Here lies a short videoblog about the DIY steadicam Brad and myself constructed from part bits of plumbing supplies from Ace Hardware, and weights from a sporting goods store. It contains an explanation of what the parts do, and a visual demonstration of what effect it has on footage shot with it.

Operating this device to good effect does require a great deal of practice, a superior amount of balance, and a larger than average bicep (the latter of which I am definitely without). With practice though, very smooth camera moves are quite within the realm of possibility.

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The following are some photographic images of the things we have been doing for the last few weeks.
Last week, we did extensive motion and lighting tests with a large variety of different video cameras. Here, we see Brad poking a Fusebox, a small kid’s camera, which records in 320×240 highly compressed video onto internal flash memory at 10 frames per second. This may sound like atrocious quality, and that is one way of looking at it. We are of the possibly valid opinion that the artifacts of this format lend it a very interesting aesthetic, which is we think about it right, could be employed to a specific conceptual representational purpose. One must admit that this small camera looks rather formidable on the large fluid-head video tripod that we got from the audio-video equipment checkout facility at Evergreen, Media Loan. These tests are absolutely essential with the large variety of different cameras we are shooting with. Without these tests, Brad and myself could not do our jobs as cinematographers, because we wouldn’t intuitively understand how each camera performed under different lighting conditions, and also we wouldn’t be exactly certain about what representational purpose is most suited to each format, because we wouldn’t be sure of its specific aesthetic properties. (more…)

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Last weekend, we shot makeup tests with our actors, to get an idea of how the makeup would look under artificial lighting conditions and different colors of gels. These tests were also important to get an idea of how the more unpredictable of our cameras would perform with respect to the color temperature of the lights, and how they would represent our actors faces. This post also serves as an initial test of the Lightbox plugin for WordPress, wp-lightbox.

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Since I don’t have much time to actually write posts on my blog at this current point in time, I am going to make a couple placeholders for posts which will be coming in the future.

The first of these placeholders is entitled “Placeholder for Alejandro Jodorowsky.” When this epic post is completed, it will contain a critical analysis comparison thought-riff journal entry about the life, films, and other work (such as comics) of Alejandro Jodorowsky, including El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Fando y Lis, and Santa Sangre, including quotations and thought inspirations from interviews and articles and commentary. This one might be awhile coming, but will be assuredly very interesting.

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