So here we are on the egde of doomsday and the final revilation of John and I will just make a quick note about the last announcements on my youtube channel and current status. First I want to mention a book written by Alexander Altmann (Blog click here). It´s a german book so sorry for the foreign audience we have to exclude you. It´s about filming with DSLR and it´s quite detailed in the content of shooting with DSLR. Alexander wrote about preproduction, production and postproduction of his movie "The Green Fairy" ( Die Grüne Fee) which is still in the process of scoring. We still looking forward to see the clip in the internet soon. The reason why I mention this book is of course the little selffish motivation of being mentioned and quoted in some chapters of his book. My little advices and helping hand in his project, which you can find here, makes me little smile that I am now mentioned in a book, thank you alexander. ;) You can find it on Amazon by clicking the picture below.
The second thing I want to mention is the new perspective which I discover in the upcoming year. It´s about working with Remote Controled Multirotors to get some areal shots or even some crane-like shots from above. Together with Josefin Kuschela, the new years project will involve multirotors, underwater cameras and of course conventional cameras. So enjoy the teaser for next years project "Evolutraceurs"which includes parcour action and areal shots!
People at the Lensbaby booth getting the hype of the Lens-Babies...
Great News - "Genesis" won the first prize of the Lensbaby Competition, organized by the german filmmaker magazine "zoom" and was screened at the Photokina 2012 in Cologne, Germany. I was invited for an interview at the booth of Lensbaby and met Lensbaby Founder Craig Strong, who introduced the lensbaby "Spark"to me, which is actually a nice toy for filmmakers.
Additionally I got a look-a-round at the Photokina and realized a big amount of DSLR Filming equipment, starting with scuba cameras, cranes and even air drones.
With the honor to be the winner of this competition I have to thank Dirk Erik Schulz for his talent and his enthusiasm to go with me thru this film and I hope this film will make people curious about what great stuff he´s actually doing!
The Last months was full of changes and now I´m back in line. First of all I introduce a new OMW INSIDE Video which explains our last Super Low Budget Shoot for a competition. Thanks to Dirk Erik Schulz for taking part in this special project and check this blog out in future for further results!
The last week I was producing a short film for the Berlin Fashion Filmfestival and had to organize serveral thing during a week. After the confirmation of my favourite camera rental shop Camelot Broadcast Services in Berlin of sponsoring the equipment, I sat down with Nora Fritz for the idea of getting her fashion into the film.
No budget, that´s why we wasting money
I also wanted to shoot it on slow motion that´s why I had to wait for the confirmation of Camelot, because without their help the whole project wouldn't come to life. The thing with the SloMo is that only certain cameras can do this in Full HD in these days. So we end up shooting with the RED One MX which was very kindly of Camelot to use the cinema camera for this project.
The story of the plot is easy. It´s about a skater girl is looking for something in her life and takes a journey thru the world and pass three phenomena which symbolise individual stations in life. In the end she finds what she´s looking for. All was shot in SloMo in serveral places in Potsdam and an abandoned military training area in Brandenburg, Germany.
rarely moments of having the camera on shoulder
Normally I would prefer smaller and lighter cameras to shoot sport action but as I said the 120 fps you can get only by special cameras like the RED cameras, ARRI Alexa or the Sony F35. Maybe in future I will have the opportunity to shoot with the C500 from Canon, but they haven´t released it yet.
In order of the heavy weight of the camera with all the stuff like Lenses, Mattebox, Follow Focus, Rods, Quickplate, LED Monitor, REDDrive, Cradle and Battery on it, it comes down to approx. 10 kg, it was obviously that it wouldn´t become a dynamic handcamera. We have lot of tripod shots ( a 10kg o´conner C2575 head with short stands or normal stands) and we improvised some kind of dolly shots with a trolley which was okay in order to shot SloMo.
The SloMo effect on the RED One has also a little sideeffect on the lenses you have to choose, because the camera use the "lower" resolution of 2K instead of their normal resolution of 4K. So the camera doesn´t read out the whole sensor and it come to the well known crop-effect, which means the focal length of the lenses don´t match anymore. So if you want to shot with an 50mm lense on a 35mm frame like the DSLR Full format, on the RED with 2K it become a 162mm lense impression. With this crop factor of 3.24, we mostly shot with the Zeiss Ultra 14mm which becomes in the end a 45mm lens.
After shooting I had 4 days for editing and compose the music for it and had deliver it on the 15th of June, which I did in time and now we waiting for the jury to the end of the month to tell us if we are in the ranking of the 10 films which will be shown at the Berlin Fashion Week 2012. Let´s keep the fingers crossed!
Nora and I would like to thank all involved tomake this project happen. Franzi for performing the Skatergirl and Alina for performing the three phenomena. Alexander Altmann for giving me hand on the camera and taking still photographies of the shoot and Josefin for giving me the inspiration for the end shot of the story. If you would like to see more impressions check out my album on flickr here or have some german blog impressions on Alexanders Blog here. Also Franzi posted some stuff in tumbler here To watch the film, look down below or go to my Youtube Channel here.
Two weeks ago I joint Mathias and Anne, booth scientist at the German
Research Centre for Geoscience in Potsdam, on their mission to collect
data down from a 40 meter heigh crane. That´s something a cameraman ever
dreams of to be the " extreme cameraman from above!"
This time I tried out some of my Kiev88 analog lenses on my Canon 5D MII for filming. Just to figure it out how they work out in the idea of style and colours.
First you have to find an converter that takes your thread mounted Kiev88 lenses to the EOS mount. There are some sources on the Internet but it´s kindly hard to get the right one, because the most of the providers of adapters will delivery the Kiev88C/M mount that´s actually like an pentacon-six-mount and this is not what you want for your thread-like lenses as such as the Kiev88. At last it takes me several trys and time to get nearly the right adapter. Here it is a Kiev88 to nikon adapter that I have to match with a additional adapter for Nikon to EOS. Once this work I could start filming with these lenses.
As you will surely regognize, this lenses don´t have any auto-capabilities at all. No autofocus, no autoaperture or imagestabilizer... Pure manual working on this lenses. If you want to take pictures with that it could be a littlebit to soft in the focus and the colors are also very flat. The meter in the camera will also give you some strange settings that maybe caused by the badly coated lenses that reflect the light onto the meter... So, there are no reasons for photographers why they should try that kind of lenses. But... for filmers it could be a stylish tool to get some special kind of look.
So I tried two different lenses on a weekend joining three members of the famous Fotoclub Potsdam (Katja Gragert, Michael Schulze and Ralph Gräf ) in which Im also a member. For me it´s just fun and I was filming this guys as they´re looking for a motive in the southern Brandenburg County.
First lens is a 45mm/3.5 MIR - 26B wideangle (mediumformat 6x6 related). It has a six blade aperture and the nearest focus distance is 0,5 m. It is quite heavy and the stops are some kind of ridiculus. You have an open aperture, then it goes from 5,6 to 8 as the same light intesity and then the 22 f-stop is like a 11 f-stop, so you´re actually working with three f-stops... well... it old and it´s russian... what did you expect after all this time...
Second lens is a 80mm/2.8 MC VOLNA-3 normal lens (mediumformat 6x6 related). It has also six blade aperture and the nearest focus is 0,6 m. It´s quite similar manufactured as the 45mm and the f-Stop problem is not as much as at the 45mm.
With the Adapter KI-88/N you got an adapter without lenses and you can take the 45mm and the 80mm as "real" 45mm and 80mm for smallframe kameras. On the Kiev88 the focal length is similar to 35mm and 50 mm but here it´s like a 45mm and an 80mm.
up: 45mm Lens, Adapter KI-88/N, Nikon to Eos Adapter and DSLR on the edge the 80 mm lens. Down: 45mm with adapters attached to the DSLR
So, I take it down to a test on a very sunny and bright day. Open aperture on these lenses are a littlebit tricky. The lenses colors got flat and the focus could be a littlebit too soft. But it´s a matter of taste and could be like an old 60ties lens. If you got lensflare you could get a six-edged figure or some kind of strange lightrays by the 45mm in your picture. As you working without matebox or lens hood you got a nice orange coloration in your picture that really reminds to the 70ties or 60ties pictures. As you can see in the film.
On this test I didn´t use a follow focus but it should be no problem to attach some gear rings to the lenses and make it work.
In matter of Image quality I can say that it´s quite good, although the lenses got blurry to the edge of the frame as you use the medium format 6x6. On a DSLR you got a crop effect and it takes the middle of the frame, so you got the best part of the circularforming. It´s also good in matter of sharpness while you using motion pictures. On still pictures I didn´t test it, but I don´t expect great results.
On the day of testing I got also the possibility to test a lensbaby and an old Diana lens on the DSLR. the Diana Lens is an old plastik lens that actually make some saturated colors and light fisheye effect. It is the first colorshot after the black and white lensbaby effect, which I will test in a later project during this summer.
In the end I could say that I have some lenses for old style filming that´s quite good working in matter of focus and colors. They got nice lensflare effect but it´s not for people which prefer high-fashion-super-sharp-true-color-shots. Also the limitation to the focal length is a unfortunate thing, cause in this lens class you can just get an 30mm (ARSAT/ZODIAK 30mm/3.5 ). I also got an 250mm/3.5 JUPITER 36B which I don´t tested while I got no tripod with me on that day. It´s become quite heavy! So you got to figure out on yourself if you want to shoot like the sixties without a big wideangle and f-stops like 1.8 or similiar. I enjoyed it in the end and shurly give them a try in future.
For the first time I had an experience in filming with super 8 material during my trip from Vancouver, Canada to South Dakota, USA. One of the reasons for this trip was to fullfill my selfpromis to my deceased Dad, in which I continued the procedure of spreading a little piece of ashes to the favourite place of the deceased one. He did it for my mom as she died in October 2000 and after his death in 2008 I felt that I had to do the same thing for him. At this time he was quite enthusiastic about the history of the indians in north america. But unfortunatly his health and his enormous fear of flying prevented him from getting to this places like the battlefield of Little Bighorn or the holy place of the Black Mountains with the Crazy Horse Memorial. So as the opportunity appeared to me and my girlfriend, who is currently studying abroad in Canada, we drove all the way from Vancouver via Little Bighorn to the Black Hills. As a result, here you can see that though all the years, 8mm films have still the talent to change a trip that actually took place in 2012 into a 1970´s look. . Have fun!
Before I forget, I was not only in vacation the last months, one of the things I did was also a little clip for a hairstylist in Berlin/ Beelitz. So enjoy this as well and we will see what other things will coming up!
The last months was pretty amazing for me, as you saw, I came a littelbit around from poland to spain, greece (I didn´t post it, confidential topic) and in the end Vancouver, Canada again. In mid of April I was even in the States and yes there will be a little shortfilm to that, but I shot it on Super 8, so I will post it later on , when the film arrived from the lab.
As long you´ll be waiting for that I can offer you a little photographical Impression on my Flickr Account! Stay tuned!
For KOBN I'm at the Mobile World Congress to film several companies at their booth. We have sunny weather, brilliant temperatures in compare to poland and in the evening we see the transportation company at strike... As always I'm the one man show and serve KOBN all-in-one package with shooting and editing.
This time I shot in Warsaw with KOBN a nice Imagefilm under freezing conditions. Came back from Canada, got into a real winter in a way I expected it to be when I was in Vancouver... But Ok. The good part is, I shot with my lovely Compact Primes and that lenses rock really! Let´s see how this shoot turn out in the post.
