[Watch the video on Youtube here]
I’m Chris Hilleke, the Director of Photography for Third Saturday in October and Third Saturday in October Part 5 which are two slasher films that are supposedly a lost slasher film franchise that started in 1979. I wanted to make this video for you guys to kind of show you a little behind the scenes of what went into getting the look that we did, specifically for Third Saturday in October the first one, which is set in 1979. This movie is directed by one of my best friends Jay Burleson. He and I met at Sidewalk Film Festival and if you’re ever looking for reasons to go to film festivals, I would say that is one of the main things, you can meet incredible like-minded folks at a film festival. I met one of my best friends there.
The answer to how we achieved the retro look was that Jay pulled together a team of people all focused on different areas of making that happen and we coordinated well enough to pull something off that I think’s fairly convincing. If you are doing a film that you’ve got to achieve a retro look (for really any film), the production design is paramount. I find that a lot of times cinematographers will get credit for things that really probably the production designer should be getting credit for. So for all you production designers out there my hat that I’m not wearing is off to you my friends.
There’s all these departments, all these team members putting forth their best effort to tell your story and they’re putting all that stuff in front of a lens and it gets turned into photons and goes through that glass to the film plane or to the sensor in the camera and that’s the first gatekeeper of what your look is…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
WATCH – THE THIRD SATURDAY IN OCTOBER V
WATCH – THE THIRD SATURDAY IN OCTOBER
CONNECT WITH CHRIS HILLEKE
About:
Chris Hilleke is a filmmaker located in Birmingham, AL who’s been making motion pictures in one way or another for almost two decades. As a die-hard independent he writes, edits, scores and directs but it’s his cinematography that’s kept food on the table and small budgets available for his own work. Over the years he’s traveled the world shooting everything from corporate video, commercials, reality TV and focus groups to short and feature-length narrative and documentary films.
Some of his more notable feature-length contributions of cinematography include the thriller, A Horrible Way to Die by longtime collaborator Adam Wingard, a sex comedy, Autoerotic by Joe Swanberg and, most recently, the HBO documentary Gideon’s Army directed by Dawn Porter which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival to win the Best Editing Award for US Documentaries.
His corporate clients have included (to name only a few) Converse, Under Armour, John Deere, HBO and Mercedes-Benz and his work has been seen through conduits such as IFC, TLC, Food Network, HGTV, Netflix, Anchor Bay and HBO.
He began making films to connect with those around him in a creative and enduring way and to eventually spend all his time making his own films to share. With each year he gets closer to living that dream. Between gigs as a DP he’s managed to produce a slue of his own award-winning narrative and documentary short films including the 2009 Sidewalk Film Festival’s Audience Choice Award Winner Some of What I Know About Tommy which follows a man struggling with Paranoid Schizophrenia in Hilleke’s home neighborhood, Five Points South.
Advertisement – contains affiliate links
(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases)
More affiliates:
Camera we use for interviews – https://buff.ly/3rWqrra
Sound we use for interviews – https://amzn.to/2tbFlM9
Other books on Amazon that Film Courage recommends – https://buff.ly/3o0oE5o
