Khairil M Bahar

Those that are familiar with my filmmaking work have probably noticed by now that I don’t often light a scene, preferring instead to use natural light.

The reasons for this are usually two-fold - shooting with natural light allows me to shoot faster (and for a lot of my passion projects such as my short films and no-budget features, I need to shoot as fast as I can) and I also haven’t, until now, owned any lights.

The thing is, whenever I’m doing corporate jobs I often use lighting and I’ve begun collecting some second-hand lights, whatever decent deals my crew guys manage to find me these days, and thought I’d test them out. I was also lucky enough to get my hands on a Sony NEX-VG20 to test out over the long weekend last week together with a couple of E-mount lenses and some Alpha mount Carl Zeiss lenses with the appropriate adapter to fit them on the camera, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and test both the camera and the lights I recently bought.

For the curious, below is a pic of how I set up the two flourescents that I bought. I used an Ikea desk lamp as a backlight - just took out the bulb that came with it and replaced it with a daylight flourescent lamp with about 120W (equivalent) output.

I’ll post up my thoughts and review of the camera itself at a later date and I’ll update this post with the same footage color treated on Magic Bullets 2. I haven’t slept since yesterday and I should’ve passed out two hours ago but instead decided to blog for a bit. However, I definitely don’t have the energy to write a full review of my thoughts of the camera just yet.

Besides, it’s raining - perfect sleep weather.

I’ve also re-arranged the Hub yet again since the layout above. Because that’s what I do.

So a month or so back, after taking a trip to PenangPac to peddle my filmmaking wares I arrived back in KL and found myself at One Utama with an odd craving for a Crumpler messenger bag to carry my laptop and other such items around with me. So I made my way up to the Mac store upstairs and started looking through the bags.

Next to the Crumplers, though, were a bunch of messenger bags that looked similar yet different, design and material wise, so I started checking them out. A beat later, a guy next to me asked me whether I liked them.

Those bags were by Greenroom136, and the person asking me about the bags was the creator, Mr Gordon Greenroom himself.

Turns out it was the first day his products were being stocked at the store. We had a little chat about his bags and exchanged business cards. A few moments later I left with a Bootstrap Original:

I have to admit, part of the reason I chose the bag was because it was locally made and I’d met the creator who seemed to be a really nice guy. The price difference wasn’t that big, only slightly cheaper than a Crumpler equivalent, but Gordon wasn’t kidding when he said this thing was sturdy: I took out all the contents of my backpack from my trip to Penang - a laptop, charger, video camera and a change of clothes - including the backpack itself.

The past few months since I bought it the Bootstrap has been my main laptop bag for meetings where I’ll usually pack a camera in there too and it’s very comfortable. The bags are handmade, built in Gordon’s house and they stress-test the hell out of them. All in all, a happy purchase indeedy.

But that’s not why I’m writing this post.

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Before everyone starts asking “where can I get this?!”, here’s the bad news - this is just a test print I did to see how the covers might be. The good news is, I’m actually awaiting the basic quotes for the printing of the DVD’s which I am hoping (fingers crossed) to release in March, as well as on other formats as well.

Why March? A number of reasons. Firstly, as far as the DVD is concerned, I don’t believe in just releasing a DVD with the movie on it and want to get all the extras done. I also need to finalize some of the possible video-on-demand deals and even then that may not come out in March but later on down the line, depending on how quickly the respective parties can get back to me. And then there’s a bunch that needs to be researched and sorted out with regards to on-line streaming, downloads, etc.

So if you missed the flick or simply want to watch it again or if you’re a budding indie filmmaker who’d like to find out the details on how I’ve been going about trying to get the movie released on home video, do read on.

(As always, this is gonna be one of them lengthy posts, so if you’d rather read a blog featuring three short paragraphs and pics of the blogger smiling with the two finger peace sign, please feel free to add to their growing number of followers.)

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