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.

May update

Since it's been a while since my last post, I'll just update with the most recent, as most of my jobs the past two months have been simple things like interviews and some event coverage, so nothing too exciting. This week, however, I worked on a pretty fun suspense/horror project.

I just got back from Indiana, where I shot some test footage for a possible feature with Lionsgate. We shot a couple scenes over two days for a script they had optioned. This was one of my first shoots where I had to hire an entirely local crew, but I managed to find some great people to come on board.

When choosing a camera, we decided to shoot on the Alexa Mini, as I had it on a gimbal for quite a few shots and needed to use a camera that was lightweight enough for the Ronin. I had also considered a RED Dragon, but knowing that we would be shooting a bunch of night scenes and only having a 1-ton G&E van package for lighting, I went with the Alexa as it offers a pretty clean image at ISO 800 and 1280. Keeping in mind the need to stay lightweight and wanting some vintage softness, I opted to use a Zeiss Super Speed Mk3 lens set and I aimed for a T2 (+/- a half stop) to get a little softness in the image with shallow depth of field.

For being a quick shoot with a minimal crew and lighting, I'm pretty happy with the images we got. While waiting around the airport for my flight back home, I did a quick color grade in Photoshop from some screen grabs I snapped of the Log C footage, so these aren't necessarily representative of the final color grade.

Tech specs:

Alexa Mini
Zeiss Super Speeds Mk 3
ProRes 4444 Log C
3.2K framed for 1.85:1 final image