 "Photo: Courtesy Alex Bowser")
Early last Friday night, the flash of strobe lights shone on a sea of people who swayed inside of a small, dirty club that looked like it belonged in the 1980s, but it wasn’t just a regular club.
What looks like a cramped, disgusting club was a facade finished just the day before located inside of a gigantic, state of the art sound stage, part of UCF’s stunning Center For Emerging Media in downtown Orlando.
Three cameramen circle the sea of dancing actors, hoisting small Digital SLR cameras on their shoulders.
These three cameras are an integral part of the story to making Bad Pixels directed by Alex Bowser. While the drama on the screen is dominated by the unique story of Kyrie, an oppressed teenager living in a bleak, male-dominated dictatorship who discovers a synthesizer whose music can restore equality to her society, behind the scenes these cameras are a big part of the story.
Bad Pixels is one of the first full length movies to use the Canon 7D digital single lens reflex (SLR) camera that is primarily used for still photography but are also capable of high resolution video.
The Canon 5D Mark II, the other Digital SLR camera used to shoot Bad Pixels, was first pioneered by Andrew Gay, another UCF Film graduate, whose MFA film Naked was the first to ever be shot on Canon 5.
“My cinematographer (Director of Photography Jon Perez) was insistent we shoot the film on the Canon 7D and 5D Mark II because they are both able to shoot 24 frames per second in high definition, and they allow you to shoot in low light, shoot handheld, and they have a ton of versatility,” Bowser said.
Most importantly, the stunning technological advancement allows for independent filmmakers to save thousands of dollars on film and was spurred in part by UCF’s unique take on requiring Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema graduate students to raise money for production costs and shoot their own full length film in order to graduate.
“One of the reasons I chose UCF when I was looking at graduate programs is that it’s set up for you to make a feature, obtain all the rights to the film and complete your MFA,” Bowser said.
It’s not the only thing that the crew raves about the UCF Film program.
“I was very grateful that UCF has a place where people can just meet each other,” said Viky Reynoso, second assistant director. “In the film department, you can just walk anywhere and you’ll meet the most interesting people, and they’re doing the most interesting things. And just this building here (the UCF Center for Emerging Media), this building is perfect. UCF has put so much thought into everything.”
Bowser agrees wholeheartedly.
“The new UCF Film infrastructure set up by John Bohen, who really took the student’s input and brought in the Digital SLR cameras, is what allowed me to make this film within the budget range that I had,” Bowser said.
The new Digital SLR technology has allowed Bowser to film his dystopian 1980s new wave, inspired vision for under $10,000.
“This is the future, especially in indie films,” said Tom Hurter, administrator for UCF Film.
The department is insistent on training students to use and embrace the new Digital SLR technology for shooting movies.
In fact, several UCF Film professors are literally using Bad Pixels to help write guides on how to film using Digital SLR cameras.
Pioneering the new technology has not been without obstacles.
“The native codec, or format, that the camera shoots on is not an editing codec,” Bowser said. “It’s a compressed web codec, which is not ideal for editing, so we’ve had to convert it every time we finish shooting to something we can edit, and we’ve shot 28 hours of footage, so digital storage obviously becomes a concern.”
Still, those concerns have not stopped Bowser from pursuing his vision, aided by UCF’s cutting edge Digital SLR technology. Unlike the dark, dystopian world of Bad Pixels, the future looks bright for him.
“If it wasn’t for the way UCF is set-up, I wouldn’t be able to be here,” Bowser said.
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