Final Exam | Short Film

Two close friends of mine, Gabby Barbosa and Dylan Garcia, reached out with an idea for a project in collaboration with Rob Cobasky. Rob is a local special effects artist who makes truly incredible prosthetics and creatures. He had a new creature that he made for an out-of-state client and needed to film a few minutes of b-roll to send to them so they didn’t have to ship the creature. They wanted me to DP this b-roll, and since we were all getting together anyway, Rob suggested that after we shoot the b-roll we make a little short film.

Those who know me know that the first movie that I fell in love with as a kid was Alien. Since then, I’ve dreamt of meeting someone like Rob and working closely with them. While we had worked together a number of times, this would be the first time I was DPing for one of Rob’s creatures and I really wanted to make sure we did a good job. Over the summer of 2023, I made a connection with elite cinematographer JJ Bukwoski while we were mentoring at Huntington University in Indiana. He mentioned to me that if I ever had a really cool project he’d be happy to help me out through Arizona Camera Rentals, the camera house he owns in Phoenix. To me, this felt like a great time to call in that favor and get the camera package that we really thought would put this film over the top.

We shot the film on a Red Gemini with Atlas Orion Anamorphics and a Smoque 1 filter on most of the shots. Because the film was a little creature feature about a mad scientist experimenting on humans, we were hoping for the dirtiest lens setup that we could possibly get. While I’m not generally an anamorphic fan, it was hard to think of any lenses that would lend themselves to the otherworldly creatures seen in the film. The Orions are natively a little dirty, with chromatic abberation and sharpness falloff on the edges which in testing ended up being the perfect look for what we were going for. The other reason for going anamorphic was we were going to have to shoot four characters in a small room at a veterinarians office. Anamorphic would allow us to shoot wide horizontally while staying tight vertically, which allowed us to rig lights into the ceiling of the room. The Orions were not quite dirty enough for us, so we added in a Smoque 1 filter which looked perfect in testing. 1st AC PJ Koelbel kept things sharp through the softness of the lenses and filters and camera operator Kayla Windsor did a lovely job of creating beautiful composition in our chosen frame size of 2.20 even after coming in immediately after working 12 hours on a feature three hours from our location.

Gaffer Stephane Strande worked as the sole member of the G&E department, rigging all the lights to the drop ceiling with scissor spuds and cleaning up the cable runs to keep it out of frame. Going into this shoot we broke the script down into five setups. There is the hallway in the intro, inside the room looking towards the tarp, inside the room looking towards the creature, inside the room looking towards the creature during surgery, and inside the room looking towards the tarp during surgery. This allowed us to only move the lights in the ceiling around a few times and work out the blocking around our limited lighting possibilities. It was crucial to us that we had fixtures that were a great quality of light out of the box as diffusing and cutting the light on the ground was not possible. The whole show was lit solely with DMG Lumiere fixtures, mostly the SL1, Mini Mix, and two Dashes. Stephane also employed a few really fantastic gaffer tricks like bouncing into silver instead of white and bouncing the lights off of the floor instead of using them directly onto talent, which created a soft-ghoul-light that accented the gross horror content of the piece.

With no budget, a crew of exceptionally talented people, a few favors, and an absolutely killer creature, I believe that we created something that we could all be proud of.

Director: Rob Cobasky

Producer: Gabby Barbosa, Anna Cobasky

1st AD: Dylan Garcia

Gaffer: Stephane Strande

1st AC: PJ Koelbel

2nd AC: Eddie Vargas

Camera Operator: Kayla Windsor

Sound Mixer: Adam Hecht

Color: Phoenix Color House