New Directions?

In a way I surprised even myself when I started thinking seriously about making moving pictures instead of stills. It was an idea that came out of left field, as I have never fancied myself the producer/director type.

But a couple of things happened recently which have me looking in that direction. The first was the purchase of the little fuji f31 digicam. It takes video, but I never bothered testing it out until the Utah trip where I took a few small clips. And like the iso800 stills, the low-light movies look pretty darned impressive... well, for digicam movies anyway.

The second was stumbling across a site the other day where they were discussing the merits of various lens adapters used on camcorders to achieve cinema-like shallow DOF. They accomplish this little trick by focusing regular 35mm lenses (usually old, MF lenses) on a matte screen in front of the camcorders regular lens. The camcorder sees and records the image on the matte screen, and because the lenses producing the image are 35mm, you get all the DOF that you normally get with with 35mm on a camcorder. Nice idea, I thought. And then I saw some of the sample footage taken with prosumer 3-chip camcorders. Impressive stuff.

Then I started thinking about a couple of screenplay ideas that I have had for awhile (doesn't everybody have a few?) and how I could actually write and produce something that at least "looked" kinda like a steak dinner on a 99 cent value meal budget.

The last piece of the puzzle is that movie making is not a solitary pursuit. And if you have followed my blog then you know how lazy I am. So maybe collaborating with some others on a few projects would help keep me focused and allow me to explore some new directions.

Oh yea, todays image. It was taken the next morning just up the river from Labyrinth camp. In fact, if you look closely you will notice that the rock formation is the same one seen on the left hand side of the river in the previous post.