Matt Kieley

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.

Gh13. The footage I've seen from the 2 and 3 is great, but I think I'm in the minority of people who still prefer the GH13. Whenever I get gear lusty, I look at stuff I've shot with my current set-up and I'm always surprised by how well it holds up, at least for my own personal aesthetic taste.

Long time lurker (finally decided to register), first time poster. I'm selling two gorgeous anamorphic lenses: The trusty Sankor 16c and the Optivision XW 5000. I'm also selling some FD lenses, zooms, Tokina MD Zoom, filters, clamps, and some other bits and pieces. Sankor 16c (with lens caps, pouch and original box) - $250 2X compression, coveted blue flares, small, light weight. Barrel has minor cosmetic scuffs, glass is flawless. It's nice, but I've barely used it in the 8 years I've owned it. And you can't go too wide with it. Here's a video I shot with the Sankor/GH13/Helios 44M: Photos of the product: '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> Optivision XW 5000 - $350 2X compression, very sharp, large barrel (I can go as as wide as 28mm on the GH13, in 2.40:1. Any wider and you get vignetting. 35mm on the GH13 covers the full frame with no vignetting), lens flare seems to match the color of the light (tungsten looks white, sunlight looks orange, mag flashlights give blue flare). The barrel also has minor cosmetic scuffs, but the glass is great. I bought it second hand from a camera shop, so it didn't have lens caps. I do have a small bag I bought for it that I'll throw in for free. Videos shot with the Optivision: https://vimeo.com/48040832 Pictures of the product: '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> Vid Atlantic Clamps - $30 each Basic Clamp with 60mm thread base, plus 52, 55 and 58mm step rings (the 55 doesn't actually come with the package, but I used one I already had that I'll unclude), extra screws and a pouch for the rings and screws. 72mm Front Filter clamp, for larger anamorphic lenses/filters. '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> Vivitar 67mm Macros (1, 2, 3) - $10 each Very sharp, clean glass. I also have a pouch, and 72-67 and 67-72 step rings for use with the filter clamp, macros and macros with filters, included for free. Video (Macros with Optivision): https://vimeo.com/38679583 (The Anamorphic Selfies and Butter videos I posted above used these macro/anamorphic combinations). '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> Manfrotto Lens support - $40 Telephoto lens support that I used to support my Optivision lens as it's bulky and heavy. It has an articulted head, extendable support and a quick release plate, multiple threads for use with a tripod. Very handy, but if I'm selling my Optivision, I won't have any use for it. '' target='_blank'>> 72mm Filters: Vivitar Variable ND $15, Tiffen Circular Polarizer $15, Tiffen UV Haze 1 Protector $5, Tiffen 4 Filter pouch $5 Clean, good quaity. I'll include Bower 52-72 and 55-72 step rings and the pouch for free if you buy all three filters. '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-42mm 3.5-5.6 zoom - $70 Excellent condition, barely used. I'm the original owner. '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> Canon EF/s 18-55mm 3.5-5.6 zoom - $70 Excellent condition, I'm the second owner but I've barely used it. '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> Tokina MD 28-70mm 2.8-4.3 zoom - $25 Minolta MD mount, excellent condition, great quality, pretty fast at wide angle for a zoom (f/2.8). Includes a pouch. I'll also throw in an MD-MFT adapter if the buyer wants it (free). Canon 135mm 3.5 FD lens - $10 Glass is great, but the serial number was scratched off by an earlier owner. It's missing the front lens cap, but has a Hoya Filter protecting it (the owner before had keept it attached at all times, so he said). It's nice, but a bit too slow of an aperture for my needs. '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> Canon 28mm 3.5 FD lens - $10 Excellent condition, glass is clean. Has a generic lens cap and Hoya Skylight filter (came with it when I bought it). Again, nice, but a little too slow. '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> Canon 35mm 3.5 FD lens - $10 Excellent condition, clean glass, includes the original lens caps. Too slow wide open so I never really use it. '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> Kalimar 28-105mm 3.5-4.5 FD lens - $10 I'll sell all four FD lenses together as a kit for $30, or all the Canon primes as a kit for $25. Excellent condition, clean glass. It's a decent lens, but I never use it. Includes original lens caps. '' target='_blank'>> '' target='_blank'>> I'll also sell anamorphic kits with clamps, support, macros, filters, etc. at a discount, which will depend on what lens and extras you want. I'll accept paypal or cash. If you're in the LA area we can do an in-person transaction, if you're comfortable with that. I really need to get rid of a lot of these lenses I never use. I'll always love anamorphic, but I cant stand the dual-focus system, and the general pain of the anamorphic process. I've debated selling them for a long time, but I'm finally ready to let them go. I'd like to spend the money on more lights, and maybe a follow focus/rails, which I've managed to survive without all this time, but it would still help immensely. Thanks for browsing!