Secret Gospel

Secret Gospel, a short horror/suspense film I shot last year, has debuted on Japanese streaming platform Samansa, which makes sense as the financiers behind it are Japanese. It was written and directed by Brandon Aumen, a friend I've known for many years and we've wanted to collaborate on a project, but never matched up until this one.

We shot this over the course of 4 days with two primary locations: the convent and the main character's home. Our camera rental budget was super tight and I needed fast lenses for the nighttime and dungeon scenes, so went with Sigma Cine primes. The Sigmas were a bit too sharp for my taste, so Tokina was nice enough to lend me a set of their Black Alchemy diffusion filters to try out (I bought some after using them on this shoot and liking them so much) and they helped to take the edge off the image. We shot with my RED Komodo 6K at a 1.9:1 aspect ratio, as we wanted a little wider than the 16:9 look but not quite an anamorphic 2.4:1, which would take a little too much off the top and bottom.

For lighting, we utilized mostly Aputure LEDs, such as the 300X, 600X, and B7C. For tubes, we went with the tried and true Astera Titan Tubes. I tried to utilize sunlight where possible, as I'm a fan of natural light. While this is a modern day film, I went for a little less saturated, slightly warmer color palette to give it a more timeless visual aspect. If it weren't for the laptop and car giving away the era, I feel like this could have taken place in the 70s.

So I'll just leave you with some non-spoiler screenshots from the film.