Shot some super 16 at Wherehouse MKE’s opening night, a cool new photo studio in town.
The site was very dark, so I had the lab push the film one stop in processing.
Camera: Aaton LTR 7
Lens: Angenieux 12-120mm
Lab & 2K Scan: http://www.videofilmsolutions.com/
Music: Alison Wonderland x Jinsang - Messiah (Hex Cougar Ghibli Edit)
Location: http://www.wherehousemke.com/
Emily Evers, model
Angeneiux 12-120mm lens test
Shot on Super 16, Aaton LTR
Music: “What Can I Say” by No No Yeah Okay
I recently shot an acapella teaser video for Queen Tut’s upcoming single “Heroes.” I wanted a simple video with the artist rapping the song acapella on the street, bringing the lyricism to the forefront. This promo video should build awareness for the single when it’s released in full later this summer.
Shot on digital cameras (Panasonic GH series) in black and white with the contrast and noise bumped up in post to give it the feel of dirty reversal film. Thanks to my buddies Shaun Hosseini, Serbata Tarrer, and Matthew Metcalf for help with camera and sound. And of course check out Queen Tut on Soundcloud.
Music video for Rahn Harper, “Stay”
Directed by Damien Blue
Super 16 shots by yours truly
John Roberts is a Milwaukee filmmaker, whose motion graphics work has been featured in national ad campaigns and feature films. His most recent short film, Lemon, features a girl’s revenge after her lemonade business deal goes sour. The citrusy-sweet film was the main squeeze of the 2015 Milwaukee Film Festival, where it won the Cream City Cinema award.
The short showcases a ton of local Milwaukee talent, impressive special effects, and lists me as an associate producer!
A mysterious drifter thrust into a woman’s dangerous family affair. Three30Three is an action short produced by my friends Shaun Hosseini and Ben Soto, shot in the summer of 2014. I was involved in production from the start and was pleased to see their pages grow into the finished product we see here. Their idea was to give a genre-bending spin on the noir film. The choice of having the majority of the story in daylight led to some pretty cool shots during the action scenes.
(Source: vimeo.com)
This short film from 2012 is the first “real” production I worked on.
Croquembouche tells a post-WWII story of two former lovers who reconnect during a dinner date with their husbands. It was filmed as an AFI grad thesis project, shot on the campus sound stage. My friend Nacia Schreiner was working as an art director for the short and invited me to help her on set for a couple days during my LA visit in 2011. My job was cleaning the dishware and refilling glasses between takes during the dinner scene. Real filmmaking shit.
Being involved with the beehive of activity on set was eye-opening. At the time it was a little awkward, but never overwhelming – my job was so small that I spent most of the time trying to avoid getting in the way of people actually working. But even with little to do, it felt good to be there. Watching the cast and crew do their thing gave me that weird “I can do this!” feeling. Everyone’s jobs were small but all the work combined to the footage you see in the video. Even outside of filmmaking, I’m drawn to work that contributes to the bigger picture. I like being a small part of something big. Someday I want to be a big part of something huge.
Random notes:
-The lead husband and wife had a big difference in height during shooting. The woman towered nearly 12 inches over the man, who had to stand on apple boxes when they were on screen together. It looks like they forgot the box in a couple of the shots.
-One of the big ideas for the visuals was to create a black-and-white film shooting color footage. The set design had a fully-B&W color scheme, with the actors being the only source of color (until the final exterior shot). I don’t think it really worked, but it was a cool idea.
-Filmed on a Panavision Genesis camera, one of the first digital film cameras used on big productions.
-Looking at the film’s IMDb page, it appears the only crew member who has had any substantial work is the cinematographer Robert Arnold, who has credits doing camera op work on a bunch of TV shows and Furious 7. However, the rest of the crew may have had steady work in commercial shoots or other video work that doesn’t typically get IMDb listings. I wish there was a website for smaller stuff like that.
This is raw Super 16 film from a project I’m currently shooting.
I recently bought a film camera from the 80s and wanted to test it out without wasting film stock on standard test footage fare (foliage, babies, etc.) so I quickly wrote something stupid to have something to shoot. This was scanned to a 2K ProRes 422 file, from which I made a compressed H264 file for Vimeo.
Posting raw, uncorrected footage is typically a no-no but when I was shopping for film stock and cameras I had trouble researching because there wasn’t a lot of sample footage out there. So I made this available for people who were curious.
As you can see, the footage has an ugly, flat, green tone. We shot on a very overcast winter day so I knew it wouldn’t have a lot of color popping out but did not know to what extent. Now I know why so few movies use winter exteriors! Kodak’s Vision3 film stock is known for having an impressive dynamic range for highlights and colors so I’m looking forward to correcting the scanned ProRes footage and seeing how it compares to modern digital files.
This was also a way to finally try out a cheapo 1.5x anamorphic adapter I picked up almost a year ago. The adapter is too small for most digital sensors but I figured it would fit over a Super 16 frame. Super 16 has a 1.66:1 frame ratio, so stretching that out 1.5x gives an anamorphic 2.49:1 image which is very close to the scope 2.39:1 footage you see in theaters. I’m interested in using as much of the Super 16 frame as possible since it’s a pretty small gauge film. Once corrected and sharpened in post, it should resemble soft 35mm footage (since the stretched Super 16 frame equals about 75% the width of 35mm).
At the 2:00 mark there is some wonky footage that goes on for about a minute. Somehow the film loop in the camera was lost, not giving the stock enough slack as it ran through the gate. This resulted in the film being pulled through the camera slower than the shutter was moving, which results in smeared unusable footage. A real shame!