name to Winter Stories at some point.

Here’s the first episode in the series, which I released last week, just in time for Halloween.

And here’s the trailer for the series, containing clips from some upcoming episodes.