On Tuesday, Indiana University students and staff produced minute-long silent movies using century-old hand-crank camera technology.
Bear Brown is a senior lecturer of photography and cinematography at IU. He has his students use a 35-millimeter hand-crank camera to learn the fundamentals of light and focus.
“Sometimes shooting with digital, you become like a shotgun, you're hitting everything around,” Brown said. “But with this, you’ve got to be specific with what you want because you're limited to how much film you actually have.”
Brown said the Lomography LomoKino camera operates based on the original designs of the first filmmakers, Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers.
A roll of film lasts only about 20 seconds and contains 144 frames. The film has to be hand-cranked at a constant speed so the footage stays fluid.
Film by Noni Ford, Grace Cheng, Julie Tran, and Jamie Thomas
Brown isn’t just teaching film photography to improve students’ directing skills.
The workshop was part of College Care Week: a weeklong series of events organized by the College of Arts and Sciences at IU meant to help students cope with the stress of finals. Brown said shooting and developing film can be an effective creative outlet.
“I've been told that I have my foot in the past and in the future, so I can teach the present,” Brown said. “It's just a different texture that they have, and I’ll be honest, shooting film is fun.”
More videos by Bear Brown and his students can be found on his Instagram.
