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Antigone (2021)


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I shot a feature adaptation of Antigone and it's currently playing through a limited virtual performance. You can watch it here: https://bit.ly/antigone-virtual

Here's the trailer:

My old college hired me to shoot this feature for them. Because of the pandemic, their theatre department couldn't produce any live performances. The department decided to film a play, but instead of shooting a live (or in COVID's case "live") performance like Hamilton did, they wanted to actually shoot a single camera movie. They reached out to their alumni network to hire former students and I was one of them who was available.

Here's a story from NPR about this production: https://kjzz.org/content/1671861/mesa-community-college-premiers-first-feature-film-antigone

We shot the film on my DIY anamorphic lenses, a combination of Schneider Cinelux and BH16 anamorphosers with Nikkkor and Russian sphericals.

You can find stills of the film here: http://ajyoungdp.com/articles/narrative/antigone/

A final interesting note, we utilized Blender for pre-vis. All of the prep work was done remotely. The art director sent me the blueprints for the set and I built it in Blender to build our shotlist, blocking, and lighting.

Edited by AJ Young
typos
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Lovely work AJ! The frames look great, I thought the anamorphic look worked well and the lighting was rich and contrasty. Nice use of hard light, which you don’t see much of these days anymore.

It’s an interesting challenge to film a play set in antiquity in a cinematic style without large resources. One often has to get quite stylized and creative to make it work. 

I personally enjoy the challenge, as long as the actors and costuming are high caliber. Without that, it’s a nightmare. I’ve had experience with both unfortunately!

 

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5 hours ago, Satsuki Murashige said:

Lovely work AJ! The frames look great, I thought the anamorphic look worked well and the lighting was rich and contrasty. Nice use of hard light, which you don’t see much of these days anymore.

It’s an interesting challenge to film a play set in antiquity in a cinematic style without large resources. One often has to get quite stylized and creative to make it work. 

I personally enjoy the challenge, as long as the actors and costuming are high caliber. Without that, it’s a nightmare. I’ve had experience with both unfortunately!

 

Thank you so much! I was incredibly lucky to get both great actors and great wardrobe, plus an amazing set. Our shoot schedule lost a week because of a COVID outbreak, but the actors were so well prepared that we finished the film with everything we wanted.

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