36 Creative Experiments to Add to Your Filmmaking Bucket List | No Film School

Who out there knows who Mathieu Stern is? If you've been an NFSer for a while, you most definitely know him...maybe not as Mathieu Stern but as the "Weird Lens Guy" that I obsessively cover.

We've written about almost all of his "Weird Lens Challenges" in which he takes 100-year-old projector lenses or lenses he finds in dumpsters or lenses he makes out of icebergs and engineers them to work with modern day cameras...and then goes on to capture some absolutely gorgeous imagery.

Well, today is this dear fellow's birthday and to commemorate it, he decided to make a list of 36 "weird photography ideas" he wants to try out this year. After watching it, I realized that this should be the creative bucket list of pretty much every filmmaker and photographer out there. Check it out and see for yourself.

Granted, some of these experiments only really work for photographers, but damn it, filmmakers are just photographers who can't stay still, so if you're gonna do this bucket list thing, I'll tell you right now that there's no skipping, Jack.

For those of you who just picked up a camera for the very first time, first of all, hi, hello, congrats...you're gonna have so much fuggin' fun, my friend! Second, write down all of the things from the video and use it as a checklist. For real, experimentation and practice helps us learn so many fascinating things about our craft, ourselves, and our creative voice.

For those of you who have a little bit more experience and have done a few of the things on this list...don't stop! Keep going. Try something you never thought you'd try, like a bullet-time sequence. Just surround your subject with a couple dozen GoPros (or just twirl your phone around on a string...kinda works) and go nuts.

For those of you who are so experienced that you have done everything on this list, please...share the coolest/weirdest/most amazing cinematographic experiment you've done as a filmmaker in the comments below.

And for those who are going to go through all of these things within a year...I wish I had your stamina.

Almost forgot, Happy Birthday, Mathieu!

Source: Mathieu Stern

mathieu stern weird lens challenge

What's the Hype With 'Interstellar' Revisiting Cinemas After a Decade in 70mm IMAX?

Here's Why You Need to Revisit 'Interstellar' in 70mm IMAX

Celebrate the love and hope at the center of Nolan's space epic in the format it was meant to be seen.

If we know anything about Christopher Nolan, he likes to go big. Nolan started with smaller-scale stories (as many of us do) with early noir adjacent works like Following, Memento, and Insomnia, then started going and staying big with his illusionist drama The Prestige. Since then, the scale has been various degrees of massive, with the biggest scope in his time-and-space sprawling epic, Interstellar.

While Interstellarmight not be everyone's favorite Nolan outing, there's no denying it's an impressive feat of filmmaking and his most emotional—if watching Matthew McConaughey's Cooper desperately try to reach his family through quantum space-time doesn't make you cry at least a little bit, what's going on, dude?

With Interstellar'sIMAX release, it's a great time to shed some tears in a public setting in one of the most prestigious film formats around. As we mentioned in our film gauge piece, Nolan loves shooting on film and utilizes 65mm intentionally to provoke a tone of massive scale. In that regard, Interstellar was made for 70mm IMAX. That goes without saying, dawg. That being said, other factors make Interstellar a perfect movie to revisit in theaters while you can.

Let's break down the release further below.

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