New short made with homemade MINI35 kit.

[Imran Zaidi]

Just finished watching it. How engaging! I definitely enjoyed your unique style of story progression that was both original while at the same time staying true to the feel of Fight Club.

Very well done. My only complaint was that I wanted more!

[Keith Loh]

Fantastic. I'm in love with this girl.

The minor problem I had was with her audio in the room with the bald fellow. It was a bit hollow.

Otherwise, superb. Simply superb visuals.

On the vingetting, I don't think that is actually a problem. I think it has a nice quality to it.

I had no problem with the subtitles as I was concentrating more on the girl, to tell you the truth.

[Jim Lafferty]

For those interested, I just put up a revised summary of building one of these adapers for the GL1.

- jim

[Jean-Philippe Archibald]

Hey Jim!

I have stopped to read the homemade mini35 thread some times ago because I thought that it would be too difficult to build one for my XL1. At this time, you guys built motorized "Angus35".

What is the trick with this "non-moving" ground glass?

[Nicholi Brossia]

I finally got the movie downloaded and must say it was worth the wait. Not only was it produced well, but you did a great job with the 35mm adaptor... I'm suprised at how presentable the adaptor looks. I've been participating in the static adaptor posts for months now, but have given up lately due to the complications. Your movie certainly re-grabbed my attention.

I didn't really get much of the storyline because I was so caught up in the video that I didn't read the subtitles. Great editing, very nice color and composition. I especially liked the commercials. So much, in fact, that if it weren't for the vignetting, I would be convinced that the commercials were taped off television. I agree that normally vignetting looks bad, but with Marla it added a unique style, almost character, to the film.

If you don't mind, I have questions about your adaptor.
Did you go all the way down to 3 micron for your ground glass? The Quicktime movie has a little grainy look to it, but that just adds to the overall feel of the movie. How does it look on a full sized television monitor?
Obviously, you had to deal with an inverted/reverted image. Did you use the camera's lcd or get an extra one and just rotate it 180?

Like Brett, I'd love to see some full sized still shots from the movie.

Very impressive.

[Taylor Moore]

How did you deal with the reversed and inverted image on set?

[Olivier Vanaschen]

Hi everybody,

first thank you all for the nice comments and critics, we've really appreciated that, even more because of the lack of answers on french forums (I won't give names but... :-).

So, here's how we done it. Some time ago, we did find a post on the Hackermovies.com forums (great site and forum, unfortunately only in german) about homemade MINI35. Basicaly, they did simply shoot the ground glass of some 6x7 camera. We thought we could do the same by using an old Nikon F-2. So we did; we did remove the viewfinder to shoot directly the focusing screen. By doing so, the image is only inverted horizontaly, it's a lot easier but we had a hard time finding a plain focusing screen (Nikon D f.s.). The one we did find was quite dirty, small black stains at the border,... this is why our picture is not that clean. Later on, we read on DVInfo about the aldu35/angus35 homemade MINI35 but, we have to admit, we're not technician enough to try it :-) We gave up right after reading the long post. On the Canon XM-2, we used a +4 macro adapter and that's all, as you'll see on the picture, the black paper is only there to avoid dust and light to go on to the focusing screen.

We had to optics (had because they died during the shoot, too much focus pulling probably :-) A Nikon AI 35mm-2.0 and a Nikon AI 105mm-2.5. To fill the gaps between these two lenses and to get some nice wide-angle, we did use a Canon 0.7x wideangle adapter on both optics, using adapter rings.

We had some hotspot problems, for sure, probably because of the cheap macro adapter and the wideangle adapter, but we do like it, we did even push it sometimes to get a bit of retro/lomo look.

We did shoot with some el'cheapo lights, two 500watts and one 150watts, plus some 50w and 60w mixing colors,... We did mess up the white balance too to give the interiors a colder look and the exteriors a warmer feel.

We used a cheap AV radio emitter to be able to frame using a 14" TV and a ironing table as a tripod because we had nothing else to place this camera on. Mic was a cheap Sony mic, originally used for Mini-Disc recordings, and our boompole was the stick of a brush :-)

And then, much was done in post (but NO Cinelook Plugins used)

Here are some pictures:
http://www.originalversion.net/temp/makingof01.jpg


Olivier & Sebastien
www.anotherstateofmind.be

[Federico Prieto]

Nice job Oliver....The movie has a great look !!!!!

Congratulations...

FP

[Richard Mellor]

what a great effort . I hope that our work on the aldu35 will
reduce the size . but your camera should go to a film museum
it is a work of art

[Taylor Moore]

Awesome approach to the camera design!!!!
Keep up the good work, vid was spectacular....

[Jean-Philippe Archibald]

There's only one word to describe this movie: GREAT! Plus, it is in french!!!

I'm in love with this girl too! keith, we will have hard time! :)

BUT...

She smokes too much. You surely threw your 400 euros in the cigarettes!

Great work!

[Emmanuel Decarpentrie]

"Great" is not enough! This is AWESOME! SUPERB! BRILLIANT! FANTASTIC!

Excellent story, actors, editing and music choice. Superb picture quality! The only thing I believe you could improve is the accoustics from the cop's office.

This is the best short I've seen in a very long time. As a Belgian from Brussels too, I'd be glad to meet you guys one day, for we seem to share the same passion: I am currently producing and working on several short-movie scripts (kind of a new-original concept, remotly based on "SOS Bonheur" if you know that "BD") and our crew should be starting to shoot within 3-4 months. We already have 3 scripts and did already compose some of the music we're gonna use... And furthermore, we also are willing to make one of these homemade Mini35...

BTW, did you graduate from INSAS or IAD? For you really seem to be skilled like professionals...

May I send you a couple of questions by email (in French :)?

Congratulations again!


Cheers,


Emmanuel

[Olivier Vanaschen]

Again, thank you so much for the nice comments, man this makes us wanting to work even more now !! :-)

We are a small small production company in Brussels, in fact, we're just two guys surrounded by a lot of amazing friends. We are both autodidact, we started this company about a year ago and have quite different background. We have really really small budgets, actually, we only have a XM-2 as camera and we struggle hard to find work, so we're like semi-professionals with hobbyist budgets :-)

Emmanuel, if you want to contact us by e-mail, don't hesistate, we'll tried our best to answer and we'll meet in the near future, no problem.

Thanks to everybody again, we are working hard on the website, where we will put all the infos and making of pictures,... We are also working on a DVD.


PS: The whole team stopped smoking after this shoot, I highly recommand this kind of shooting to quit smoking, it works very well :-)


Olivier & Sebastien
www.anotherstateofmind.be

[Dustin Waits]

Sorry for my ignorance, but what is mini35?

[Jean-Philippe Archibald]

mini35 is an optical adaptor to use cine prime lenes with some DV cameras.

http://www.pstechnik.de/datasheets/d...5.htm#products

Many users created their own home made version to use still 35 mm lens with their dv cam.

With these devices, you keep the depth of field and angle of view property of the lens used.