• Check your corners – This was the best advice I ever received from my photography professors. When you’re taking a shot, line up what you want within the frame – and then check the corners to make sure you’re not including anything you don’t want. Not quite right? Try again. You don’t want a great shot of the birthday boy with Aunt Myrtle’s rear end edging into the frame. In the day and age of Photoshop, this may seem like a moot point, but trust – saying you’ll edit it in Photoshop is on par with “we’ll fix it in post.” Not a great plan.

• Avoid camera shake – It sounds easy, but after you spend an afternoon taking photos, your arms can get a little shaky and ruin great photo opportunities. Get your posture down ahead of time. Some people prefer one hand on the bottom of the camera, one on the side – I personally hold both sides and support the bottom of the camera with my thumbs. Pull your elbows tight to your sides. I like to stand one foot in front of the other to allow for more range of movement. Also, utilizing the viewfinder (versus the digital screen) allows for a little more balance by placing the camera against your face – and allows for a clearer focus.

• Experiment with angles and close-up – Dramatic angles and close-ups can liven up any photo. Once you get your primary shot, try getting it from above, below, in profile, or up-close. Try making the action the profile of the picture, with a related object in the foreground. You may find you like certain angle better than the standard front-on shot.

• Lighting – This can mean a lot of things, from pretty basic (outside) to complicated (in a studio with lighting).  But there are commonalities across the range. Always be sure that your light is in front of your subject, not behind or directly above. Try out your flash and see if that compliments the available lighting, or if it washes out your subject. I like to arrange sharp contrasts, establishing the light source in profile – but that’s not always the best plan depending on your subject. Play around with taking shots with the light at different positions to the subject – you’ll quickly learn what you like and what is appropriate for different situations.

• Keep. Taking. Pictures. – This is super important.  I was once shooting around a vineyard, completely taken with a cluster of flowers. As I was capturing them from different angles, a tiny hummingbird flew into my shot, pausing the drink from the flower. Had I put my camera away, I wouldn’t have been lucky enough to catch that moment. When photographing action or portraits, this holds true as well; sometimes the best moments are the unexpected ones.

There you have it kids! Five tips for improving upon your already awesome pictures – but you don’t have to listen to me. Take this learning out into the world and see how it does for you.

Have a film-related event you’re dying to capture, but, well… you might be a little busy? Send the Wicked Birds an email and we can help you out!

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Photo by Rachel L Blumenthal.

We continue our 48 Hour Film Project Boston Spotlight with tireless musician-filmmaker, Sophia Cacciola. For the 48 Hour Film Project, Cocciola created a mad sci-fi tale,  El Loco Ojo (The Crazy Eye) with her husband Michael J. Epstein (not interviewed here). When they are not playing shows, inevitably they are concocting something fun and insane or creating eclectic music videos that get noticed.

Why did you decide to participate in the 48-hour Film Project? Is this your first time participating?
This is our second time participating in the 48-hour Film Project. Last year at this time we were trying our hand at any short-term video project we could find. At that point, we had shot a bunch of music videos and did one short film. The concept of the finite 48 hours to get something done really appealed to us. By Monday, you have a new creative work in the world! Last year, and again this year, we decided to only do it with the 7 available members of our band, The Michael J. Epstein Memorial Library, as cast and crew. Although it has happened now only twice, it has kind of become a tradition and I think It is something we look forward to doing as a band every year. It’s a wonderful experience to work with our band members on something creative that’s outside of our normal musical roles at band practice and in rock clubs. It’s also fun to have a sleepless sleepover — it’s a little like being on tour without having to go anywhere!

Tell me about your film and why you settled on your story and genre.
We first pulled “horror” as our genre, but we’ve done quite a bit of horror stuff recently (see TEN), and our 48hfp film last year had some horror elements, so in order to broaden our horizons, we choose to trade-in for a wild-card genre. We ended up with “Spy,” which is also a genre we’ve done a lot of work in already for our Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling music videos (more here). So, we wanted to put some kind of new spin on the genre. Michael and I have been watching a lot of Buck Rogers, Star Trek, and other 60s-80s sci-fi recently, so we thought it would be fun to borrow from some of that and put the spy into space! Together, the whole group came up with a story of a spy being outfitted with a cybernetic eye in order to help him find a suitcase that has a doomsday device in a cantina on Mars. The film is called El Loco Ojo (The Crazy Eye). We decided to use the eye as a filmmaking device to allow a portion of the film to be shot from a first-person perspective. We displayed the action as the eye saw it, including computer overlays, with computer voice narration.

Where did you shoot and who did you work with?
We shot the entire thing in our kitchen/dining room that we transformed (via many packages of metallic tablecloths from iParty) into our Martian cantina. We worked exclusively with the members of our band.

How did you incorporate this year’s requirements?
We tried to use a classic Spy scenario in which the spy received assistive devices using the latest technology provided by the Q-like inventor Bonnie Higgins (the assigned character) to enter a dangerous scenario and retrieve a highly volatile item. The item was a net, which we worked in as a space-age bar-rag. The line of dialogue, “Believe me, it’s worth it!” is a sort of punchline at the end. We also decided that this movie was a pseudo-sequel to last year’s submission, Los Locos Manos, but set 200+ years into the future. So, for fun, we also used last year’s prop (chocolate), line (“You’re making a big mistake”) and character (Ivana Wright – with Susannah Plaster reprising her role). We have decided to try and accumulate the previous 48hfp requirements every year that we do this. We set up this Facebook page for our series of films.

When is your film screening?
We are Thursday night at 9:30 at the Kendall Cinema – Group F. 

Anything else you’d like us to know?
You can listen to music from the film online, and here’s a list of funny things overheard/said (as transcribed by Rachel) during the weekend!

“We can’t get to space without glitter.”
“In the future, there are no germs.”
“You definitely said ‘nipples.’”
“I also enjoy blue.”
“Don’t actually insert the eye in my face.”
“I’ll send you on a space vacation…to hell!”
“Go get some beer. When you come back, this whole place will be painted silver.”
“Wouldn’t that be exciting if you were a Planet of the Apes monkey all along?”
“Am I from Waterworld?”
“I was fondling the mannequin’s crotch.”
“We’re creating our own weather pattern in here.”
“Can you take the hammer out of my butt?”

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In our hometown of Boston, the 48 Hour Film Project took place last weekend; screenings take place this week at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge. A lightning fast turnaround for a project of any kind. At just $11 a ticket, it’s a great way to see what the indie scene is up to and to celebrate the auteurs of New England. We’re kicking off our 48 Hour Film Project spotlight with local weekend warrior/filmmaker Joshua Mocle.

Why did you decide to participate in the 48 Hour Film Project? Is this your first time participating?
Yeah, it’s my first 48-hour project, although I’ve pulled projects together in roughly the same amount of time before, just not on purpose! My co-creator and I wanted to do it mainly because we had both been really involved in filmmaking in college and hadn’t really had much time to work on any projects since we sold out and got day jobs. So this seemed like a great opportunity to have some fun and stretch our camera legs again.

Tell me about your film and why you settled on your story.
We were given our genre (drama) by the fine folks at the film race via random lottery. I was initially a little concerned since most of my team tend to lead drama-free lives as a general rule, so rewiring to fit that mold was going to be a challege. That said, it turns out the definition of “drama” as a genre of filmmaking can be quite loose if you want it to be, so once we realized a “dramatic comedy” route would be somewhat acceptable, it became easier to think through. I think the film we made ended up being a labor of love that combined the personalities and quirks of our whole team, and by that I mean it was snarky, tongue-in-cheek and exceedingly inappropriate. We had a lot of fun though, so that’s what matters.

Where did you shoot and who did you work with?
We threw the idea of securing an actual set out the window pretty early on and wrote a story that could easily be shot in our apartment. My roommates and girlfriend made up the core of our team along with one of my co-workers on camera. One of my roommates has been going to a lot of meet-ups lately, so all of our actors were sourced from the friends she’s made there. I honestly didn’t much care too much how our final product turned out, but for a crew of non-professional actors, I was pleasantly surprised at how serious they took the (admittedly non-serious) script, how quickly they embodied their characters and how well they took direction and worked collaboratively. If I come away from this with one thing to be really proud of, it is the way our cast and crew worked together on this project. At the very least, I now have people I genuinely don’t hate that I can get drinks with.

How did you incorporate this year’s requirements?
Very carefully! Like I said, we took our genre of “Drama” into more of a “Dramatic Comedy” route, just because of the kind of people we are and the kind of art we feel we could make with even a shred of honesty. We made our required a character a bit of a hybrid between one of our characters and the character that character played in our film within a film (confused yet?). Our required line of dialogue was very easy given the premise of our film (in fact, the line itself was one of the reasons we went in the direction we did). As for our required prop, we admit that our use was a bit of a stretch, but anyone that makes the claim that fishnet stockings don’t count as “a net of some sort” would be silly.

When is your film screening?Wednesday Night, 7:00PM at Kendall (Screening Group C)

Anything else you’d like us to know?
One of my biggest take-aways from this project is remembering how much fun making movies is. When I was studying film in school, it was all about the results. If you didn’t make the movie the producers wanted to see, you were wasting your time. If you didn’t have the demo reel that got you into AFI, you were nothing. All of the fun, excitement and idealism was sucked out of the whole medium in favor of making the movies OTHER PEOPLE wanted you to make or die trying, and that is really unfortunate. Film for fun’s sake is really an idea that needs to catch on more. Maybe that’ll be my next project!

You can say hello to Joshua on Twitter via @anarchoburrito.

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Born and raised in Holliston, MA, Adam got his start making local commercials for Time Warner Cable Advertising in 1997, where he borrowed company equipment to make his first feature film COFFEE & DONUTS. In 2000, he moved to Hollywood, CA and set out to turn the film into a television series. Over a decade later, it was re-developed and re-titled HOLLISTON, and premiered on FEARnet in 2012, where it was immediately embraced by critics and audiences. Adam also made his mark on the horror genre with the 2006 slasher comedy HATCHET, which went on to become a bonafide fan-favorite worldwide franchise introducing the now iconic genre villain “Victor Crowley” to genre fans around the globe. Through ArieScope Pictures, Adam’s independent film studio, he has written, directed, and/or produced the theatrical feature films: SPIRAL, FROZEN, GRACE, and CHILLERAMA.

“I live in Los Angeles these days, but Boston is still the place I consider home,” says Green. “I’ve never forgotten where I came from and always infuse my work with Massachusetts references, whether it be showcasing the Newbury Comics logo in the HATCHET series, naming the fictitious ski mountain in FROZEN ‘Mount Holliston’, or setting my sitcom HOLLISTON in Holliston, MA. While I am just one guy, thankfully I have a body of work and a loyal and extremely passionate fan base within the horror community that I can call upon to step up and help. I think a lot of people underestimate not only the sense of community that genre fans share, but the fact that we are some of the most kind hearted and generous people you’ll ever meet. I know that the Boston chapters of the Hatchet Army and Holliston Nation will join me for this, not to mention my fans around the world that will hopefully donate to the cause online. However, the real heroes behind this are my friends at Rock and Shock and Wicked Bird Media who have worked tirelessly to make all of the arrangements, not to mention all of the various sponsors that are rising to the occasion to support all of this. I’m merely the face of an enormous heart and collective of individuals who want to help.”

Details for the events include:

1. “HOLLISTON Comes Home to Holliston”: Season Two advanced screening and Q&A with the cast Adam Green returns to his hometown of Holliston, MA to host an advanced screening of three episodes from HOLLISTON’s upcoming second season, followed by a live Q&A with members of the cast, including Joe Lynch and Laura Ortiz.

• Date: Tuesday, May 28, 2013
• Time: 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
• Location: Holliston High School, 370 Hollis St., Holliston, MA 01746
• Admission: $5

2. “Horror / Boston Strong” Party at The Palladium: Hosted by Adam Green
Join Adam Green (HATCHET I – III, FROZEN, HOLLISTON), Kane Hodder (HATCHET I – III, FRIDAY THE 13^TH VII – X), Zach Galligan (HATCHET III, GREMLINS 1 – 2) and more celebrity guests, for a one-of-a-kind party at the Worcester Palladium that includes a silent auction chock full of horror and music memorabilia, gift certificates, and other rare and amazing prizes.

In advance of the event, fans can bid on an online auction to win a private dinner with Adam Green before the party starts. More information about the auction can be found here: http://bit.ly/11gFDml.

• Date: Wednesday, May 29, 2013
• Time: Doors open at 7 p.m.
• Location: The Palladium, 261 Main St., Worcester, MA 01608
• Admission: $5

3. HATCHET movie marathon: Featuring the first ever screening of the highly-anticipated HATCHET III.
Join HATCHET franchise creator Adam Green for the first-ever HATCHET marathon, including a screening of a rare uncensored UK 35mm print of the original HATCHET, an uncensored 35mm print of HATCHET II, and the first ever screening of the highly anticipated, and also uncensored,  HATCHET III.  Special guests from the films will be in attendance.

• Date: Thursday, May 30, 2013
• Time: 7 p.m. to 1 a.m.
• Location: The Revere Hotel, Theater One, 200 Stuart St., Boston, MA 02116
• Admission: $25

Green and special guests will also be doing a free in-store signing for HOLLISTON on Tuesday, May 28, 2013, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., at Fiske’s General Store, at 776 Washington St., in Holliston, MA.

Advanced tickets for all three events go on sale on Friday, May 10, 2013, and can be purchased here:  http://bit.ly/10nN7gI.

Tickets will also be available at the door the day of each event. For more information regarding ticket sales, please call The Palladium box office at 508-797-9696. All proceeds will go towards The One Fund Boston.

Events are hosted by Rock and Shock and Wicked Bird Media.

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Media Contact:

Stacy Buchanan
Wicked Bird Media
617-202-9643
stacy@wickedbirdmedia.com

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