Have you seen Boston Globe’s Big Picture photo blog? If not, you should. It’s a series of photos organized by recent news subject: immigration, conflict in the Middle East, natural disasters. The photography needs no caption; the stories are told instead through powerful images. A lot of people can take […]
Author: eidolonfilms
Logging Verite
Our latest project is a cinema verite short about a local men’s fashion store in a gentrifying DC neighborhood. We’ve spent almost two full days in the store filming the salesmen chatting with each other and interacting with customers. We’ve asked a few questions, but nearly of our filming time […]
Tech Thursdays: Review – Zeiss Makro-Planar T* 50mm f/2 ZF.2
This week we rented a Zeiss Makro-Planar T* 50mm f/2 ZF.2 to use on our Panasonic AF100 to film the walking gallery. We knew that the painted jackets by Regina Holliday would be the star of the video, so we wanted the capability to get some really great closeups. This […]
Micro Doc on Regina Holliday’s “The Walking Gallery”
Last night we documented Regina Holliday‘s Walking Gallery of health care stories and advocacy at Kaiser Permanente’s new Center for Total Health. Above is the “micro doc” we put together about the event. We’ve been filming Regina since she lost her beloved husband Fred to kidney cancer in 2009. Since […]
Art Tuesdays: Illustration
Even the wordiest of magazine publications, The New Yorker, uses some form of art. Yet instead of glossy photographs, the prestigious zine uses illustration. I recently discovered the video below on Drawn, a blog featuring illustration, animation and cartoons. It details the artistic process of New Yorker illustrator Tom Bachtell: [brightcove […]
The challenge of profiting from social issue films
The New York Times recently published an article about Participant Media‘s struggle to profit from films they distribute about the important issues of our time. It’s no secret that social-issue docs and thoughtful fiction indies sell significantly worse than major blockbuster thrillers in 3D. Yet Participant’s efforts are compelling. They […]
Tech Thursdays: Micro 4/3rds Lenses for the AF100
Along with Art Tuesdays we are also going to be posting “Tech Thursdays.” Each week I will post about a piece of technology, camera gear, computer software or the like and how we have used it at Eidolon in our work. For the first post, let’s take a look at […]
The Art of the Interview
I recently came across a 2006 eulogy written by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair about Oriana Fallaci, an Italian journalist who joined the resistance as a youth during WWII then spent the rest of her life questioning the exertion of power. Hitchens draws an interesting comparison between an interview conducted […]
Art Tuesdays: Marta Minujin’s Statement Installation
Last December we visited Buenos Aires after two weeks camping and trekking Patagonia. Upon arriving in BA we did a lot of consuming, mostly of steak pasta and wine, but also a bit of art too. Most impressive was a retrospective at the MALBA on the work of Marta Minujin, […]
Typography: Telling Stories In Beautiful Letters
My AP History teacher in High School gave extra credit to students who passed in papers with multiple fonts and colors. I guess that was his way of making the class fun, though most of us used it as an opportunity to meet paper length requirements. Even then, I didn’t […]
Collecting Sound: thoughts on sound design in documentary
When we ventured out to make our first film, we didn’t think much about sound. At the time it seemed superfluous as we believed that story and visual were most important. So we focused on those aspects of film-making and relegated our sound efforts to nothing more than a shotgun […]
Three-point Lighting for Interviews
Natural light, depth, cool lights and keeping it simple. It’s our go-to formula for setting up consistently good lighting for traditional sit-down interviews. Here’s a snapshot of a lighting set-up we did recently for a client shoot. It wasn’t an ideal location but it was the only one available so […]