As a class we worked to assemble a full-fledged space craft, decorate it, light it and shoot an approximately ten-minute short film about it and its two passengers (a man and a woman.) In addition to many non-SFX shots, we dealt with a handful of special effects scenarios (e.g. creating a floating hologram using a piece of plexiglass and a projector, double-exposure, etc) without the use of CGI or (hardly) any post-production work or effects. Think ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’

Anyway, I recently re-discovered our classes’ shutterfly page which contains more than a handful of production photos for those interested in how it all went down. It’s hard to believe how much we accomplished in just a matter of ten weeks — and only 6-9 hrs a week!

Let me know if you have any questions about what we did (or how we did it) and hopefully, come September, I will be able to post some scenes from the film for viewing.

Lighting & Cinematography

Probably the most practical film course I’ve taken at Northwestern thus far. The professor knows his stuff and it shows: we have covered a lot of ground so far this quarter, learning both the Bolex 16mm film camera and now the Arri BL. Granted, they are kind of the Beavis & Butthead of film cameras but they’re still the first (and only) film cameras we’ve worked with. The Bolex is a royal pain the ass to use but it produces some nice looking images and it’s the first time most of us have produced something on film — so, to get that ‘filmic’ look (i.e. short depth of field) is awesome. It’s a bit of a monster: heavy, hand-cranked, with a terrible eyepiece and viewfinder.

Loading the camera is a real task, but unlike the Arri BL (more on that later) you can load this in a low light situation without too much risk of exposing your entire reel. It’s got a pretty good feature set though, and some models (like the one above) have a 3-lens turret configuration whereby you can change lenses on the fly. We did a couple of in-class exercises with these machines before tackling our first project: a three minute short narrative. We were given one hundred feet of black and white Kodak film (about 3 minutes worth) and our assignment was to convey a character’s search for something — in some way, shape, or form. My partner and I decided to shoot what we thought would be a fairly basic concept — someone looking for their glasses, but realizing that they already had them on — but this turned out to be more of a chore than we anticipated. Isn’t that life? Needless to say, we ran into some problems. Our actor wasn’t an actor, he was my roommate. We had about 60 minutes to run through four lighting setups. The camera’s take-up spool decided not to ‘take-up’ our film so we ran into a situation some 45 seconds in whereby the camera housing was basically bursting open with loose film. That portion ended up being completely blown out. Crud. Otherwise our remaining footage was decent. At the very least it was properly exposed and focused.

Anyways – moving upwards and onwards, we’re now focusing on the Arri BL which my professor claims is not an oft-used camera (I can see why) but one that is good to know for foundational learning purposes. It’s battery powered (which is good) with a Batman utility belt-like battery pack that weighs about 25 pounds (not so much.) It’s got a separate magazine for the film reels (which is good) but it’s an absolute, undeniable pain in the ass to load (not so much.)

We’re splitting up into groups of four to work on our next assignment which gives us 400 feet of color super 16mm film and a bit more narrative freedom. We’re adapting an e.e. cummings poem (‘may i feel said he’) and hopefully the results are as exciting as our visual ideas about the project. This is by far the most difficult part of the group project process: getting that image in your mind onto the page and making sense to other people. I imagine this is true, by all accounts, in every other field as well. Will keep you all updated on the status of the project and hopefully I’ll be able to make a digital transfer to post up in a couple of weeks.

Random note: my professor was the producer/director of a film by 137 Films called ‘The Atoms Smashers’ that aired as a part of PBS’ ‘The Independent Lens.’ You can catch it on Netflix, or read the blog here.