Philip Bloom, who is very much my hero when it comes to shooting beautiful things with unlikely cameras, posted a review last week of the new Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema camera. It definitely has some issues (lack of built-in ND filters being the biggest problem), but I'm amazed at what he is getting out of it. The size and extraordinary bit rates make it a pretty amazing little camera.
While I admittedly want the camera in the worst way, and even have a couple of great lenses I could use with it (my AF100 has the same Micro Four-Thirds mount), I'm going to hold off, given my current financial priorities. Still, I've got a little bit of a bug for shooting right now, since I haven't really done much of anything since GateKeeper opened at Cedar Point.
I volunteered to shoot a promo for GKTW, and shot about half of what we need on Saturday. It won't be short film material, but I want to find excellent music for it. The quality of what I shot was all over the place, but I think I can make it pretty in post. One super annoying thing is that one off-camera line from one of the subjects has poor audio because of a mic that got tweaked in the wrong direction, and I feel like an amateur dick for not having better headphones with me for monitoring.
Bloom tracked the short he did with the pocket camera with something from The Music Bed. It's not cheap, but the quality of the stuff there is awesome. It's not the typical shitty synth crap production music. Some of the artists you might have even heard of before. So I was browsing around there, and found a track that I absolutely fell in love with, and I want to use it as background for a short film with Simon and Diana. It sounds like a silly project when I say it out loud, but in my head it's something that could be completely awesome, and a great snapshot of my family.
Beyond a short music video film, that service inspires me for something feature length as well. Editing is a lot like music to me. I see in terms of cuts and beats. There are songs I love that I would likely never be able to afford to license, and it bums me out to the point that I don't even want to write. But there is a ton of stuff I could work with there.
Making stuff for the screen was energizing when I did it for a living, and my skills evolved so much. I don't want to totally let go of that.
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