> cat ./story.txt

Behind the Scenes

Nocturia is my cinematography debut, and it was built almost entirely through experimentation.

The Custom Anamorphic Rig

I couldn't afford an anamorphic lens, so I built one. The setup stacked four lenses together:

• A speed booster to fit my Blackmagic camera
• A Japanese 50mm Canon FD lens
• A KOWA Russian 2x anamorphic projection lens (designed for old film projectors)
• A diopter for pulling focus

All four layered together to create a genuine 2x anamorphic look on a zero-budget rig. It was unwieldy, finicky, and exactly what the film needed.

Halo Lighting & Robert Richardson

The film was shot entirely with natural light, but this is when my obsession with halo lighting began — the painterly, diffuse glow that cinematographer Robert Richardson made famous in Tarantino's films and Scorsese's Goodfellas. You can see me chasing that look throughout Nocturia, learning in real time.

The Pulse Influence

The central visual motif — a character walking in an unsettling, unnatural way — was directly inspired by a scene in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (Kairo, 2001). In that film, a ballerina actress walks in reverse while the footage plays forward. I recreated the effect to give my character an otherworldly, haunted presence.