Kevin Powell

I’ve been cooking up some new stuff lately & here’s a glimpse at something very special. Coming soon right here from thebasementlab, you can catch your very own Sasquatch Hunter patch! It’s included when you purchase the limited edition, resin, hand painted, 8″ figure designed & sculpted by yours truly. What figure you ask? Just you wait… it’s rad. Stay tuned for this & some other cool stuff too!

-KP

“When it boils right down to it, we’re creatives. We get paid to be creative.”

In the world of home media, there’s a lot of chatter these days concerning the leap from Standard Definition to High-Definition. It’s not the only discussion, but currently the most common with both consumers and content creators. Hopefully, you already own a TV with an aspect ratio more like a movie screen than a coaster. And maybe, just maybe, you had some common sense & bought a Blu-ray player over that format Microsoft was pushing. Congratulations. You’ve taken the first step into a much larger world. Although SD DVD’s look pretty good on new TV’s and in new players, BD looks better. It’s the future, for the time-being anyway.

There’s an entire team of people that create the DVD’s you enjoy. There are producers, compressionists, authors, designers, a slew of behind the scenes artists make it happen. All of these people should be considered artists because, well, there’s an art to doing each of these jobs well. For a designer in the realm of SD DVD’s there’s a pretty simple set of rules. You know the limitations & you design with those in mind, pulling from your bag o’ tricks when necessary, & attempt to create something fresh & compelling within a fairly restrictive environment. There’s only so much you can do with SD DVD’s. But this shouldn’t be stifling, it should motivate you to be more creative with the choices you make. Which is ultimately what we do right? When it boils right down to it, we’re creatives. We get paid to be creative. Having a limited set of tools shouldn’t restrict creativity & it doesn’t.

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I received two rolls of Super 8 from the lab yesterday. A few things to note: The camera(Beaulieu S2008) performed great, but leaving my tripod behind wasn’t the best choice. My DIY telecine method needs improvement, but overall transferred some fairly good images - gotta fix those color shifts & hot spots(I’m thinking RGB LED’s are the way to go). Flicker isn’t too bad, but noticeable. The Plus-X & Velvia stocks performed as expected, but my metering technique with this camera wasn’t spot-on & resulted in some underexposure… I’ve got it figured out now. That’s what camera tests are for right? Tri-X and E64 tests coming soon. Check out some of the footage… Read more…

I started design/construction of a blaster back when I was working on the fan film idea, but never really completed it. Spent a couple of hours this morning in the garage and finished what I started. Sometimes it takes me several years to actually follow through on these things, but eventually I always do. No one ever seems to understand why I collect so much junk… this is proof there’s a good reason for it.

Another discovery from the archives. Several years ago I started doing tests for a short fan film idea. It involved a spaceship crash landing sequence which led to the development of this test shot. A bit rough, but fun to look at.

In KY testing film stocks for a new project, Harris puts his 1971 Challenger RT through it’s paces. This is why I still shoot film - You just can’t make images like this any other way. In between takes of Plus-X B&W & Velvia 50D Super 8, I fired off a few rounds of medium format Porta 160NC with my Yashica Mat 124G. More medium format stuff in my flickr photostream - finally putting this to use.