In a nutshell, Danielle Hamel of the band says “we filmed it entirely on 35mm film using a Lomokino crank camera, scanned all 2000+ images, and compiled the footage in a stop-motion style video. It was a laborious process.” 

A Lomokino “movie maker” is so old-school it has to be hand-cranked to work! She bought it “with the explicit intention of using it to make a music video one day. Four years later, I’m happy to say I finally got around to it. Thirteen rolls of film, several days of shooting, hours of scanning, cropping, colour correcting, and assembling into Adobe Premiere, and it’s finally finished.”

What’s cool about the Lomokino, is that it captures its footage at the speed at which you turn the crank, up to 3-5 frames per second. “There is no view-finder, per se,” Hamel says. “It has one of those pop-out viewfinders but it is cumbersome to use since it is placed so awkwardly close to the front of the camera.”

Knowing what she was doing, Hamel played a trick on the type of film she chose to use (Lucky Charm 200). “If pushed to be slightly over-exposured, it has all the features of cross-processed film (blues and greens) and if under-exposed, it has the classic redscale look. I redscaled the film myself using an empty film cartridge, tape, scissors, and a dark room to respool each roll of film backwards so that I was exposing the ‘wrong’ side of the film.”

The challenge was trying to wrap her head around the tone and the pace of the video. “It’s not like I could take a few test shots and play it back immediately. How many frames did I want each scene to be, to set a good pace for the video? How much motion did I want to try to introduce to an already shaky method of taking video footage?”

She decided I liked it best when the camera was mostly stationary but the subjects moved. “It was easier to keep your attention and focus on the action that way. So from there, the concept became shots of us standing still as tableaus with the handheld camera movement being the only indicator of motion.”

The truest challenge, of course was shooting on a Lomokino during Junuary in Newfoundland. “Shooting in St. John’s proved, as usual, to be difficult when the film you are using depends on sunny weather to be properly exposed.”

Catch Land of the Lakes at their next show, June 30th, at The Levee with Lyubov Orlova and TBA — This is Canada Day Eve, you have the next day off after all.