deadCenter 2022

While I should be finishing out an expense report from a fancy corporate shoot early last week in Vegas, I'm instead letting you in on what I fanboy'd over this weekend with the 2022 deadCenter Film Festival here in Oklahoma City.

Since 2006-ish I've either volunteered, worked, and/or had different short films in deadCenter. I skipped the 2019 event seeing as how we were out in New York. Then – along with everything else – Covid forced the film festival to be fully virtual the last couple years. No parties, no in-person screenings, no forced conversations while waiting in line with strangers. We got that nonsense back this year and I spent the last few days soaking it in.

Considering how I'm nearly drowning in trying to get my rubber stamp doc made, I tried to focus on seeing as many documentary films at this year's festival as I could. First off was Skate Dreams, a documentary about the rise of women's professional skateboarding. Then there's Octopus, a unique doc about the aftermath of the August 2020 Port of Beirut explosion. Finally I caught a documentary that legitimately made me cry called Refuge. It's about a former white nationalist connecting with a Muslim cardiologist and a community of refugees in a small town in Georgia.

I only caught one narrative feature at the festival this year and it blew me away. Chicken House is a low-budget comedy/horror about three struggling actors in Oklahoma City taking in an unusual new roommate. It could be that I've really been into Siouxsie and the Banshees and late 70's early 80's punk rock lately, but writer/director Cate Jones and her motley crew killed it with their film. There's no question I've been incredibly frustrated with being back in Oklahoma and the creative scene here. Films are being made and keeping the locals working, but for the most part it's the same copy and paste conservative Christian film of the white working girl finding her true beau with the help of her one black friend. Chicken House not only directly called that propaganda out, but this much needed underbelly art film absolutely shivved those direct to Hallmark Channel films. I had zero shame in seeking Cate out on Instagram afterwards and gushing in her DMs.

The parties and in-person events are the highlights to deadCenter. My hack to navigating networking events as an introvert is to grab a drink and keep one hand free to shake hands. I give myself a quota to meet and talk with 3-5 strangers before being cool with ducking out from the event and recharging. Pretty sure that's how I met NYC-based producer Elizabeth Potter back in late 2018 at an event in Brooklyn. She was in town for deadCenter with a film she EP'd plus she was speaking on a documentary panel. We hung out Friday night at one of the events and got to catch up and talk shop.

Along with the films, I also hit up a couple of the panel discussions. The Indie Film 101: Breakthroughs on a Budget session had a few helpful insights, but it also highlighted and promoted some incredibly unhealthy financial advice. Having personally been in the game long enough to know better, there's no legitimate reason to literally use the down payment on a home to get your art piece done. Also, low-balling a teenager who "knows how to do VFX" isn't financially savvy, it's selfish on the producer's part and setting up young creatives to not properly value their work. I've absolutely called in favors at times from friends I've hired out on commercial jobs. I've also worked out long-term licensing splits with talent and crew on stock footage projects, but damn I'm not going to be the one who pays in "exposure." The most helpful thing I got out of that panel was fleshing out the idea of selling shares of your film like you would shares of your business. That same panelist who used the down payment on a house for their film also talked about how they sold 50% of their project to investors and how those backers would be re-paid 110% of their initial investment if/when their film was sold.

Now it's Monday morning and I'm back to my own nonsense. I'm still staring down that figurative herd of elephants I've committed to eat with my own film project, but now I've got a bit more of an appetite after a weekend of independent films and filmmakers who've already had their fill.

This Time of Year

For a bit there I felt like things were going well. Shoutout to this time of year for always keeping it real.

There's normally a good amount of work and stock footage sales coming in the last of the year and 2021 was no different. Then January hits and it's basically crickets while everyone with real jobs is sleeping off their year-end work hangovers. It's not too bad though because January is also normally when those end of year jobs get paid for so there's plenty of cash coming in and no complaints.

But then freakin' February... It's basically Winter's July when no one is working and us freelancers are once again questioning our life choices. My backup plan du jour this time of year is normally wanting to go back to school for an MBA instead of just being alone with my dog all day and doing laundry, taxes, and spiraling into this year's version of seasonal depression.

Things will pick back up like they normally do this time of year. Until then, I'll just be over here freakin' out. I'll also be reading a lot, pretending to take still photos, and procrastinating on the rubber stamp doc I have no excuse to not finish.

Each weekday morning you'll most likely find me at my regular coffee shop scribbling out a daily journal entry followed by a good amount of reading. Lately I've been obsessed with Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" and I'm nearly 200 pages into this 750+ page economic textbook. I'd seen the 2019 documentary based on Piketty's book a while back and wanted to read it myself ever since.

There's also that medium format camera that's been keeping my attention more than I'd like to admit. I do appreciate a change every now and then to remind me how much I enjoy what I get to do for a living. This time last year I was avoiding how slow my paid work was by learning my way around a drone. This year it's this film camera from the early 1970s.

The beginning of February brought a decent amount of snow for here in Oklahoma City. I knew from last year's February snow to head out to Lake Hefner to try and find some magic. There's a story too about me nearly getting Saint Anne the Wife's car stuck in a snowy ditch for a single photo if you're up for that kind of thing. Also, I went out to shoot a major real estate investment that literally went up in flames (thankfully no one was physically hurt).

In rubber stamp doc news: not much... Late last week I connected with a grad student writing her thesis about a narrow slice of of rubber stamp history I've been drowning in. Kinda wild being able to share notes and contacts over such an obscure topic. Not gonna lie: I'm crazy envious of her being seemingly laser focused on her specific topic while I'm over here trying to grow a crop of wheat and raise turkeys so I can make lunch.

DIY Film Developing

So back to this whole "shooting film" nonsense: I'm a fan. At this point it's more along the lines of having unprotected sex and just "hoping for the best." Sure, it's super exciting to do the thing, but the risk of incorrectly metering your light is incredible lower than a surprise family addition or a weird rash. There's also the the thing about not waiting nine months for your film to be processed. I could go on, but I'll just snip the analogy here and now.

Unfortunately Oklahoma City isn't teeming with photo shops and getting film developed isn't as easy as it would be in a larger market. Buddies of mine ship their film out to be processed, but they're better people than I am. Turns out in this situation I'd rather have the one marshmallow now instead of eating both later. The photo lab I'd stared using here in OKC to develop my film ran into some substantial delays and I started down the rabbit hole of developing my own color film at home. As a high school student twenty-something years ago, I'd taken a photography course and developed black and white film. We never did anything with color film, but it's the future now and I'd figured there'd be a YouTube tutorial or thirty that'd get me up to speed.

Thanks to the internet I put together a film processing kit plus the confidence to not blowup my house. Willem Verbeek's YouTube videos on developing were key in me actually gaining the confidence to try and pull it off, but Will Cobb's in-depth video was crazy helpful with the nuts and bolts of the process.

The worse part was waiting for the $200-300 in gear I'd ordered off Amazon to be delivered. There was a problem with the first round of plastic reels included in my Paterson kit being defective, but I was able to work out a hack while waiting for those to get replaced. I'll say too the amount of developing chemicals I'd ordered was twice as much as intended (got the two liter Unicolor kit instead of one liter) and the recommended bottles were smaller than I should've gotten (the four pack of 32oz dark amber glass bottles vs. an accordion style solid plastic bottle). Thankfully I can do basic math and use a calculator to split the chemicals in thirds to make the mismatched puzzle work.

It was nerve-racking getting used to spooling the film negatives by feel alone in a dark bag. Some of the tutorials I'd watched had dudes sacrificing an unused roll of film but I didn't want any part of that $12-15 of nonsense. I got somewhat comfortable with the spooling process after practicing in the light and then the dark bag with some previously developed negatives I already had. Those botched plastic reels – even with the hack – ended up creasing a few sections of my negatives and added some "character" to a few frames. Thankfully though most of the rolls I developed came out pretty well, especially considering how I'm just getting started. There was one roll I'd hoped to get more from that turned out a bit sour; pretty sure I'd botched the developing time on that one. Still, not bad in terms of the collateral damage I expected early on.

At this point I'm something like 6-8 rolls into developing my own film and it's much less daunting than expected. The startup costs weren't nothing, but considering how much money I was spending having someone else do it I'll end up ahead here pretty soon. I figure too the time I'm saving doing it myself will help with the learning curve of shooting on film.

I knew I'd not be getting the same results I'm used to from my digital cameras, but this is something else. This old film camera is making things interesting and I'm crazy impressed with the unpredictability and character of the images I'm getting. There's also this thing of the inherent mood and color that comes along with the film negative compared to digital. There's an annoying camera scratch on my negatives due to something scraping along the negatives in my film back. I've still not figured out what it is, but Photoshop fixes are working till I get the problem solved.

My old-school Mamyia RB67 doesn't have a built in light meter, so in order to figure out exposure I've been using a combination of a handheld light meter and my Canon DSLR. I'll do an initial light reading with my incident meter and then a test shot with my digital camera to help dial settings in. The Sekonic meter I currently have doesn't include a spot meter, so I'm sure I'll upgrade in time.

It's easy to get lost in trying to correct and grade the different images, especially if you're trying to match multiple shots. The time I'm spending scanning my negatives and dialing in the colors to look the way I'm wanting will only help my color correction and grading for paid work.

This dip into the world of film photography has been super interesting to me as a digital cinematographer. Watching how some of the film photographers I've been following expose their images has been refreshing compared to my near reflexive habits and digital workflows. It's wild seeing more and more images from film photographers that I'd normally consider overexposed compared to the dark and moody frames from my cinematography brethren.

Over time all this nonsense will work its way into how I make a living. Even this early on I'd feel much more comfortable approaching the idea of shooting motion film stock. I know St. Anne the Wife and I have had a couple different conversation about some of the money I've pumped into this thing. By no means is it crazy money, but surely it's a much more cost-effective mid-life crisis compared to the spandex clad buddies of mine and their deep dives into road racing.