Scars of Youth Day 19

Today was another maintenance shoot with Jeremy, where I shot a few various elements from other scenes.

Scars of Youth Day 18

Today I shot a very strange "execution"-type scene with my friend Wade Best. It was rainy as hell, incredibly overcast but overall the shoot went well.

Scars of Youth Day 17

On June 17 and 18 I was focusing on doing some shots of the moon. I was primarily shooting on the 18th, the full moon, which the screenshot is from below.

UAR

Yesterday I was able to engage in a nice little diversion - helping out to put together as well as film User Assumes Risk's stage show. We basically Amanda Edingtion, wrapped her up like some strange biomechanical monkey and then blasted lights into her face for an hour. Of course numerous things went wrong but the final results were interesting, to say the least.

User Assumes Risk - June 14, 2008 from john Hand on Vimeo.

Scars of Youth Day 16

Wow, I love days, or should I say evenings, like these where you can really go down, bottom of the barrel, video gain all the way up and see what kind of an image will come out. Today we shot the scene which kind of ends Paul's relationship with his mother, mostly at night, by a lake. It's a really moody and sad scene.

Scars of Youth Day 15

Yet again I had to scuttle the afternoon shoot because systematically people fell out, which was fine because I had my hands full for this ritual murder scene I shot around eight. I want to thank Amanda, Jeremy and Bruce for showing up promptly and helping to create this little scene.

The scene is kind of half-dream logic, half weirdo paranoid fantasy of mine. The idea is that this ritual murder - some kind of strange psychological figment of the main character feelings for his mother and father - is all being captured by some kind of vintage tube camera in a television stage of sorts for some creepy futuristic sacrifice. In order to realize this effect I actually tracked down a vintage tube camera - a Panasonic PK 750 - along with a tethered VTR module (the camera plugs into this VHS VCR with a long cable) and shot most of the scene with this camera until the scene reaches a cresendo and we switch to HD. It's kind of been a dream of mine to fool around with one of these old analog cameras because you can get these smeary analogue motion artifacts that are just impossible with solid-state cameras. The sad thing is that now that I have the money/time to acquire this vintage analog equipment I've gone HD and the whole game is flipped upside down. Oh well.

I took raw footage from panasonic on location and immediately recorded the raw image to a minidv camera from the A/V outs on the VCR. I could've possibly risked recording the scene on actual VHS but for some reason I don't trust those nearly 30-year-old tape heads. I then kinescoped the minidv footage - videotaped a monitor in HD using a 1/12th shutter speed which virutally eliminated the hum bars and gave the motion this weird static feel that I liked. Also, since we're shooting 16:9 HD I reformatted the image (I shot it loose anyway) to about 1.66 and put black bars on the sides.Then I rendered the footage in black and white, both to match the look of the other dream sequences and because the color on this camera is shot. I do admit that the colors in broad daylight are really neat though, all streaky neon greens and blues. So was it worth all trouble getting that vintage gear when the final product was so heavily processed? Perhaps not, but it was fun anyway. Also, I finished up a few moments I wanted to shoot between Paul and Helen.

Here's a bit of the rushes from today. It's also available on youtube as well.

Scars of Youth - Ritual Murder Rushes from john Hand on Vimeo.

First Teaser Trailer

Here's a high-quality version from Vimeo. There's also a version available at youtube as well.

Scars of Youth Teaser Trailer from john Hand on Vimeo.

Scars of Youth Day 14

Today I shot a couple scenes featuring Amanda's children Matthew and Megan in a very ominous scenes where the worker in a white suit implants something into their hand with a machine while our lead Paul looks on.