CLIP: Testing New and Improved Gear with Lexi

Lexi lives not too far me and makes pretty much everything—even technical gear testing—fun. So I asked her to help me test a new anamorphic camera rig I put together for artistic shots, as well as a lighter, non-anamorphic rig I’ve been tweaking for fast-moving action.

The anamorphic rig is big and very heavy, but after a lot of trial and error, I finally found a way to get it onto an electronic gimbal. So now I can handhold the most beautiful image machine I’ve ever used.

If you’re not familiar with anamorphic lenses, they create an extra-wide image and horizontally compress it onto the available space on the camera sensor; then you stretch the image back out again when you edit the footage. Anamorphic lenses render images in a way that make you feel closer to what’s happening, and they also do some beautiful things with out-of-focus background areas and light sources.

I’m especially excited to share this early footage from the anamorphic lens (ie, the wider shots in this clip), and there will be a lot more of it from my upcoming trip to California.