Bolex Shoot

I love shooting with bolex cameras, so I was super excited for this project. We decided to shoot our one minute film by some abandoned railroad tracks. The plot was a short horror film that depicts a girl in a white dress (me) walking along the tracks, dropping white flowers as she goes. Behind her, a scary man in a wolf mask is weaving in and out of frame between the trees. She walks closer and closer to the camera until you can only see her legs. Her legs suddenly stop, and all of the flowers she is hold fall. The camera pans down to a body on the tracks, covered in blood (blue food coloring), right before the shot ends you see you legs walking up behind the girl's legs.
So this was the plan anyway. The shoot itself went really smoothly. We blocked everything out really well and the timing was perfect. Developing the film went pretty smoothly as well. While I have previously shot on bolex cameras, I had never had the opportunity to develop the film, so that was really cool! Transferring the film onto the projector, however, was another story entirely. We had trouble running the film through and then when we finally got it, the projector shredded our film. It was disappointing because it felt like all of the time we spent on planning the shoot went to waste. However, once Andre showed us the film he had contacted printed onto another reel, I was really excited. The distortion of the reel actually ended up looking really cool and while it wasn't our original plan, I think the final edit might end up looking cooler than our idea. I guess when you are working with real film you have to have an open mind and just learn to roll with the punches. You never know what might happen to your film through the process. I'm just glad that we got the opportunity to work with real film cameras and explore that process. I hope that I get more chances to work with film in the future.