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Man•child Rhapsody: The 1st "Dream Lens" Filmmaking Test

in

Let's rewind the clock a little, shall we? Rewind it back to the year 2021 when the coveted & illustrious vision of Zack Snyder's Justice League finally became available to the world and graced my eyelids.

This was a glorious moment for me as I fucks hard with this Movie (hard language will be used to describe my unbridled love for this man's interpretation of the DC Universe). This was also the same time when his zombie film, Army of the Dead, was just on the cusp of being released.

Zack Snyder not only released two movies in 1 year, but he also promoted the hell out of them and from it was a beautiful collection of portraits crafted for the release of Justice League.


These photos portrayed the cast as their respective characters in the Knightmare reality, and each character was gorgeously captured by Zack Snyder with the beautiful lens that is the Canon 50mm F/0.95, aka the Dream Lens. Absolutely in awe by these photos, the texture, the creaminess, the bokeh goodness; they're nothing short of visually arresting. Not too long later, the trailer for Army of the Dead released, and once again, I was visually arrested by the mixture of beauty and horror.



Never have I been so fascinated by seeing zombies rendered in gorgeous shallow depth of field. After watching that trailer for about 4 times that day and scouring every inch of Snyder's Vero account [Decent app, but not for me] for more details on the mythical lens.

!st shot after getting the lens

I eventually found out there was a dream lens available at the camera shop I worked and I immediately jumped at the chance to bother my manager about letting me borrow it. After enough harassment and crying on the subject, they caved in and gave me the weekend to borrow it. Yay!




I hit up the sexy Mexican Charlie’s Angel himself, Mr. Jersain, for a Sunday afternoon of testing the Dream Lens.

Da Mexican Charlie’s Angel, Jersain

Now with most lens tests I do the point is to get a feel for the character and rendering of the glass with my camera. I’m not one for scientific tests because A.) It’s boring B.) It’s not interesting C.) It's not fun. (Very non-rational reasons) At the end of the day, the point is to make moving images that evoke feelings and reactions. I want to say it was this year the desire to create some sort of story in my tests started to neander around my thoughts. Even though we are two adult dudes, we are very silly man-children messing around on the playground. The footage are a bunch of random shots by themselves, but by re-purposing the footage to portray a loose story [emphasis on loose] accompanied by a bumpin track by Wax, this arranges the footage in the context of a narrative. The close-up shots of Jersain looking out in the distance could be a moment of longing rather than just a pretty shot of Jersain lookin sexy, either works, but there's still something being emoted through the images arranged into a sequence of events.


It took seconds for me to fall in love with this lens. The way it renders the face in close-ups is remarkable; the way a person is encapsulated by these gigantic pearls of light feels as though you're looking inside a jewel. There's no point in playing with a lens that opens to F/0.95 and stopping it down for any reason. Any other lens can stop down, but a lens that opens all the way to F/0.95 is bonkers and just the kind of quality that I’m drawn to. Slap an ND on it, set the camera to the lowest ISO, and keep it pushin.

Taking that responsibility in creating an image, let alone a film with that approach, is what got me excited about Zack Snyder's reason for shooting Army of the Dead that way. A directorial and stylistic choice that was executed from beginning to end. After this test and getting the footage put together in the video you see up top, I absolutely made this lens an official part of my arsenal. I couldn't pass this lens up. The moment it became my lens, I knew I was going to make a film with it. Just like Snyder, I’d make a directorial and stylistic choice to film a narrative from beginning to end with this lens.

Fast forward to today, currently working on Of Little Dreams and Odysseys with that exact intent, but that's a story for another time.

Still from Of Little Dreams and Odysseys Lens test

Hope you Enjoy

-Andrew

It's About Damn Time

in

To every person who has asked the question, “when is it coming out?” Mark the calendar, We have a date! Triptych will premieres to the world on May 4th.    

It’s a great feeling to finally have a date to share the fruits of much labor with you guys. I’m incredibly proud of myself for sticking with an idea I’ve had since November 2019 and making not one film, but a series of stories influenced by all the nerdy shit I love with snippets of personal anecdotes.

The joy of working with such talented people who lent their talents into this series is indescribable . There’s so much planned for this project that I hope ya’ll dig it. It’s going to a busy 2 months (as if it already wasn’t).

Hope You Enjoy!

-Andrew

Sun•day On The Tracks: Filmmaking Test

in

Such a cool shot

At some point, this time last year I had the chance to play around with a genuine Germany( maybe Canadian) crafted Leica R lens. With endless excitement and only the weekend to play around with it, to get an idea if I wanted to buy it, I set up an afternoon with Francisco to shoot some test footage.

Like anything I do, there's not an ounce of scientific reasoning for the things I do in the pretentious name of art, which includes A.) filming on active train tracks just because it seemed cool B.) Endangering an old ass lens that I don't own and whipping it around active train tracks & C.) Inching humanly possible to the edge of the tracks to film train whizzing by with 50% regard for safety, but this was never meant to be a technical lens test ( me technical, I laugh).

Proud of the way this framing came about

What I set out to discover about the Leica was its characteristics; the way it renders the world through the Olympus EM5 Mrk III, I wanted to test the kind of mood and atmosphere that can be achieved with this pairing.

Look at that pop in that stance

Creatively I wanted to do something loosely narrative with the test because at the end of the day we're making narratives, so all through this past December, I was toiling over the idea of how to make this test with a semblance of a story(this was a process having just filmed Wolves in The Wilderness and Holiday cheer creeping up). I eventually started listing to the track "Signals From The Noise" by BADBADNOTGOOD (an amazing fucking album you should listen to) and there were parts in the tracks that helped me visualize the mood I wanted to portray.

I started off building my timeline with the track and then this evolved into using audio clips from archived train videos from the '40s, and because I'm such a fan of Jessica Chastain in "The Tree of Life" this led to me using the beautiful monologue of Grace and Nature and bastardizing it for my nefarious purposes( Mwhhaaaa).

Look at that dumbo ear action

I want to say this was filmed at ISO 200 mainly to help cut the amount of daylight without an ND and hoping I wouldn't have to stop down, but that was a fool's game ( damn you sunlight). Looking back on it stopping down wasn't a horrible compromise, I think around F/4 or 5.6 was what we shot for the majority and the rendering looks stellar.

Overall this came out pretty well and this gets me excited to try my Leica R 35mm F2 because as good as the 2.8 is based on this test I couldn't deal with the weird Series VII filter thread situation.

• Olympus EM5 Mark II • Leica R 35mm f/2.8

Hope You Enjoy

-Andrew

Cine•ma Classics 2019/20

I love films. I’ve been making these lists since 2012 and it’s amazing to me how much my taste in films has changed & developed over the years.

Looking over the choices for what qualified as a cinematic masterpiece, I can vaguely see a unifying thread that gravitates me towards these films. Most of the films all share the unifying detail of being a movie about people & love. To get deeper on this point, they're movies about people and the abundance or absence of love in their lives.

The selected films are created by filmmakers with varying styles and technical expertise, but at the same time they all have films that made me feel and think inwardly about my own life and relationships. Thinking about my mortality, the trajectory of my love life, the legacy I want to leave on this world; these are some questions that form when watching these films.

As I mentioned before on the last list I wrote, it is becoming increasingly hard for me to add movies on to this list, not because there's no good films out in the world( I have many more films i’ve been needing to see)that's absolutely not the case, but looking past the visuals, the score and the performance all the matters is the story.

Now on an internal and somewhat spiritual level I find myself asking did this film truly make me care? Do I really care for the survival of these characters relationship? Do I care this character just went through a physical & mental ordeal? Do I care for the success of a plan executed by the character? Of course I do want to care but sometimes the the trajectory of the story is like a roller coaster; when you get all this momentum to the top but then the hype doesn't meet expectations it makes a movie I really wanted to love just a movie I have alot of appreciation for. But there's those moment when a film keeps going on the building momentum to the top, and then once the big drops finally happens my God does it feel so gratifying to witness, that’s the magic I crave for in films.

Alright this post has gotten way off track and gone on to rambling I was not prepared for so here's the list

Cinema 2019

• The Grandmaster

•Glass

•The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

•Pariah

•Only The Brave

•Blindspotting

•The Fisher King

• Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

•A Star Is Born (2018)

• Burning

•Revenge Of The Nerds

•Manila In The Claws Of Light

• Days Of Being Wild

•Joker

• Happy Together

•Y Tu Mamá También

•Alita : Battle Angel

Cinema 2020

• Troop Zero

•Parasite

•Ghost In The Shell

•Tootsie

•The Disaster Artist

•I, Tonya

•Knives Out

• Long Shot

•La Haine

• Jay & Silent Bob Reboot

•Hostiles

•Da 5 Bloods

• The Karate Kid

•After School

• Bad Hair

•Paddington II

Do yourself a favor and checkout a few of these films and tell me what you thought.

Hope You Enjoy

-Andrew