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Darrienia: “A name meaning “Dreamer”. In ancient Greek legend a goddess Darrienia was the person who created our dreams for us. Some times known as Aphrodite’s daughter.” (Urban Dictionary)

For Darrienia, I wanted to apply a simple story concept, whereby a book about dance would directly influence the dream of its reader.  Once again I worked with talented Elliott Montello.  We were priviledged to get beautiful, professional dancer Bethany Rose Harrison for a few hours to dance in the very grand Torquay Town Hall.  She kindly travelled all the way from London especially to film with us, however, we only had a limited amount of time with her. Elliott and I worked as fast as we could to get all the shots, but unfortunately, we missed some of the ending scene.

Bethany Rose Harrison (Photo by Ben Leggett)

Bethany was originally meant to play the part of the dreamer.  However, this was now not possible.  So, putting our heads together, we casted Caitlin Graham to play the little girl in the film.  This, in my opinion, was our best decision.   But, resulted in adding a few problems, due to the fact that the film had to be convincing, and having filmed all the dancing shots and the little girl shots on completely different dates, meant that a bit of compositing and clever editing would need to make the connection between both actresses solid.  Any doubt and the film would lose its impact and meaning.  Little Caitlin was extremely convincing considering that there was no dancer present.  A little star!

Filming Bethany Rose Harrison (Photo by Ben Leggett)

Following up from Incendium, I wanted to use Twixtor on various shots of the film (See part 2 of Elliott’s twixtor tutorial: he uses open and closed masks in Twixtor Pro to help calculate where the pixels should move frame to frame).  Bethany is an amazing dancer and this ‘Twixtorised’ slow motion would capture those unbelievable moments in time which might go unnoticed in real time.

The film proved to be quite a learning curve for me.  I wanted to edit the project in something new, so I used Adobe Premiere and I also wanted to learn some of the basics of After Effects.  I have also, before this film, never created a Black and White or 2.35:1 aspect ratio film.  The black and white added a new dimension to the short.  In a filmmakers’ toolbox I believe it is something that should be used sparingly and only if it adds a visual aspect to the film and relate to the story.  In this case, the B&W lends itself to the time period.

Kelly Bond and Elliott Montello filming from the raised seating area (Photo by Ben Leggett)

Unfortunately, there are things you have to learn the hard way.  Darrienia was intended to be streamed across the Internet and 8-bit colour compression is not enough for B&W, as you only have 255 shades of grey.   This resulted in fairly bad ‘banding’ in certain areas of the film, where the gradients are very shallow.  To attempt to counteract this, I was forced to add a fair amount of grain noise to the image using Andrew Kramers Fast Film Grain.  It was fairly difficult to decide on a grain:banding ratio.  This grain as it turned out complimented the black and white and gives the film more texture.

Before we even filmed, I knew precisely what soundtrack to use with the film.  The FMA has proved to be a great resource for music and I can spend days on the site listening through its massive collection of Public Domain and Creative Commons tracks.  I came across a track called Sumar (intro) by Icelandic based band Lockerbie. This track has a very dream-like sound and suited the film perfectly.

Many thanks to young filmmaker Ben Leggett who has created a Behind the Scenes video:

Here are 2 beautiful international commercials that feature short clips from my work:

Telefónica (5 seconds from Bokeh)

Süddeutsche Zeitung (4 seconds from Incendium)

If you are interested in licensing some of my work, or would like to commission a piece, please contact me.

Soundtrack by Chris Zabriskie chriszabriskie.com

It was amazing to see the film I helped grade, appear on the big screen in Sony’s virtual social network; PlayStation®Home, with a potential of 23 million viewers, ‘Fracture’ Director; Ashley Wing came up with the idea to make his film the first to appear on the the virtual cinema in ‘Home’ something that has only recently just been showing official movie trailers. If you have a PlayStation 3, why not check it out? www.fracturemovie.co.uk

Like a modern-day pirate, 75-year-old Ray Ives has been scouring the seabed for treasure his whole life.

The former commercial diver has plundered the deep for over fifty years, bringing to the surface anything that glittered — even gold.

In a shipping container near the water, Ray tends his museum of cannon, bottles, bells, swords, portholes and diving gear.

To this day, he still takes to the water in a 1900s diving suit.

Behind the scenes stills by Neil Hope:

Director Amanda Bluglass helps to prepare Ray

Ray sitting idle in his standard gear, whilst my father helps to pump the air

Zacuto z-finder: making it a breeze to shoot in harsh sunlight

This year had a great selection of bands, my highlight being Toploader – Their performance was epic especially when lead singer Joseph wielded my GoPro HD camera on stage!

Elliott Montello did a great job editing our footage together – we went with a simple yet effective plan of Elliott filming the wide shots and I would film the closeups – This worked extremely efficiently as we didn’t have to do any unnecessary lens changes.

It’s been over a year since I used my Canon 100-400mm f4-5.6 – So I thought I would give it a go for this event. The lens is perfect for this kind of job as I can literally sit back from all the action and catch it with an element of stealth. You often capture moments where on screen people are unaware they are being filmed and it adds a great deal of realism.

For more info on this event, please visit www.lemonfest.co.uk