Diana Olifirova Directs Romantic Short Film Exploring the New Cinematic Canon Zoom Lenses

‘In’ - is a short film which was born from a romance or art and technology - I got the opportunity to tell the story that was brewing in my mind while presenting and exploring the new cinematic Canon zoom lenses. 

Canon is a big international brand, and has been making superb high quality and great user-friendly design cameras and lenses for years.  

In fact, my first video camera was a Canon 5D markII - that’s when all of it began for me, back in 2010.

I had an idea to make a film exploring mindsets and visual representation of “what is in the head of the artist” merged with a day of busy life in the city - I feel as artist we all are very sensitive to the outside world and interact within it in a very different way, so I wanted to make a piece that features three different types of artists that I like.

Canon helped me to bring these visions to life.

Canon has just launched two superb quality cinematic zooms - Canon CN-E 14-35 and Canon CN-E 31.5-95 and I collaborated with them to highlight all their qualities and discover them for myself as well. 

Canon loves working with talented filmmakers worldwide to showcase their new equipment and gives a lot of creative freedom to the artists - which I really enjoyed! 

I took them to their limits and had a lot of fun.

One of the characters in this story is played by me - self-portrait filming is something I really enjoy as it allows me to dig deeper into technology and the nature of filmmaking from inside out, to visually meditate on it one might say. 

I also worked with my usual collaborator Karel van Bellingen on both edit and music - we love blending the imagery with the music and working on both simultaneously - coming up with beats before filming, just based on ideas and inspiration, and then finessing them after we review the footage and start editing.  

My friend Joseph Finkel felt drawn to expand on the melody and recorded some piano for us, which we used for the last part of the piece. 

I also involved a little bit of sound design (working with James Locke-Hart) and whispered random words over the music. I love the layering and depth it brings. One might watch the piece over and over again to soak it all in, and this is what we are aiming for. 

I am really enjoying coming up with ideas that I can explore the visual language, lighting, lenses and technology, so creating this was just another stepping stone for me to explore, develop my skills better and keep pushing the boundaries - as you do!

As a cinematographer while working on sets daily I often come up with very experimental visual ideas that somehow seem very poetic to me, and blend within my daily inspirations and explorations. As my old teacher Sergey Lysetsky from Ukraine has been telling us along - the main thing about a filmmaker's work is curiosity. This has always been my strongest skill and it intuitively leads me to collaboration with tech companies and brands that aspire to create interesting high quality experimental work. 

I was inspired a lot by my daily observations within London, people passing by, architecture, silhouettes and movement. I wanted to make film in three chapters - slow 

morning, dynamic day and static evening. Here is also an extensive BTS that Itch Media made.

‘In’ has just launched on July 28th on @dianaolifirovadop @CanonUK social channels - Instagram, YouTube and Facebook.  

The eight minute BTS study film has also been very popular - made by Itch Media you can find it on Canon’s youtube channel or my instagram @dianaolifirovadop. 

‘In’ is also already long-listed for one of the next Shiny Awards!