The title says it all. This is my newest short for my Summer Stories miniseries that I filmed in 2018 and finally finished editing earlier this summer. Just watch it.
Sunglasses ND Filter Hack
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.
Shooting with a Retro Fisheye Lens
Blackmagic Pocket Home Movies
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.
Summer Stories: Make Films Until They Don’t Suck
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.
Grayslake Pinhole: Shooting Pinhole Video with a Homemade Body Cap Lens
Pinhole imagery has always fascinated me. I own a Zero Image medium format film pinhole camera that I shoot with occasionally, but other than my weird pumpkin camera obscura, I’ve never tried shooting pinhole photography with a digital camera. I find the precision made digital pinhole lenses that you can buy online just a little too expensive for the results you get, so the other day I finally did the homework and made my own pinhole lens from scratch.
Sony A7R II at the Shedd Aquarium
Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium is a beautiful and relaxing place to visit, and last week I was able to take a camera there to shoot some video. I used a Sony A7R II, two Canon FD lenses–a Vivitar 20mm f3.8 and my Dad’s old 50mm f1.4–and a Rokinon 7.5mm Fisheye lens, all mounted on the camera via Fotodiox adapters. I shot half the video is 24fps and the other half in 60fps for the slow motion effect. I was going to shoot in a flat profile but I really love Sony’s built-in color science so I ended up going with the standard picture profile and layering on a film emulsion LUT in post. Here’s the video I shot:
After shooting with the A7R II for a little over a year now I’m still regularly surprised by how beautiful it can render photos and video. It’s not great in low-light, but if you have a fast lens mounted on it and stick at ISO 800 or lower, its powerful little imaging device. I guess it should be for the price. I’m so thankful that my work lest me borrow it so frequently!
Fisheye In The Bog
I grew up going on hikes with my family at Volo Bog State Natural Area, and it’s still one of my favorite places to visit in Illinois. A bog, especially in the vanilla Midwest, is a magical place, and when you get out in the middle of it, after crossing acres of quaking ground and floating dwarf trees on a narrow boardwalk, you feel like you’re in another world. This January we had an unseasonably warm stretch that felt just like Spring, and one Saturday I couldn’t help but grab a camera and head out to Volo to check up on an old friend.
Probably Okay: The Pie Problem
Here’s the latest video from my sketch comedy YouTube series Probably Okay. My writing partner Michael Golus and I have been stepping up our game lately with more complex ideas and polished cinematography, and it’s helped to elevate the material, which is, as usual, entirely mad. Probably Okay is all about jokes without punchlines, and this video is no exception. When Mike and I write these scripts, with occasional help from the rest of our fluctuating team of actors, we like to play the “what if” game and go as far as we can with it, which ends up generating some pretty bizarre ideas. This alternative humor isn’t for everyone, and I’ve encountered plenty of of people who just scratch their heads when they see our videos, but from those who understand the humor, we’ve been fairly well received. We’ve been making these video for 7 years now and we’ve never really generated a large audience, but for Mike and I it’s never been about the amount of views or the likes. We just enjoy creating funny videos that surprise and hopefully delight the viewer with their unexpectedness, and if we’ve done that for even just a couple of people, we feel like we’ve succeeded.