Built Not Bought
“The majority of the kids in their senior year drove SUVs. You would see a pick up truck on occasion, so it was a fairly unique thing. I had some idea that Matt and his family were into building their own cars, but not to the level they are.”
“I knew that his family worked in construction. However, I later found out that both his mom and dad have been working on cars since childhood; auto rebuilding is in their blood!”
‘The auto community in this part of the world is huge. It's just crazy, the amount of people that have cars like theirs. You wouldn’t know it though, because they don’t drive them around all the time. You only tend to see them when the weather is nice.”
“Matt’s family has a large garage next to their house where they work on all of their cars. Matt told me he had worked on his own truck for a year. He then told me it was a pick up from the 1950s. I had always heard things about the cars Matt and his family were working on, but never in great detail. And so when he started telling me about his own truck, I thought it was super interesting. So, I then chose to write up some questions to specifically dig deeper into the stories of the Burton family and their cars.”
“I had done some smaller projects involving their cars, like taking some still photos for Matt. I've always had an interest in making something bigger. He then started talking about how the cars have really brought the family closer together and this struck me as an idea for a short documentary film.”
“We talked about making the documentary, and at first, it was just going to be Matt and his truck. I wanted to add more depth to the story; so we decided to include his parents as well, which I feel definitely added to the narrative and the overall feel of the film.”
“We started the prep for the project just before the Covid-19 outbreak. Fortunately, my crew was very small, so we were able to finish all of the interviews with appropriate social distancing. Then as Ohio went in to lock down, I had plenty of time to do all of the editing and color grading within DaVinci Resolve. So I guess, the timing of things actually worked out for this project, giving me three months of lockdown to finish the post production from home.”
“I had just got myself the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, with a Rode mic. Although, the Pocket Camera is micro four thirds, I was actually shooting on full frame glass with a speed booster. I finally decided on the Aputure Lens Regain Follow Focus Adapter for EF to MFT. I was using Rokinon EF primes which were giving me really sharp images when paired with the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K.”
“I was mainly using the 50mm, but I also had a 24mm and an 85mm with me. I started off with a 50mm lens to see what the quality was like. And after seeing how good they were, I went all in and bought another three lenses.”
“With the speed booster, I definitely like the wider image I get with the full frame glass and the depth of field you get with the MFT sensor. This setup worked well with the lighting I had, which was a soft box paired with double diffusion and a grid. So in the end the majority of artificially lit footage was captured using one light. For all of the other shots I just simply used the incredible flexibility that comes with the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K.”
“The thing that pulled it all together was shooting on Blackmagic RAW Q0 uncompressed, which is such an incredibly forgiving format. When I was shooting the documentary, I stuck to ISO 400 so I could get the highest quality image out of the camera and Blackmagic RAW. When shooting night shots I could go to ISO 3200 and know I was still going to get great footage. With Blackmagic RAW you get so much more latitude. If you get the wrong stop, you’ll still be in the right range with RAW. I was finishing in 4K, so all of these things were important.”
“I love the size of this camera especially for the hanging out the window of the car shots and the interview shots. Having such a small body not only makes it easy to shoot with, but it looks just like a DLSR, which is less intimidating for the people you are interviewing.”
“The project was finished by gifting the Burton family the film and the film’s poster within a homemade frame. Overall, working on this film was an incredible experience.