Assembling a 16 mm camera

Charles Edwards visited again today to show us how to assemble a 16 mm camera. Man, those things are heavy! The camera has a tactile quality that is completely different from handling a digital camera, even those large Panasonics. I am finding myself strangely drawn to the film process, despite my misgivings of cost and old-fashioned technique, it reminds me of working with my old Pentax 1000 shooting and printing black and white stills. The whole assembly process is so complicated, I took a load of pictures so that come the time we have to do it for real I will remember how it went.

Art Department Exercise

Today we filmed the results of our week-long art department exercise. We worked in groups of 4 with the help of John Girdlestone to produce a short film set in a particular period. The script was pretty simple, intentionally so that it can be interpreted in many ways. Since there were 4 groups in the class, we picked 4 random periods - 2030, stone age, china in the 30’s and post-WWII NZ. Then we went location scouting. Since our group had been assigned the stone age, we went looking for caves. Luckily the coastline is full of them, but we also went for an old gold mine in Karori nature reserve. In the end we plumped for an open space in Breaker Bay, where we could light a fire and film without any problems, after getting the ok from Film Wellington. We spent a happy afternoon at the Costume Cave looking for furry bits for costumes. We had done a script breakdown of all the props and set dressing items we needed, but because of our period we had to find a stone age equivalent for them. A clock became a sun dial, the photographs turned into hand prints on rocks, the mirror a rock pool, the paper in the Jayne Eyre book was replaced with the twist in our story, a lighter hidden behind some decorated pebbles: We shot today, with Merryl and Corey acting, Jake directing and me as DoP. It was freezing cold, but the actors still managed to act barefoot and wearing very little. We set up early and shot till 3pm with hardly a break. You can see the end result below or here.

Panoramas

I have been making panorama stills for years now, ever since I got my first digital camera. I love the way I can capture everything I see, not just what the camera sees in one frame. Until recently I thought that my panoramas had little to do with film making, apart from being a sort of instant pan, until I came across a tutorial on making moving panoramas. I still can’t figure out how I hadn’t come up with this myself. I mean, I was already using the tools, making little films and even editing them, and making still panoramas. Anyway, they are my latest obsession, and so easy to make with Final Cut. And they are so cool! I’ll put more on the page as I make them. Enjoy! Here is a taste: