Today I woke up to cinematic snow.

Regular snow falls down in little flakes and eventually makes piles of snow. Cinematic snow is image-ready incredible prop snow where every flake is the size of a quarter and you can look out and even snowflakes hundreds of feet away are pretty visible. Because they’re huge, they fall slower, making life even easier. I knew I had to shoot this cinematic snow.

As part of GET LAMP, I’ve been shooting shots of a lamp in various beautiful locations. Some time ago it snowed so I took some shots of the lamp in snow. They were OK. But this was an opportunity too good to pass up; as I mentioned some entries ago, referencing the DV Rebel’s Guide, a low-budget film guy has the advantage of time, so if something comes up, he merely has to hop to it and take advantage of it.

Some people might go “ah, but I don’t want to GET UP and go OUTSIDE and go DO THIS”, and, well, sorry, you’re a slacker and your movie idea doesn’t deserve you. Make a minimal goddamn effort, Captain Couchrider. Get in the damn car.

West of my home is the beautiful town of, wait for it, Weston. This is a less-developed bedroom community which still has a nice amount of fields and open spaces. I figured I’d find one soon enough. And I did; just two miles away, I might as well have been in the mountains. So here’s some shots I got that way:

What I did was go up a somewhat unpleasantly slippery side road, past lots of estates, until the road was wide enough that the snowplows wouldn’t bother me and my car. I then took out the lamp, put it on a convenient pole, then took the camera and tripod out under my coat (it was snowing, after all), and plunked it into a small bank. This is what that looked like:

From another angle, it also looks rather desolate, although I assure you I am located right next to a road:

Unfortunately, the screen shots don’t really give you a full impression of the beautiful snow, so I’m going to give you a clip of motion from my shoot. I added some random Christmas music (because I think I’m funny) along with a random Nick Montfort quote (because I like Nick Montfort). I am putting it forward in WMV format, which I will continue to use in the future for these sketch-like clip examples, because it renders fast and is pretty nice-looking for its size. The wonderful Videolan VLC Player, which is free, will play these on Windows, OSX and Linux, so there you go, cranky platform pushers.

Enjoy the Cinematic Snow.

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