11/26/2025
One of my favorite parts of working on Mountains of the Moon was getting the chance to really play (I’ll save the jam band references because we might have already overdone it a little) Director editor and DP encouraged the crew to not be afraid to take creative risks and do as much as possible in camera: we had crazy lighting rigs on jet skis and cables, lasers, projection mapping, cameras on vertical sliders a hundred feet up, dip cameras under drones, avalanche crash boxes…the whole grab-bag of weird stuff.
Somewhere in the chaos I had this idea: What if I made my own aperture shapes?
One of my vintage Zeiss lenses already gave the out-of-focus areas this wild saw-blade look (see pic), so I wondered if I could lean into that and create custom bokeh shapes. A couple hours later with an exacto knife and construction paper what ended up being called “Jeff’s Art Project” was born.
We tried it on the next shoot (the climbing sequence) and, to my complete shock, it actually worked. If you watch the film you’ll catch the weird little Easter eggs all over the place: Dancing Bears, Steal Your Faces, Dead lightning bolts all created for about ten bucks and some late-night tinkering.
