On September 30th, Eric Kessler and Philip Bloom hosted the first Hallo-weekend DSLR meetup at Ohio’s Cedar Point Amusement Park. Known as the “Roller Coaster Capitol of the World”, Cedar Point was decked out in it’s Halloween finest, complete with ten “frightfully scary” attractions. We could try to explain them to you, but wouldn’t it be better to just see them yourself? No, we won’t go into the past to attend the event. We will give you the next best thing however: five awesome video’s from five attendees.
The top video is from Preston Kanak, filmmaker and assistant editor to Philip Bloom. We were able to have a quick chat with Preston about Hallo-weekend and his film.
KU: Was this your first Hallo-weekend or have you attended before?
PK: I have always been in love with roller coasters but have never had the opportunity to experience any outside of the yearly fair that comes through Saskatchewan. When the opportunity to visit Cedar Point (the self proclaimed roller coaster capital of the world) came up, I couldn’t say no! Being that I was coming to Indiana to assist Philip on the Kessler doc, I decided to come a couple days earlier so I could make it to the meet-up.
KU: What was Hallo-weekend like? Did you learn anything or was it all just fun and games?
PK: The weekend at Cedar Point was amazing! Although the weather really sucked, I had a great time meeting everyone and hanging out. Friday night was good but I found it hard to chat with everyone as some wanted to ride the coasters while others wanted to shoot. Saturday was great but because of the wind, many of the coasters were closed so we ended up spending half the day waiting in line to ride the ones that were open — although it was okay as Tom Guilmette kept everyone entertained. So was it just fun and games? Hell ya!
KU: So your video is the simply titled ‘Cedar Point’. How did you settle on the idea for your video, and how did you manage to make it different than the rest?
PK: Concept-wise, initially I was just going to do a soundscape — focusing on the fun everyone was having. However, after walking through all the Screamsters, I knew they were going to be the feature of the short. I wasn’t sure how I wanted to use them in the piece but after stumbling on the dancing duo — I decided to feature their narrative — as they obviously had created their own in this fictitious world.
I knew many people were probably going to feature the Screamsters because of the lighting and atmosphere so to separate this film from the others — I wanted to post the short the next day. I shot all the time-lapse stuff over about an hour period and shot the live-action stuff for about an hour as well.
KU: Going into shooting it, did you have a specific look in mind, or did you simply try and let all the elements together fall in place however they may?
PK: Going into shooting I knew I wanted to do a soundscape but wasn’t sure how I wanted to approach it. I ended up only using the soundscape element for the time-lapse section of the piece. Normally when I go out shooting my daily shorts, I have a rough plan of what I want to achieve but usually let things fall into place as I shoot — as I find things to feel more organic.
Here are four other great videos to give you an idea of what the weekend was like:
You can find more about Preston Kanak and his work at 3minuteshorts.ca
0 Comments
You can be the first one to leave a comment.