FYI: Season 3 of Haunted Discoveries has a 12-Hour Marathon TODAY concluding with the series finale on Haunt TV (https://haunt-tv.com/usa/).
History lives and breathes in Boston. We have the oldest public park. America’s first subway. The first public beach. The oldest original MLB Stadium. Hoards of zombies running on Dunkin Donuts.
As tourists explore here, they can basically trip and fall into an historical graveyard or memorial site. So it is fitting then, that when I log on from Boston onto Zoom to chat with Mustafa Gatollari and Brandon Alvis, explorers of paranormal activity and Lead Investigators of Haunted Discoveries, I am reminded that they tell stories about places that carry history and stories. Alvis tells me that a section of Louisville Kentucky, the home of Haunted Discoveries, has the largest collection of restored Victorian homes in the country. And they play a key role in the stories of the afterlife.
“The main character[s] on Haunted Discoveries are the locations, right? It’s not us or the guys going in to investigate it. It’s the building. It’s the architecture. It’s the cultural history,” Alvis shared.
Diving into the stories contained within said buildings requires simultaneously showcasing the location and the storytelling elements at the same time. But that is the challenge one carries as a simultaneous cinematographer, storyteller, and paranormal activity explorer. Alvis keeps a key question in mind as the team approaches their projects: “How can we make this look like I just walked into this building and I’m looking at it through my own eyes? I want people to feel like they’re there. I want people to feel like they’re experiencing this journey with us, and I think that’s important to make sure that it looks the way it does to us while we’re on site.”
Ghost stories. Witch craft. Black magic. Terms associated with Halloween. It is fitting, then, that the team turned to the Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K to help tell these stories, driven by the possibility of compelling visuals and pleasingly (dare I say bewitching?) rendered images.
“We wanted to tell these stories in a beautiful, cinematic way. That was our biggest thing,” Gatollari shared. “We don’t have to cheat the audience out of a very nice, visually appealing mode of storytelling without compromising the run and gun nature of being able to then transition on the same shooting day with a more portable, run and gun friendly camera setup.”
The BMCC6K also provides an advantage when it comes to shifting angles and shots in post-production. “We not only have the option with the UHD delivery, where we can punch in with a 6k, but utilizing the full size of the sensor, I have so much more room to move that frame if I want to, especially with some of the recreations where we’re shooting a bit wider,” Alvis explains. “I have full options to move that frame up, move it down. And it just gives you so much more flexibility within the edit from a creative perspective, because you can even take a shot that maybe looks one way, but then once you bring it into the edit, and you just move that frame on the Y or Z axis up a little more. It can change the entire perspective of it.”
Indeed, a philosophical shift in perspective is at the heart of Haunted Discoveries, not just to divert away from classic “black and white security camera footage” found in other versions of ghost stories on video, but to use both modern equipment (6K Cinema camera) and vintage (old lenses) to focus on the humanity of it all. To tell the true experience. And perhaps event to “heighten it,” as Gatollari explains.
“What’s the human element?” Gatollari shared. “Can we connect that to the visual that’s being told? The challenge comes in “aligning the emotion or the terror or the sadness or the joy associated with the story with the image. Can you heighten that human experience, our experience there, along with the experience of these individuals who have purportedly witnessed paranormal activity?”
This is where vintage lenses come into play. Like our Halloween costumes, sometimes an added element, such as sound or a physical effect, speaks volumes and elevates the experience. In this case, the unique flairs, looks, and bokeh offered in vintage glass provides an additional layer of storytelling.
“There’s times you want to capture a certain mood, right? Especially when it comes to someone telling a very personal story about something they experience. And that’s when you would go into a vintage type lens, like a Helios or Canon 50,” shared Alvis.
“You got instant character,” enthused Gatollari. “They were all hand built. I feel like no lens is identical.”
Sometimes when you trek in the aforementioned graveyards here in Boston, there is an unnerving emotion of sorts, an indescribable one. Well, one that can only be described as the heebie jeebies, an annoyingly vague term for something that feels more sophisticated. The thing that Scooby Doo might say “Rikes!” too. Again, the childlike terms belie a greater complexity to the paranormal world and the stories contained within it, both on location and …somewhere else? I ask:how do you keep your cool in these scary and unpredictable scenarios?
Alvis attempts to set my nerves at bay with a grounding perspective.
“What we’re trying to uncover and collect data of is consciousness surviving death, and that’s kind of the root of it all. That’s from our point of view with the American Paranormal Research Association, is that we are trying to find data or document the possibility of consciousness surviving death. And if that, in fact, is true, and that theory does hold hold weight, that we’re just dealing with people that are no longer of the flesh. So it’s not necessarily a terrifying or scary situation, you’re just dealing with consciousness that is carried over through hundreds of years. So that’s the easiest way to keep cool, is to go in and understand that you’re living and breathing history, and you’re dealing with people that came before you.”
Living and breathing history. I’ll keep that in mind the next time I accidentally almost trip into a Boston graveyard. Or the next time I watch an episode of Haunted Discoveries. Or the next time I decide to approach a project with a Blackmagic camera. Our job, sometimes, is to capture this living and breathing history. And when we can use technology to “heighten” the human aspect, we’ve created something different entirely.