Rodger Marion

Ellie Adder, PI being a radio show has no images, thus we create images in the listeners mind with voices, music and sound effects. Most of the sound effects are created in a practical manner, by acting out the event. Some sound effects are difficult to create in person (A jet airplane crashing for example), so effects are purchased from specialty companies, usually Sound Dogs.

In Spies by the Sea, the spies are using a radio transmitter to send shipping information to submarines offshore. They have a hidden antenna. Ellie and her associates identify the location of the spies when they hear the antenna being raised. I needed the sound of a ratchet jacking up a long pole to represent the raising of the antenna. See the video below for how that sound was created.

The musical play, Little Shop of Horrors, just opened at the Wimberley Player’s Theater and runs until the end of July 2018. I was involved as the Video Designer. The musical is based on a low budget 1960 SciFi film of the same name and the director, Jason Kruger, wanted to capture that the feeling of old, funky, B&W movies in the play by beginning with clips from 1950’s SciFi and horror films. So I assembled a number of clips from old films that are out of copyright and that we could legally use.

All films released before 1923 and certain films released before 1963 are no longer copyrighted and fall into the public domain. These latter films, those between 1923 and 1963, are in the public domain if the copyright was not renewed. A lot of obscure films fall into this category. It was from these rich sources of over acting and model rockets on strings that I gathered 35 minutes of really classic clips. This runs as the pre-show while the audience finds their seats. On opening night the audience really got involved in the clips and they created low key version of a Rocky Horror Picture Show atmosphere (Wimberley is after all a low key sort of place).

Still from
Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

At the end of the pre-show, there was a countdown clip while the public service announcement was read, then the last clip was the prologue to the play featuring a out-of-sync voiceover added to a talking head from an old SciFi film (See photo on right). It ended when the film broke and melted.

The film breaking and melting was the only part I created from scratch using some special effects and actually melting some film with a blowtorch. That little snippet is presented below.

Back in January, I wanted to see and photograph the Super Blue Blood Moon. In order to get a moon image as big as possible, I went hunting through my lenses for telephotos. I found that I had two 200mm telephoto lenses. One was the 18-to-200mm E-mount zoom lens that came with my Sony cinema camera and the other was one of my father’s ancient Auto-Topcor full-frame 35mm film lenses.

I set up a test to see how telephoto was a 200mm lens and if both lenses covered the same field.

A 200mm lens does give quite a close up image. Photo 1 is the tableau I set up as seen with an 18mm wide angle lens. Photo 2 is from the exact same spot. The camera was not moved. I just changed lenses. You can also note that the 50 year old Auto-Topcor provides a nice bright, sharp image.

Even though both are marked as 200mm, they were made for different cameras. Usually full-frame 35mm film lenses when adapted to a camera with an E-mount and a Super 35mm film size sensor provide a more close-up image than native E-mount lenses. I wanted to test that. It turns out that the difference was quite small. The Auto-Topcor provided a closer view but not significantly so. Below is the Auto-Topcor as mounted on the Sony camera. It is a pretty big lens.

So, equipped with a good long lens I duly got up at 3am and headed outside. I looked up and it was overcast! I looked for the moon and for a second the clouds parted, I saw the moon, and the clouds closed never to open again. So, much for Super Blue Blood Moons.