about film
A few weeks ago Juicy Jones performed at the finals of The Secret of Starsound, a band competition in Utrecht. At the start of their gig they glued together three of their songs into a medley of sorts. This is a sample of that medley, clocking in at just under four minutes.

I filmed it all with my Voigtlander lens, becoming quite adapt at quickly shifting focus, though I expect my newly arrived SmallHD monitor will help a lot next time. I tried to create a sort of disco-seventies look, which explains the very-saturated colors, grain and slightly skewed perspective.

about film
Last weekend I visited the ‘Collectors’ expo’ at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht to film a cool fashion show created by Pet van de Luytgaarden, ‘Pet’s verzamelingen’. As there were quite a lot of cameramen present already I just decided to play around with my camera and try out some lens-whacking (which I hadn’t done yet with the Panasonic 14-140mm lens). I also did some pretty strong grading of the footage in post, and am quite happy with the result actually!

Then I also took a nice pic of my Buddha statue, in name of the patience that was needed to get the friggin’ chain on my bike fixed!!

The duo-tone look was created with iPhoto on my new iPad (which ROCKS by the way!).

about film

Here’s a nice little stop motion experiment I did with my friend Malou for her theatreplay, ‘op zoek naar het Huilmeisje’ (looking for the crying girl). She wanted a playful and fun kind of stop motion style to quickly tell the story in a way that would appeal to young kids, and this is the result.

I was surprised how well Final Cut Pro X works with stop motion because of its compound-clips. You just put all your photos in the timeline and make them a compound-clip. Than you can time warp until the speeds is perfect and the timing just right. It does start to slow down a lot when you stack your compounded clips, but its still so quick in comparison to other software…

Cool stuff!

about film
This is just a pretty cool short experiment with my anamorphic lens. While a small crew of three was making a short documentary about me and my entrepreneurship I took the chance to film them back while trying out my anamorphic lens (which I don’t take out often enough!). Basically I also wanted to show the guys how I could create footage that had a real 16mm retro-look to it by using all these different tools and techniques. So I filmed them for a few minutes using my Bells&Howell 16D anamorphic lens, while lens-whacking it (manually holding it in front of the sensor), and worked with the footage in Final Cut Pro X to tune the look. Basically these ingredients together gave the clip its look:

–Filming with an anamorphic lens to create the great widescreen, slightly distorted look that instantly pushes your footage into the 70s realm (in my opinion).
–lenswhacking your lens to create a sort of random fluidity in your shots and creating these cool moving vignettes.
–manually distorting the image a bit more by strechting it vertically (after compensating for the anamorphic distortion). Why? Dunno, I just like that look. Just stretch it 2 to 3%
–Color Grading to make the shadows less black and the highlights kinda salmon-pinky, those two things really push the footage into the retro-look I think. You could make the shadows a bit more blue, but don’t oversaturate them because that looks cheesy!
–Adding 35mm film grain (I use GorillaGrain Plugin) to not only create the grainy organic look, but add a jittery character to the light-intensity across the frame, which is very characteristic for analogue film-footage.
–Lastly make sure the aspect ratio is at least 2.35:1 and put a slight vignette over it in post (don’t over-do that either!).

That’s about it.
Pretty fun experiment!

about film
Recently I received quite a special assignment through a friend of mine to make a short movie to celebrate the coming retirement of his father. His father had been a doctor and has had a long and fascinating career which provided us with a great concept to work with. My friend suggested to film people who’ve come to know his father during his career, both patients and colleagues, while they were talking about their memories. These people included life-long patients, his successor, and amazingly a woman who he had helped being born years ago, who now was pregnant herself (and was expected to give birth around the time he would retire!). We then chose to frame these images with a staged scene depicting his last workday, his last procedure.

We wanted the whole film to be more of an abstract, artistic remembrance than a real literal ‘best-of’ movie, so we chose to withhold the audio from the interviews, put in some great classical piano music, and film the whole movie with a lot of ‘lens whacking’ (detaching the lens to manually create those dreamy light-leaks and vignettes).

I’m very happy with the end result, though I realize its real resonance can only be felt when you understand the content of the movie, but even for outsiders it gives a nice idea of the creative choices we made for this film. As far as ‘remembrance’ films go, I like this abstract, musical, artistic result a lot more than a collections of interviews of people praising someone. By taking away their words, you let them say so much more…

Technically I didn’t try any new stuff out. Used the Voightlander 25mm again, with the ND Fader attached, and that’s about it! Enjoy!

about film

Recently I’ve been filmed and interviewed by a few young, enthusiastic students for production of a pilot-program about young entrepreneurs. I was one of three subjects of the program, and here’s my part of the program. It focused almost exclusively on the business side of my story, but does show me producing some cool shots at night! And well, it’s a pretty cool item actually.

It IS in Dutch however, so foreigners beware!

The program was made by Martijn van de Zuidwind, Daan Ruijter and Pjotr Sen.

about movie
Recently I’ve been doing lots of projects with friend/actress Malou van Sluis. One of her own running projects has been the theatre production ‘dancing on your grave’, a play about loss & mourning, in which she plays a starring role. Recently they performed the play in Utrecht and I filmed them to create a nice promotional trailer for their play.

As the father of one of the actress was around also with a camera I could finally experiment with the multicam function of Final Cut Pro X, which by the way is amazingly fast and easy to use! Really looking forward to filming larger projects with multiple cameras now…

14–140 lens
Also it was the first time in a looong time that I filmed with the stock panasonic 14-140mm lens. I really more or less avoided the lens for quite some time because A.it really isn’t that fast and even in daylight I prefer to use the Voigtlander with an ND-Fader attached to it, and B.I don’t really like the fly-by-wire-focusing and aperture. I’m so used to the old-school manual control like on the voigtlander, that I feel awkward with these more modern lenses.
BUT it IS a 10x zoom lens, which is pretty handy when filming a live-performance, and as theatre lighting is pretty bright anyway, its slowness wasn’t that big a deal. And as it turned out, it does give a great image still.

first crash!
Less amusing was the fact that I had my first crashes because of the hack. Basically I manually installed the GH2 hack by adding values in pTools, which worked great until this night. I never stress-tested the camera for longer takes and as it turned out, after 13:47 it halts. Apparently file-spanning didn’t work. So not only did my camera stop recording twice during the 40 minute performance, but the files couldn’t be played back or read into FCPX.

Fortunately, through the 5DtoRGB app I recovered the material and could convert it to manageable Prores, so no casualties in the end!

But it did prompt me to work on the hack again. Fortunately the GH2 1.1 firmware update had just been hacked again so I took the opportunity to upgrade the firmware and re-install a new hack, this time by using a real patch, the FlowMotion 1.11, which promised close-to-intra quality WITH file spanning. And it has been working great! No crashes every since