The movie’s budget was ultra-low, the shooting schedule just 21 days, and the studio mostly the mean streets and cramped tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Add a first-time director/screenwriter who is also portraying the film’s main character, and it was clear that making Straight Outta Tompkins presented multiple challenges.
“When I was on The Office, we started off with the traditional three man tripod and head set up” says Randall Einhorn, cinematographer turned producer/director. “We had great support but it simply took too much time and manpower to set up. So, I started looking around and realized that the OConnor 1030D with the CF tripod could be the solution.
This year, when cinematographer Danna Kinsky made her pilgrimage to Black Rock City for the Burning Man festival, she took something new with her — the iPro Lens System from Schneider Optics for her iPhone.
“In the true tradition of independent film, Cold Turkey is a dialogue- and character-driven movie,” explained director of photography Lucas Lee Graham. “We wanted an intimate, personal look with a really shallow depth of field and nice portraiture so that the visual emphasis would be on the characters and what they were doing.”
Music and dance are a big part of the contemporary adaptation of Langston Hughes’ holiday musical drama, Black Nativity. It follows Langston (Jacob Latimore), a street-wise teen from Baltimore as he journeys to New York City to spend the Christmas holiday with his estranged grandparents.
The Short Game about competitive junior golfers around the world was shot with Canon’s C300 digital cinema camera.
Director of photography Jon Nelson, owner of Production Hero in Orange County, California, recently acquired a new Fujinon PL 19-90 Cabrio (Model ZK4.7x19) Premier PL Mount cinema-style zoom lens
“However, because the Schneider Cine-Xenar III’s are small and light, we felt like we could still shoot and move, shoot and move, shoot and move without slowing down. This was key.”
It was a challenging assignment even for a veteran shooter of car commercials. A major ad agency for a leading automaker asked cinematographer Dana Christiaansen if he could shoot three full commercials in 48 hours on the streets of Atlanta. The spots would include nighttime car-to-car photography of a moving vehicle, close-ups of a celebrity spokesman at the wheel and scripted vignettes. Christiaansen’s solution was to rely on the Canon EOS C300 digital cinema camera.
FujiFilm’s Optical Devices Division introduced its new Premier PL 14-35mm Cabrio wide-angle lens at the International Broadcasters Convention in Amsterdam.
