Lens Test

Jane Doe: OM-1 & Canon Dream Lens Lowlight Test

in

A small excerpt of a long test session with the OM System 0M-1 paired with the Canon 50mm F/.95 The test was a great opportunity to nail down the in-camera settings for the OM-Log, as I've been obsessed over the White Balance settings and the effect it has on the log footage for the past few months.

The good news is my neurotic obsession defiantly paid off, and I think I figured out a good workflow to dial in the WB in log. The tragic news is l've discovered this super weird Pulsating effect that appears in the image anytime anything gets remotely dark enough in the shadows, no matter if there's plenty of light present or not(if you can't see it great. If you can see it tell me know how to fix it, baby!)

Ideally, this would've been a one off situation as we were filming in the middle of the night with street lamps but going through previous footage from various controlled and uncontrolled lighting setups this shit still shows up.

It has bummed the hell out of me.... like for real this shit sucks massive balls.

I'm holding out hope that I'll get an answer from OM System or find a way to pray the sin away (whichever comes 1st), but for now, the OM-1 is probably not the right camera for the films I have in line to make.

Anyway, hope y'all dig it!

-Andrew

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

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