American Werebaby

Shot this horror-comedy for my roommate over a couple Saturday nights. We had fun.

An American Werebaby in America - watch more funny videos

Canon 7D, Nikon 50mm f/1.8 AI, Nikon 20mm f/2.8 AI-s, Vivitar 80-200mm f/4.

Cool old photo lenses die hard

Whoa there! This page is in dire need of some updating. At that, I will plug my favorite new site: kenrockwell.com. Everything you could ever want to know about photography and cameras. Every page is full of useful insights such as "the FE has real knobs so you can change settings like a man." Hahaha I love it! He was referring to the old Nikon film camera that I just bought along with some slick lenses that I can mount on the 7D for shooting video.

One awesome conceptual breakthrough I made is understanding that the Canon 7D's frame (22.3mm x 14.9mm) isn't even close to "full-frame" 35mm (36mm x 24mm), as the 5D and Nikon D3 approximate. But luckily for us movie people, the 7D's chip size is so close to a Super-35mm movie film frame (24.9mm x 13.9mm) that it's not even funny. Think about old film cameras. You run the film through sideways, producing an image like the full frame of this film cutout:

(I pulled this image from here.)The blue square represents what you see on a 7D, at 1.6x crop. Now think about movie cameras. Film generally runs through the gate vertically, effectively a 1.5x crop from full-frame 35mm. Check out how the 7D aligns:

Holy crap! Cool, huh?

I realize that equipment doesn't define a cameraman, but I can't wait to screw around with my new stuff! For the record, I'm not a wild fan of DSLR filmmaking. It just gets weird. In my fantasies I'm shooting everything with Alexa and all of my footage looks like it came from IMAX. But those are fantasies, and the 7D is still the best deal for us hipster guerrillas.

Transformed by BLACK SWAN

Forget 127 Hours. BLACK SWAN is the movie of the season (at least until Tron & True Grit come out). It is breathtaking, horrifying, and bloody brilliant. Just like Inception, Nina(Natalie Portman)'s process of 'letting go' is undertaken on multiple levels - in her dance, in her relationships, in her mind, in the music and the very structure of the film itself. I couldn't open my eyes wide enough to take it all in.

127 Hours is a movie I could actually see myself making. Yet I could only ever dream of attempting a film like Black Swan.

127 HOURS

Saw 127 Hours finally. It was freaking fantastic. It's the exact kind of film I could see myself making in, oh say...10 years. High-adrenaline, poetic, emotional, small yet cosmic, and HEAVY on visuals. I've been wanting to make a short with similar style now for a couple years, but there's that little catch of needing to be talented with raising money. That is, if I want to do it right. I just got out of debt - I'd rather not take the plunge back in! Oh right, and I would need to find a talented crew that I can trust. And actors. All potentially very fun, but I feel like I have a lot more maturing and a lot more of my own world exploration to undergo. All of which requires time. But if I think this way it may never get done. So, I'll set a year deadline for shooting the short. It will be AWESOME - basically the best adventure drama-doc short you've ever seen from a 26 year old director cameraman.

Friends with Benefits

Man, it is so 'clutch' to be working full-time on a production, even if it's just a half-hour comedy series (the sad/funny thing is that there are two movies shooting concurrently with the exact same name). Finally. After three years cutting my teeth in freelance and racking up debt, things are starting to pay off in big ways, metaphorically and financially. Plus, my bosses in the camera department are kickass and I've been given lots of responsibility which I somehow pull off well. I just have to make sure I never get too comfortable.

Thank you to all who have led me to this place of professional success. Moving to LA when I did was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Everything I've accomplished before and since has been a testament to that. My heart spoke, and I listened. I hope that all y'all can go through a similar process, no matter what stage of your life you're at!

INCEPTION: An Extremely Conscious Movie

If you haven't seen INCEPTION, see it. Preferably in a real IMAX theater. The wider shots were captured on 65mm film, which is ultra crisp! Plus the sound has more OOMFF and the 35mm seems somehow enhanced & sharper on the bigger screen. I suggest a cheaper matinee showing.

Also if you haven't seen it, DON'T READ what I've written below b/c it will either SPOIL the movie or not make much sense.

If you have, please feel free to rip my analysis apart. I'm not trying to prove a point so much as navigate this maze.

!!!!SPOILERS BELOW!!!!

With INCEPTION, Director Chris Nolan succeeds in doing what 99% of other filmmakers can barely hope to do. Just like the "how the hell did they pull that off?" subconscious-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream climax, he employs multiple levels of metaphors and symbols to elevate INCEPTION into much more than a movie. It raises the bar for how powerful a film can be. So trying to understand the complex ways in which it succeeds would be like analytical suicide, right? I disagree! Let's do a quick breakdown.

First, Nolan decides upon a set of themes he'd like to explore. Themes such as fatherhood, leadership, corporate espionage. And an over-arching theme of perceptions of reality.

Next, Nolan faces the character with a basic spiritual/emotional journey that might compliment these themes, then subsequently builds around it. All good stories do this. Cobb's journey is to let go of his guilt and get back to his children. Translation: he must finish grieving (reconcile w/ his subconscious) in order to become whole again. Catharsis leading way to redemption.

Nolan then gives Cobb a specific reason for needing to undertake this journey. Cobb's been too selfish! His livelihood/passion/indulgence of conscious dreaming has destroyed his wife and taken him away from his kids. So he's incomplete. And he's trapped: that same livelihood/passion/indulgence is preventing his subconscious from letting her go.

Therefore Nolan needs a specific catalyst for Cobb to snap out of this. A deep-seeded ultimatum that causes personal change (or 'inception,' if you will...). That catalyst, I believe, is saving Saito. Saito is the only one who can deliver Cobb to his kids in the waking world - versus his limited subconscious projections of them. So there's relatively little altruism in saving Saito, but it takes the greater selflessness of letting go of Mal in order to take the chance and go for it. Simply put, it takes setting his own soul free in order to free another. True compassion only exists with true sacrifice.

Now, every event and character of the plot is backward-chained from the catalyst, meaning that they all function in an emotional way to converge and create Cobb's breaking point. His father/brother figure, Saito (representing compassion), first must give him the chance to do the right thing. His muse, Ariadne (representing the reason & rational thought in his mind), must be there to guide him. His subconscious, personified by Mal, must inflict a severe blow against being able to see his kids again (she shoots Fischer and locks him away in Limbo). And his analogy, Fischer (who is also attempting to grieve a loss & find redemption), must be stunted in a similar way. Like projections within characters' dreams, the characters themselves are projections of emotional processes within Cobb's mind.

(Could this whole movie have taken place within Cobb's subconscious? Maybe...but ruminating on the reality of Dom Cobb's 'waking life' is no more productive than debating whether Leo DiCaprio is actually Dom Cobb. It's completely beside the point. Cobb is able to get home, through no other way than to reconcile with his subconscious. A worthier debate is whether 'inception' is actually Nolan's conscious analogy to his own filmmaking process. Check out this pretty sharp analysis.)

But not only does Nolan use archetypes to propel Cobb's emotional journey; the entire framework of INCEPTION does this. Symbols are everywhere in INCEPTION. In the dreams, water, freight trains and altered physics are nothing more than representations of something going on in the dreamer's mind. Multiple dream levels simply serve as varying representations of each other. But the fact that they're just symbols enhances the core theme of the movie, perceptions of reality. Every cool little detail in INCEPTION is a symbol of something more basic, something more emotional. Just like Cobb's team carries out an extremely complex plan to inspire an emotion inside Fischer's mind, Nolan is similarly attacking us from every angle to implant the idea of metaphor: both dreams and waking life are just symbolic for what's happening inside a person's mind. His pervasive, multi-lateral use of emotional metaphor is the mastery of this movie.

Simply examining the title reveals all. As a stand-in for catharsis/redemption, 'inception' first occurs deep inside the analogy's subconscious - Fischer's; it then happens not-so-deep within Cobb's; and finally happens for each and every one of us who see it. I can't let it go. I can't stop thinking about what it means to be whole without having a grip on 'objective' reality. Nolan is suggesting - not so subtly - that 'inception' isn't just a dream or a movie. It's real. And movies, or at least his movies*, have the power to pull it off.

I don't know about you, but that is irresistibly invigorating for me as a filmmaker.


*Nolan just did what the Wachowskis failed to do with THE MATRIX trilogy. Keep us wondering.
**I owe a lot of my thinking about this to the article posted above.

New Footage!

This is how I've been spending moments of free time over the past few months. A mix of timelapse, low-light, and "self-shooting"; edited to a 4-minute speech that played at my friend Sergio's South African wedding. He pushed really hard for me to move to L.A. & get serious about my career, so I think the speech ties together an otherwise unrelated series of shots.
QUICKTIME VERSION

Quote from "The New World"

This is film-related I suppose, but what I have to say about it isn't. It's a voiceover segment from Terrence Malick's The New World, said by John Smith (Colin Farrell's character) to describe his impression of the Native Americans:

They are gentle, lovin', faithful, lacking in all guile and traitory. The words denoting 'lying,' 'deceit,' 'greed,' envy,' 'slander' and 'forgiveness' have never been heard. They have no jealousy. No sense of possession. Real, what I thought a dream.

This struck me because it's exactly how I felt about my first visit to the Oregon Country Fair. Some things I'd been searching for all my life, consciously or subconsciously, came to the fore during the nine short hours I spent there last year. Strangers treated each other like family. No one seemed to feel judged. Of course, it's not realistic to live off the land and deny my civility every day. But it's inspiring to see a place where it can happen at least once a year.

Why I (Would) Love to Shoot War Movies

Because this looks like a lot of fun (an excerpt from American Cinematographer magazine, on how they shot one of the battle sequences in HBO's The Pacific):

The landing on Peleliu marks the introduction to combat for Pvt. Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello). Adefarasin and episode director Carl Franklin designed five shots that followed Sledge as he landed on shore, scrambled up the beach amid constant mortar attacks, and finally dove into the safety of a bunker. They want the five shots to play as one extended shot (with the smoke from the explosions masking the cuts), and they wanted to make the sequence as experiential as possible for the audience. "In a case like that, you really have to work out how to join those five shots before you start shooting," notes Adefarasin.

The plan called for a series of camera hand-offs among the camera operators, Simon Finney (A camera), Ben Fox-Wilson (B camera) and Adefarasin (C camera). The first operator starts the shot right behind Sledge as he tumbles out the Amtrac and starts to run up the beach. At a certain point, the operator hands off the camera to the next operator, who continues running behind Sledge and then hands off the camera to a third operator, who is sitting on a crane. The crane swoops around a patch of impossible-to-navigate terrain, at which point the camera is handed off one more time to the operator who follows Sledge into the bunker. "Simon preferred looking through the lens, but Ben and I used an LCD screen [as a viewfinder]," recalls Adefarasin. "Simon kept the camera on his shoulder and turned into a goat, running like hell and keeping his eye glued to the eyepiece."

The Experience vs the Film

You can make two kinds of movies: a film, or an experience. Which would you rather make?

While the two cross over into each other in many ways, a film generally feels like a film, which is focused on the art of visual stortelling. It is something you watch, or observe. By contrast, an 'experience' as I'm using the word here is mainly concerned with providing an 'I was there' sense of reality, or of presence and immediacy. I think I am more fond of this approach, and I probably have been all along.

It's like asking the question: Which is generally more captivating, watching something or doing it? The answer is quite clear for me. Take for example the film MILK. It was good, but I didn't like it. Watching it was like going to a museum. I felt like a fly on the wall, onlooking but never able to participate. Of course it's 'real' in many ways - it's practically a documentary. Yet still the physical & emotional 'reality' of it was too distant, too textbook for me to connect with.

And this is why movies like AVATAR and THE HURT LOCKER are so profound for me. Avatar, for instance, elevates itself as so much more than a 'film'...not only because it's as wild as someone's imagination, but at any given moment it feels real, as if we were actually experiencing it alongside the characters. Watching a character standing on the edge of a cliff feels like STANDING ON THE EDGE OF A CLIFF. Now that's invigorating! Don't get me wrong - it is a movie & a story in every sense of the words - but every time I've seen it it puts me through a visceral sensory & emotional experience that can only be replicated by really flying or really falling in love. The difference of course is the timeframe in which we have the experience, and the lack of consequences.

It's these sorts of movies/shows/docs/videos that I probably appreciate above all others - fiction and non- alike - and the ones that i feel a true calling to make.