Behind the Lens: What ODIE Was Shot On (and Why It Looks the Way It Looks)

Every film has two scripts. The one the actors carry, and the one written in the margins of the continuity log. ODIE's second script is full of numbers: 35mm, 25mm, 50mm, 60fps, 6K, 4K. This post is about what those numbers were doing. Our director of photography, Lester Platt, walked us through all of it.

The Camera

ODIE shot on the DJI Ronin 4D. One camera, seventeen days, rolls A002 through A033.

“There's no heavy rigging or build-out between setups,” Lester says. “The camera is essentially ready the moment you pick it up, and that let us move through the city at the pace this story demanded.” He had just come off producing another feature on the 4D with spherical lenses. “I wanted to see how it would handle anamorphic glass. That was the experiment going in.”

The camera department came as a package from STLL Studios: Lester behind the lens, Trevor Korn pulling focus as AC, Danny Keinarth guarding the dailies as DIT. Lester has been filming commercials for the last decade, however, ODIE took him back to his beginnings, applying all the lessons learned over those years to do justice to Nick's story, Dean's performance, and Austin, a city that embraced him.

Four Lenses, One City

The continuity log keeps naming the same three focal lengths: a 25mm, a 35mm, a 50mm. There was a fourth in the kit, a 75mm. All of them from a set of Blazar Mantis 1.33x anamorphic primes, rented from a local DP, swapped by hand, all day.

“What drew me to them was their restraint,” Lester says. “A lot of anamorphic glass announces itself. Heavy flares, aggressive distortion. The Mantis lenses have a subtler character: a gentle falloff, organic edges, just enough texture to keep the digital sensor from feeling clinical. For a film grounded in one man's lived reality, I didn't want the glass performing louder than the character. The 25mm gave us his world, the 35mm carried most of the film, and the 50mm and 75mm brought us into his face when the story needed intimacy.”

The log shows how they were used. Day 1, Scene 2: “Handheld, 35mm,” Odie asleep as the frame widens to take in the city. Later that morning, a 50mm select of Odie walking Zilker with the skyline behind him, and next to it a single word from the script supervisor: “Perfect!” On Day 5 the 25mm came out for the downtown apartment cluster.

The Movement Is His Movement

So much of the movie reads as handheld. That was the plan from day one, and it is the other half of why the 4D got the job.

“The emotional core of this film is motion,” Lester says. “Our character travels across the city in a single day. The camera traveled with him.” The 4D's stabilization let the camera follow Dean Stanfield down sidewalks, across intersections, and through crowds without laying track or resetting between takes. “What reads as handheld energy on screen is really the camera living alongside him, close, mobile, and reactive, while staying controlled enough that the audience never gets thrown out of the story.”

The Dream World Runs at a Different Speed

Odie's memories of Monica and his son don't move like the rest of the film. The dream sequences shot MOS, no sound recorded, and the Day 17 log reads like a poem written by a technician: “Switch to 60fps... whole family on top of the rocks.”

Here's the part the log doesn't show: the team shot those sequences at both 24 and 60 frames per second. “We didn't want to lock ourselves into one answer on set,” Lester says. “At 60, played back slow, the world takes on that weightless, suspended quality dreams have. At 24, it stays closer to his waking reality, which blurs the line in an interesting way.” The choice of how untethered each dream feels gets made in the edit, where it can be judged against the scenes around it. And shooting MOS was natural for material whose soundscape was always going to be built in post. No sound department on the setup, so the camera moved even faster.

6K Until the Cards Said No

Day 1, on a pickup of the cardboard-sign shot, the log notes “Pushing for 6K for pushing.” On Day 14, the last scheduled scene of the film, Odie making his bed and going to sleep in his new room, the note reads “Swapped to 4K for card space.”

Lester translates. The finish is 4K, so recording 6K banks extra resolution on every frame. “That surplus is room to move. In post you can punch in, reframe, tighten a composition, or effectively create a second shot size from a single setup, all without losing sharpness. On a fast-moving shoot with a small crew, that's insurance.” And the late drop to 4K? “A practical call, not a creative one. Because we'd already banked the coverage that needed reframing room in 6K, it cost us nothing on screen.” Pushing for pushing: shooting big so you can push in.

There's something honest about that pair of log lines. The biggest emotional beat in the movie, and the practical reality of indie filmmaking sitting right beside it.

Street Level, Not Postcard

How do you shoot Austin without it turning into a tourism ad or a PSA?

“The subject solves that for you,” Lester says. “We shot the city from his eye level and his position in it. The Austin he sees isn't the skyline. It's the underpass, the sidewalk, the places people walk past without looking. Sometimes indifferent, sometimes beautiful, but never framed for a brochure. No swelling angles telling you how to feel. The camera stays with him, and the honesty of that does the work.”

The boldest choice was the lighting department, which for most of the shoot was the sun. “We were filming multiple pages a day with no manpower for a grip truck,” Lester says. “So the sun became the lighting department. That meant reading locations for how light actually behaved in them, scheduling scenes around the windows and the hours, and trusting what was there instead of fighting it. It's a leap of faith, because you give up control, but I'm really happy with the results. Gritty, natural, and true to the world the character lives in.”

From the Card to the Color Suite

The pipeline after the shutter: Keinarth's DIT cart handled dailies integrity, color management, and look application on set. Editorial went to Jay Trautman in LA over the summer. The final grade belongs to Lisbon-based colorist Geraldo “Matondo” Alexandre, building the finished look with Lester and Nick from the locked cut.

ODIE is now in post-production. More from the Behind the Lens series as the film moves toward its 2027 festival run.