Kevin Powell

I produced, shot, & edited this promotional piece for the Sterling Rice Group in Boulder.

Another PS painting - Zombie Sean.

I’m on a Photoshop painting kick lately. My friend Brian in the early stages of Zombie.

An early concept sketch of the figure. Sculpting is almost done!

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.

Read more…

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.

I just completed the external power conversion on my Beaulieu S2008. 4.8 volts runs the camera while 2.4 volts supplies power to the iris drive motor. The external power supply consists of two separate bricks for each voltage - I built it this way because I prefer to use an external light meter and manually control exposure, but should I ever want auto exposure, it’s a simple matter of connecting it. A drilled out battery cap holds a 5pin DIN female connector soldered to the contact points inside the battery compartment. Using this standardized MIDI connector makes it cheap & easy to create custom cables of any length. 40 year old technology meets modern NiMH power sources - I like.

Digging through old hard drives, I found the very, very rough trailer for the Super 8 zombie movie “Hell on Earth”(Working Title) that some friends and I were going to make over twelve years ago. Wow. See, we predicted the zombie resurgence a decade ago… and yes, the “Grindhouse” look was intentional. I cut this back in the day using some test footage we shot one weekend and a title design idea from concept sketches. The music is courtesy of my awful guitar playing(I’ve gotten much better), my friend’s pretty good drumming(he’s basically a pro now), and a Fostex 4 Track. Too bad this project was never completed. We met with someone who was interested in actually giving us some cash to make this thing - I walked out of the meeting… HA! The nerve I had back then - hilarious. I definitely learned some lessons on this one. Click through to check it out. Read more…

A blast from the past here - I shot and cut this promo for WKYT in Lexington, KY over 10 years ago now with my colleague Kevin Wathen - Wow, time flies! I was fresh out of the University of Kentucky and anxious to make moving pictures. It’s Beta SP mixed with Super 8 and cut on an Avid Media Composer. You’d be surprised at some the shots that are Super8. I shot the film portions with a Canon 514XLS. The telecine was done by Super8 Sound in Burbank. I pitched Super8 to the producer because of it’s nostalgic quality - K40 seemed right for the piece… and, I was anxious to shoot and transfer some film to see how well it held up. I was told that this piece continued to air as a station promo for several years after I was gone even after the “Hometown” campaign had ended - I take that as a compliment.

A great little film from Kodak and Super8 Sound promoting double system filmmaking from 1973. There’s something really special about making films this way that you don’t experience with just a mouse in your hand. This footage reminds me of a commercial I shot and cut 10 years ago that uses quite a bit of Super8 - transfered by Super8 Sound Burbank - See it here.

I revisited Frameless and brought the entire FCP project back online so I could use some fancy tricks to create a new, uncompressed version for mastering. The image quality is so much better now. I shot the project on 24P DV using a Canon XL-2(HD was way beyond our meager budget). The idea behind Frameless was to show that we could produce a small, interesting piece of a much larger story on a very modest budget. My light kit consisted of one Chimera soft box, two Lowel Omni’s, a couple of small fluorescent units and several reflectors for subtle fill. I focused as much energy as possible on getting a nice film-like image from the tiny 1/3 DV chips(I had my hands full as co-director, gaffer, and cinematographer all at the same time). The story is presented as a visualization of the main character’s disjointed memory of an event from his past. I chose to light on a shot by shot basis without much concern for realism. I dialed in the XL-2’s color and saturation settings slightly in-camera, but final color timing was performed using a combination of FCP and After Effects. These are some frame grabs from the new, much cleaner, master.

Just some doodle’n from my sketchbook. I like his expression. I feel that way sometimes.

Just got my negative and hard drive back from Cinelicious this afternoon and I cranked out a quick edit reducing 15min of footage down to about 4min. The music is a Langhorne Slim track I happened to be listening to at the time. Wow! I’m so excited about how great this looks. Bernie O’Doherty did the Ultra16 mod to my Eclair NPR as well as his Laserbrighten process to my ground glass(highly recommend this). This is my first camera test with my NPR since I’ve gotten her all up to spec. I don’t see how anyone can argue that Ultra16 is not a totally viable format for budget minded filmmakers. Scanned at Cinelicious on their Cintel Ursa Diamond at 1920×1080, 24p, direct to drive using Apple Pro Res 422 HQ. WARNING! This clip is a bit large(30MB)… I couldn’t wait to post it later, so I guessed the proper encoder settings and let her rip. Click through to check it out. Read more…

Here’s a few paintings I did for a group show about a year ago. Read more…

UPDATE: The entire short can now be viewed online here!

It’s been a couple of years since the short film wrapped and not that long ago I finished post production - here’s the original poster. The initial pass of the DVD for festival submissions is complete, but I may revisit it since I always think It could be better. It’s quite possible I may submit to festivals sometime this century… But, I’m on to several other projects now, so who knows. Regardless, the poster is fun to look at.

I love Super 8 film(and Regular 8mm too). I shoot it myself, and I collect it. The classic horror stuff from Castle Films are some of my favorites. Score two for me! Randomly stopped at an antique shop in the hood and not only nabbed myself a pristine print of Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman(Regular 8mm), but also picked up a 35mm print of the trailer for An American Werewolf in Paris! Ha! Yes, An American Werewolf in Paris completely sucked… but it was only $4. OK, score one for me.