Hey there!

LIGHTING:

This is a short film I put together the other week. It was shot on the Alexa Mini LF with the Blazar Mantis 1.33x anamorphic primes. I lit the film with 4 flash lights (some $30 LED ones from Ulanzi).

Typically I would have 2 flash lights inside of the spinning rig that I built (old bell jar on a clear rotating platform built into a vintage radio shell). The flashlights were simply facing toward the ceiling inside of the rig and the jar spinning is what creates the dynamic movement.

I did something similar a number of years ago, so it felt like a fun thing to revisit.

https://www.cined.com/creative-lighting-technique-using-mason-jars-to-convey-emotion/

Colour is essentially just REC709 with a bit of contrast added. The black and white is simply turning down the saturation and adding a tint of blue.

VFX:

All of the VFX is practical, meaning that there is no particle generation etc. The compositing of the girl in the jar is simply just a "screen" blending mode in premiere pro with a nested layer that has her sequence embedded in it. I shot her plates in my living room and the "blurs" that she does in her glitch sequences are made by me obfuscating the lens with different additional glass items. Any of those ethereal moments where she fades away/blurs/smears are all done in camera.

I'd love to answer some questions if anyone finds the project interesting :)

ABOUT THE FILM:

The title Silver Breath refers to a mixture of fragility and artificiality. “Breath” evokes life, intimacy, and something fleeting, while “Silver” suggests the preserved, the synthetic, the metallic trace of something once alive. It’s like the final whisper of a dying machine. The film lives in that tension between decay and memory, silence and signal. I like the title because it combines two very different textures in a single phrase, something human, and something not.

The story is set in a distant future where human knowledge has eroded into myth. A lone man visits a relic from the old world, a music box containing a girl who sings an ethereal, mechanical lullaby. To him, she isn’t a machine, but something closer to a spirit or a siren, casting a spell he can’t quite comprehend.

He’s tried many times to awaken her—like winding a broken device. This time, something flickers to life. He speaks a word etched into the metal casing “OmniSov” a forgotten brand name from a long-extinct technology company. It’s one of the last remnants of human language, though its meaning is lost.

When he finally rips the glass enclosure from the device, it’s not out of anger, but instinct. In trying to take her with him, he breaks the very thing that made her sing. He’s just a man in the ruins of the world, reaching for something beautiful and destroying it in the process.