Matt Kieley

Bought in February, barely used, includes all the original packaging and accessories, battery, software, etc. PM for more info. $1300 OBO. USA only, PayPal only.

I liked it. The bad impression narration was a whimsical change of pace from what could be a normal, boring test.

Thanks, guys. I shot Carte Blanche from February-March 2009, and there aren't indeed any criticisms I hadn't already heard or thought of myself, even before I finished it. I don't think it's very good, but I had fun making it, and it's like a time capsule of my life at that time. Most of the film is deadpan, with a mostly static camera because I was heavily into Jim Jarmusch at the time. I often think of what Scorsese said on the commentary track for his first film Who's That Knocking At My Door. I'm paraphrasing, but it was basically this: "Watching this film is like looking at my old high school yearbook photo." I've occasionally attempted to re-edit the film, but when I look at the footage and think of the story, I realize I can't edit out the adolescence, and I'm not the person I was when I made it.

I appreciate people's advice, but what I'm saying is that I want to create films for the sake of art an expression, without an end game of distribution or "success" (which is a subjective term--completing a film is a success in and of itself) and I can see why it seems crazy. I thought it was crazy too until recently.

Maybe the way I wrote my post made it seem like a "whoa is me" post, but in fact it's the opposite. I'll be even more honest. When I was 19-20ish, I thought I'd never get married or have kids, and if I failed to be an auteur genius filmmaker with a career in film, I would commit suicide. In retrospect, it wasn't out of serious suicidal feelings, but just a lack of imagination for the future. The film Frank made me realize I just want to be a an artist, and not worry about the career. If I make another feature soon, I'll probably submit it to some festivals, and if no one wants it, I'll put it on vimeo, like my first. I'm done with the doom and gloom of not being successful and now I'm content to just work my day job, have my personal life and make art in my spare time, with no commercial goals. By giving up, I mean giving up on commercial success, or giving a shit about being a "genius" or an "auteur" or even being "good" for that matter. I don't need the validation anymore. My priorities and wants are different now. And if anyone is really REALLY curious, here's my feature. It's a bit of a mumblecore-y, adolescent mess:

This is another existential filmmaker post spawned by a few recent threads. You've been warned. Also spoilers for a film. Recently I saw a film that articulated a question I didn't know I was asking. That film was "Frank" the story of a talentless, wannabe songwriter/keyboard player who is recruited to join a band led by a man who wears a fake head at all times. You might have seen it floating around Netflix, and maybe you even disregarded it because it sounds gimmicky, or the poster looked like quirky nonsense, but I decided on a lark to watch it, and it was absolutely devastating. The "protagonist" of the film seems like a nice, sweet guy in the beginning, until he starts exploiting Frank's talent by secretly filming and posting videos of their rehearsals to youtube, eventually earning them a slot at SXSW. He tells Frank "People love us." to which Frank replies "People love us?" The pressure of the show, and pleasing an audience cause Frank to have a nervous breakdown. This film resonated with me in a major way. I watched it once, over a week ago, and I'm still thinking about it. I thought about how fame and success never occurred to Frank. He just created music for the art and expression of it, and when faced with the pressure of a major debut performance at a festival, he creates a terrible song that he thinks is his "most likeable song ever". The entire experience breaks him. The whole film forced me to think of my goals as a filmmaker. I've wanted to be a filmmaker since I saw the Making Of Jurassic Park on TV when I was six years old. In high school, I got serious about having a career in film after seeing Pulp Fiction and El Mariachi. I then discovered the French New Wave and John Cassavetes, and I wanted to make honest, devastating, achingly truthful and beautiful masterpieces of cinema. I made my first feature at 21...and now I'm almost 28, with not many shorts, and not a single follow-up feature since my first. My first feature was extremely disappointing to me. I was obsessed with it for years, and even tried to make a quasi-remake of it, which was a disaster. I've been struggling to come up with an idea for another film that I like. I haven't been able to finish even a first draft in two and a half years. I used to be able to crank out script after script, draft after draft with all the blind confidence in the world. And since my feature, I've come to the realization that I only really have a few basic themes that I keep going back to, and I keep trying to force myself to think of something different, to be a different filmmaker, but I'm not. And now I'm questioning my goals. I've wanted a career making indie films so I wouldn't have to work a crappy day job. I've been working the same crappy day job for almost four years straight, except for the nine months where I moved to LA to pursue my career. I could't even find a day job to pay the rent. Toys R Us interviewed me twice and wouldn't hire me to work in the stock room during the holidays. I sold a bunch of my lenses, and the DVX100 I didn't use anymore, for rent money. I moved back to my hometown a year ago, broken and miserable. A year later I'm in a great relationship with a woman I'm moving in with in a month. She also has a three year old daughter, and though I thought I never wanted kids, now I can see myself raising this child with my girlfriend, and marrying her. We both see it. She's extremely supportive of my filmmaking, and doesn't want me to give up. But I just feel discouraged. Discouraged that my films will never look good enough, have good enough acting or be important enough. And I still want to make films, but I'm wondering why I want, or need, to be successful at it. Before I got "serious" about it, I used to have fun making movies. The same group of friends and I would get together and film shorts on the weekends. Most people here I'm sure had the same experience. I think all I want now is to form a troupe of actors/crew members and make cheap movies in our spare time for fun, and perhaps never even show them to anyone else. I'm accepting that I'm nowhere near the level of talent as Francois Truffaut, Paul Thomas Anderson, or David Lynch, and it's okay. I'm giving up on success. I just want to make shit.

Since I've moved onto the NX1 from the GH1, I have a Rokinon 12mm 2.0 (non-cine MFT version) that is completely useless to me now. I'm looking to get rid of it and get a Rokinon 85mm. Would anyone care to trade?

Thank you!

kJust a little home movie of a trip to LA, shot on the NX1.

I'm kind of intrigued by this. I do miss the ergonomics of the DVX. I shot my first feature, and dozens of shorts and music video with the DVX for 5 years, and got pretty good with the camera. A couple of years ago I remastered my feature and some of my shorts/music videos and was surprised by how much the image quality held up (with the exception of the resolution). My only real nitpick is the speed of the lens, which is slower than the DVX100. I love my NX1 and lenses, but I suppose if the image of the DVX200 has that old DVX "mojo" i might have to reconsider.

I just got the NX1 a week ago and made this video yesterday to test out some features and limitations.

I just ordered an NX1 this afternoon, and I can't wait to use it. This should be a significant upgrade from my hacked GH1, which is now a fossil.

​I don't know how the DS Rokinon lenses differ optically, but I have a set of the regular photo versions (12, 16, 24, 35 and 50 so far) and they actually have a very vintage character to them. They look surprisingly similar to my Canon FD SSC lenses, but I can also go wider and faster with the Rokinons. I've never compared them in a scientific way, but just doing side by side test footage, I was surprised by how similar they looked. I love my Rokinons. For zooms I have a Canon FD 35-105 3.5 which is good too.

I recently read this (old) article on "Mad Men" switching from 35mm to the Arri Alexa in season 5, and why the DP and Matthew Weiner came to prefer the Alexa to film, and I thought it was interesting: http://www.hdvideopro.com/film-and-tv/tv/rebranding.html#.VNivcUfF-Sp Film is great, it's the benchmark of quality I want to achieve, and I also love using a DSLR. I feel like it helps my creativity, and if you feel like film helps yours, good for you. I don't see or really care about the difference these days. There are a few recent films that were so clean and sharp I could have sworn they were digital. I didn't even really notice Nightcrawler was shot on a mix until I saw the credits, but maybe I was too sucked into the story and Jake Gyllenhaal's performance to notice.

I like to consume as many different mediums as possible. Lately I've been more inspired by comics. Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns blow me away and really make me want to tell stories. Recently I read The Squirrel Machine by Hans Rickheit, which is great example of visual storytelling. There's hardly any dialogue in it at all. It's almost entirely visual.

Just got a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 and I'm in love with it so far. The Rokinon 16mm f/2.0 is next on my list. I've been using mostly FD lenses and the Panasonic 14mm (sold it recently), which never matched well, so I figured it was about time to invest in better glass.

As a child, Batman, Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 were the first movies that made me want to make movies (even though I didn't know what that really required and meant when I was that young). But the first films that motivated me to make a movie were Scream and Halloween. I was way too young to watch them, but, nevertheless, I did, and they changed me. There was something so visceral about the horror in Scream (the satire was lost on me when I was 10) and Halloween was the first time I became aware of the camera, with that great steadicam cinematography (in 4:3 on VHS, no less. seeing it on DVD in widescreen years later was an even bigger revelation). At age 12, I finally made my first movie (on Hi8): a parody of slasher movies. Of course, in high school, the first movie that made me realize I could be a filmmaker was El Mariachi. My Hi8 movies looked like crap, I thought making real movies was too expensive and impossible, so I had thought about just being a novelist, even though my heart was really in film. With that out of the way, the films that really influenced me artistically... 2003-2004 were huge years for me. My sophomore and junior years in high school. Earlier that year (2003), Silence of the Lambs opened my eyes to the possibility of genre. It was technically a horror movie and a detective film in a drama's clothes. I think this was the first really artful film I saw, where I was more aware of the craft: the direction, writing, acting, cinematography, editing. I was aware of all of those things before, but this was the first film where I could see how they all worked together as a whole. And I realized film could be something beautiful, even with ugly subject matter. Speaking of which... The summer of 2003 was huge. It started with Taxi Driver. That film knocked me out. It didn't have a conventional plot to speak of. It was more episodic. It was crazy. It was gritty. De Niro, whom I had known better for Meet The Parents at that time, was incredible. THAT was acting. His monotone voice-over, his charmingly psychotic smile, his lack of emotion during the graphic shoot-out. And of course, Scorsese. The slow motion, the overhead tracking shot a the end, the heavily processed footage of the streets, from inside of the taxi. It felt surreal. And the script; the things Bickle said in the voice-over really got under my skin. Later that summer, in one weekend, I saw Rushmore, Ghost World and The Graduate. The Graduate I didn't really appreciate until I was older. I liked it, but it didn't fully click at the time. But , Rushmore was sort of a teenage version of The Graduate. I noticed the influence The Graduate had over Rushmore immediately, but I connected more to Rushmore. I was even the same age as Max Fischer when I watched it. Wes Anderson's filmmaker was so striking and bold. The tracking shots, the sharp, deep-focus widescreen, the colors, the wardrobe, song choices, title cards, curtains with the seasons, just...everything. Much like Taxi Driver, it existed in it's own slightly unreal world. Ghost World I watched three times in a row, in one sitting. Like Rushmore and The Graduate, it was very melancholy, but also, in my opinion, then and now, the funniest of the three dramadies I watched that weekend. The dialogue was so real and so sharp. The filmmaking was pretty anonymous, but the storytelling, tone and mood were part of a clear vision. It felt so real, and as a teenage boy trying to navigate the secret world of teenage girls, it felt like a real window. I knew girls like Enid and Rebecca. I was surprised that the film was written and directed by men. I also had a huge crush on Enid. Not Thora Birch, but the character of Enid. Ghost World is still my favorite film of all time. Later that summer, and into the fall, I saw Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill Vol. 1, which had just come out in theaters. Tarantino was practically all I thought about for a year. I read everything I could about him. I read all of his screenplays, and obsessively re-watched everything. I was an addict. I wanted to keep re-experiencing the high of watching Tarantino's films for the first time. Much like Wes Anderson and Martin Scorsese, the filmmaking was mind-blowing. It was bold, brazen, different. The structure and storytelling choices were unlike anything else I had seen. And that dialogue... I ended up writing a ton of Tarantino-inspired scripts for a year. 2004 included the release of three films that came out in theaters at just the right time: Shaun of the Dead, Kill Bill Vol. 2 and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Of course, the last two were by filmmakers I had just fallen in love with, but Shaun of the Dead came out of left field. I saw it early, in the summer of '04 at comic-con, with Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright doing a Q & A after (Greg Noctero, Robert Rodriguez and Ken Foree were in that audience too). All I knew about the film was that it was a British zombie comedy. I hadn't seen a trailer, or knew much else. I hadn't heard of anyone involved with it. I saw it totally blind, and it was like walking down the street and finding a million dollars in cash in a bag. It was special. It was one of the funniest films I had ever seen, but it also had very real human issues and character drama. And of course, it was well-made and gory as hell. Earlier that year I had become obsessed with Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which had become more accessible because of the re-make (Romero wouldn't be a real influence, just an obsession at the time). After the screening, I was using the restroom and Simon Pegg peed in the urinal next to me. It was the closest I came to God at the time. I told everyone I knew they had to see it immediately. I don't really need to say much more about Kill Bill or Life Aquatic, since I said enough about Wes Anderson and Tarantino already. Later that year I saw two more important films, the first being A Clockwork Orange. I don't know what else to say about it, other than it was like Taxi Driver all over again. It was one of the most extraordinary films. The opening, with the synth score, the long-zoom-out from Malcolm McDowell as Alex, staring into the camera, immediately put me in a trance that I've never awoken from. That halloween I dressed as Alex. Around close to the same time, a kid name Johnny I knew peripherally, but not well, approached me, wide-eyed, asking me if I had ever heard of Eraserhead. I said I had heard the title, and indeed I had seen the iconic poster image of Jack Nance as Henry Spencer, with the hair sticking straight up, back-lit, with a crazy expression on his face and dust in the background. "You've gotta see it, man." Johnny told me. The next day, he presented a VHS tape to me. The cover art was there, though it was clearly a regular VHS box cut up into a slip cover to fit on a clam shell. I don't think the tape even had a label. It was a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy, with video static at the bottom of the frame that Johnny claimed added to the experience of the film, and indeed it did. That night, I turned off all the lights in my bedroom and watched it alone. It was the first film I had seen that really, truly captured the feel of a nightmare. I thought about the visuals and sound design for several weeks after. I haven't been the same since. Looking back on my life, those were the films that really had the most profound influence on me.

Thank you very much!

The Optivision sold. I'm selling y Panasonic lens on ebay now. I'll probably take everything else there too.

The optivision anamorphic lens is now on ebay, but I'll still accept offers here until it sells.

All of this gear is still for sale. I've found the original lens thread/alignment element for the Optivision Anamorphic lens. When I bought it it came with what is basically a clamp with 52mm thread. It was missing the original screw, but I bought a small pack of replacement screws from home depot. I've also found the lens pouches for the Canon FD lenses. All of these items are included fr free, of course. Photos: '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> I might sell on ebay if I can't get a bite here in a week.

Really lovely piece. Great imagery.And it's always nice to hear Jon Brion's score for Eternal Sunshine. What camera/lenses did you use?

Sankor 16c, Diopters and Base Clamp sold to Rupert Pupkin.

I'm new here, but since I don't really have anything new to share, I thought I'd share an older short I'm most proud of. "The Ballad of Crazy Pete" is a portrait of a mentally ill young man. It was originally meant to be a Super 8 short, which is why the film is all narration. It was my first time shooting Super 8, and unfortunately, one roll of film wasn't exposed (damn you Ektachrome 100D!), but I did shoot digital takes with the GH13 for back-up. I had already made a rough cut of the digital takes while I waited for the film to come back. I decided to keep the final film all-digital, instead of mixing formats, or trying to mix formats, and I kind of prefer the digital version. I still did my own shitty telecine involving the GH13, my Super 8 projector, a cardboard box and a white frost diffusion gel, and speed correction (my projector is only 18fps, footage was shot at 24). I tried going direct to sensor, but the GH13's crop sensor was too small. I may try it again with my roommate's 5D. And here's some digital outtakes with sound, for fun:

Sale of the Sankor is pending.