I made another short using my sony XDCAM EX1 and the Letus Extreme.<\/p>\n
It’s very different to my last one “South Bank” in that it barely features any people. It’s almost entirely just landscapes, buildings and objects. Although shallow DOF is prominent in many shots I wanted to show that adaptors can be used for much more than that. They give a beautiful organic look to everything, even if the DOF is wide. I also wanted to do something in black and white, so although it was colour to start with I have since regraded it. Now it looks much better, the mood works better, the feel of the place is easier to get.<\/p>\n
Dungeness in on the South Coast of England, it’s part of Romney Marsh. A massive expanse of flat land. On this land is Dungeness Nuclear Power Station. Recently the Nuclear part was turned off as it had reached the end of it’s life, just over 40 years of use. It’s going to take another 100 years to fully decommission it.<\/p>\n
When you go to the “village” it looms over everything. I tried to capture this in the film as you catch many glimpses of it before finally seeing it properly.<\/p>\n
The small house with the yellow door and window frames in “Prospect Cottage”, the former home of the late film maker Derek Jarman. He lived there until his death 13 years ago.<\/p>\n
I used 5 lenses. Sigma 20mm f1.8, Arrax 35mm swing tilt, Zeiss 50mm t2, Zeiss 85mm F1.4, Hartblei 85mm swing tilt and Nikon 105mm DC f2.<\/p>\n
I had to use my Vinten Vision 11 tripod as it was so windy that my normal EX1 tripod, the Miller Solo DS20 would not have withstood the extreme wind. I also had to use “smoothcam” on Final Cut Pro 6 to remove some of the wind wobbles.<\/p>\n
I think I achieved my best edge to edge sharpness today on this short. I have played around a lot and I think with the right combination of zoom, focus on the camera and focus on the lens you can get great edge to edge. This unfortunately needs tweaking for every lens though. I also, as usual, didn’t use an external monitor. All focusing was done using the ex1 lcd screen,<\/p>\n