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Bust up, homemade, cracked - lens destruction for a film about blindness.

S

Sam Goldwater

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Hi guys,

I'm prepping for a short over the course of which the protagonist loses his sight. The plan is to start fairly clinical and work our way down into some pretty abstract compositions and lens choices by the end. It's mostly one large interior, I'm thinking the lighting kit will amount to a couple of joker 800s and some litepanels.

The main thing is how to depict blindness. I'm thinking lots of near darkness, barely discernable shapes in the gloom. I'm also thinking of some weird lens experiments - for A Field in England, Laurie Rose drilled a hole in a canon lens cap and stuck a children's toy magnifying glass in it (https://vimeo.com/66072682# - 2mins in). Stuff like this and painting/cracking some flats for the mattebox - that's the kind of thing I'm thinking of.

Anyone had any experience with these kinds of experiments? I'd love to hear...

One initial question is, what could I use for optical flats without blowing $60 a piece on smashing Formatt glass?
 
Hey Sam,

If it's any use to you, in the performance pieces of this promo


The artist didn't want any traditional 'beauty shots' and would have preferred to be blurred all the way through.

As such I used the following:

Those crappy UV filters that tend to come on 2nd hand lenses? I scratched parallel lines along the fronts and drew some lines on them with blue Sharpies
A cheap close up lens covering part of the frame. I recently broke some spectacles and discovered those lenses give a much better effect, plus no filter frame in the way
A crystal from a chandelier (although any cheap £5 ebay prism would work) dangled on wire in front of the lens
Shooting through some gauze-like fabric


The other option if you want to be more precise about the transition/descent would be to get a lensbaby with a vareity of optics, going from sharpest to most blurred and abstract.
 
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how about also putting your lights on dimmers, and riding them down to zero during a take?

Also think the operating a lens baby during a shot, to warp the image and shift the blur, might be a good effect...
 
All good suggestions. Honestly with something as flexible as creating "blindness", I would just start by doing some experiments with the crappiest things you can find. The lens cap off, the pin-hole trick, cracked lenses, cracked filters, vaseline on the filters, , and maybe a sprinkle of gaussian blur in post. all of these things may combine to give you a very unique effects. as far as cheap optical flats, any glass shop will help accommodate you. have them cut it to 4x5.65 or whatever you are working with. cost = $8
 
Personally, I would approach blindness from a feeling perspective.

Saying cracked / dirty / old is, IMO, a misstep.

What about approaching the representation that you can hear and sense things but not know the specifics. Use directional sounds, strongly backlight things into silhouette to represent general form without detail, focus on -atypical elements, such as only shooting things that produce sound like mouths, feet on the floor, shuffling paper, scratching a head...

Those are just my initial thoughts. Interesting challenge!
 
That is a powerful video Ben! A lot of feeling there!

Sam you can shoot through almost anything that comes to hand, from parts of kleenex tissues, to holes cut in black card to the sides of a glass to what ever. DIY tillt-shift. The thing however I find is that with all these tricks the light loss means that you want to be sure that your lighting is bright, and controllable, enough. Also the diffusion effect of shooting through random objects stretches further across the frame than just the edge of the object. So sometimes it is good to have a smaller aperture to optimise sharpness in the parts of the frame that you still want to maintain sharpness in. Just my opinions....
 
Cheers Sam :)

Another option is to start off shooting stopped down ultra razor sharp and as the film progresses knock it more and more open increasing softness and introducing an increasingly shallower depth of field until you end up around f1.4/f1.2 and it being nigh on impossible to have anything in focus.

At the same time knock the amount of light back to compensate. Possibly this is a more subtle approach but used in combination with the filters it might yield great results.
 
You might also want to think about using a lens baby, or ramping frame rate so that you can pull iris and change the relative focus in shot.
 
I've done some different things with an optical flat, putting vaseline etc all over the filter, things of that nature. I would set a camera up and try a number of materials, etc in front of the lens.

Testing is always the best!
 
Thanks everyone for your top notch suggestions. I wasn't that well prepared for our first test shoot on location, but I got some cheap glass cut and tried a couple of things with the director in the space. Colouring in one side in big lines with a blue sharpie, roughly rolled some cling film over a 2nd flat.. Broke a pint glass and gaffered a shard of it over the lens..

I'll get some more toys together and let y'all know how it's going.

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I wold be tempted to dress a piece of window glass with five micron aluminium oxide, maybe backpolish it a bit to get slight transparency. Wet the groundglass so it becomes near-transparent. Start camera with the groundglass very close to the lens so that the lens image renders fairly sharp if maybe flary, gradually move the groundglass away about 4 inches and blowdry the groundglass so that it becomes opaque. In post I might try a vignette to replicate either tunnel vision or a centre darkening to replicate macular degeneration. Another trick worth trying may be to flare the lens with an off-axis strong pinpoint light source held very close. A bright light shone into a toslink optical fire cable might do it controllably. Over on dvninfo.net someone I cannot now recall described using a thin fibre stretched across very close to the lens to replicate cinemascope flares. I think the fibre needed light to fall on it. You might be able to try something like that.
 
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I have just read the bit about the clingwrap on the sheet of glass. Add some water between the clingwrap and the glass. Maybe leave a few bubbles in there. Pull the clingwrap away forwards so that loose water runnels deform the image. Maybe try some small pieces of sand in between the glass and the clingwrap so that with water, there are a few microlenses created by the clingwrap and water for an astigmatic effect.
 
theres a company called dogschidt optiks that make uniquely individual broken lenses in a cool way, made from old russian stuff. google it if you're interested! sweet idea man.
 
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