Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicholson Feldman.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Nicholson. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Well, it all started with my grandfather. As a child, I watched him play with his film photography cameras and I would often hear him mention things like “focus,” “aperture,” and other things that just seemed like nonsense to me. He was so occupied by photography that his first thought when going somewhere was always, “Which camera do I bring?”
I never was really interested in photography, but in high school, I attended a separate part of the school that was kept as a tech school. I took a video production class that was Monday through Friday, for three hours a day. My teacher, Will Perry, taught me a good bit of basic knowledge for a young creator.
After I graduated high school and went off to study at GSU, I had forgotten about my dreams of going into film due to the push from my parents to get a “useful degree” such as computer science or marketing. I still would brush off my dusty camera every now and then to take some pictures or make a video, but not much ever came of it.
Halfway through college, I decided that going into marketing just didn’t make me happy, and I switched over to film. I didn’t tell my parents.
My mother, who was most supportive of my decision to pursue the arts early on, eventually found out, and after a couple of days of not talking to me, decided that she was okay with me pursuing my dream, as long as I graduated at that point. My father took a little more convincing, but now he likes to pitch his network ideas to me when we catch up.
Once I got into the bulk of my production classes, I realized that I was a bit further along than my classmates, due to my knowledge of the camera from my grandfather, and the history of taken a studio class for a year. I would do what I could to help share my knowledge with some classmates who were further behind than me.
I slowly fell down a rabbit hole of using vintage lenses on my cameras, dampening colors, and adding grain in post-production to achieve a look that I preferred over a year ago, and that’s what truly separated my look from others: a more cinematic film look.
These days I mainly shoot my work on 8mm and 16mm film for various reasons. The look tends to speak to me as an artist, as well as allows me to have more of the physical feeling of creating my motion picture. I create experimental films and avant-garde art while pushing the cinematic boundaries as much as I can.
Has it been a smooth road?
It hasn’t been the smoothest road for me, and I feel like I share a problem with many artists. When you pour your soul out into your work, it’s important to surround yourself with those who support you, for your art can either lift you up or destroy you in any given project. Many times, I have been told that I am not good enough, or that the media space is too congested right now, and the best thing to do when you hear that is to just keep going because the only thing that matters is what you create.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the NichoFilm story. Tell us more about it.
I started NichoFilm as a way to separate my work from others. It isn’t about the money as much as it is about the act of creation. We shoot on film as a way to have a physical connection to our stories and use cameras such as the infamous Bolex H16, as well as a Bell & Howell 8mm Autoload. My close friend, Ross McWaters, and I have been working on many parts to a series we call the “Gothic Cinema,” and we hope to release some of our new work in the coming year. They tend to follow an experimental narrative form and contain complex characters of a Gothic nature.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
In the next 5-10 years, I really hope to see more films shot on celluloid. I am worried about the state of the film industry in Atlanta due to recent political occurrences, but we as a collective have a say in what happens and should try to exercise our right to choose where our city takes us.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.NichoFilm.com
- Email: nicholsonfeldman@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicholsonfeldman/
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