Shooting Kellin Quinn’s Mittens Scenes on the Panasonic AG-CX350: Using Modern Production Technology to Recreate the Look of Tape
By Oliver Ricketts, Producer / Cinematographer, Mittens
When we began production on our horror film Mittens, one of the more unusual cinematography challenges had nothing to do with making an image look newer, sharper, or cleaner.
We needed part of the movie to look older.
The majority of Mittens was photographed on the RED Scarlet, which gave us the cinematic foundation we wanted for the primary narrative. But the scenes featuring Kellin Quinn of Sleeping With Sirens as Country Stuart presented a completely different challenge.
Country Stuart is the film’s primary villain: a seemingly wholesome, Mr. Rogers-esque television personality with a much darker supernatural side. His appearances within the film were designed to evoke an earlier era of television — the kind of programming audiences remember as being produced on professional video and tape rather than photographed like a modern feature film.
We could have shot those sequences on the RED and attempted to create the entire look afterward with a “VHS” or retro television filter. But that wasn’t really the aesthetic we were after.
At the same time, actually shooting Kellin’s scenes on a decades-old standard-definition video camera would have created an entirely different set of technical problems and potentially compromised footage that ultimately needs to live alongside the rest of a feature film.
Our solution was the Panasonic AG-CX350.
Two Cameras for Two Different Worlds
The RED Scarlet was our primary camera on Mittens. It made sense for the world occupied by our characters: controlled depth of field, cinematic lenses and lighting, and an image designed from the beginning around a feature-film workflow.
Country Stuart’s world wasn’t supposed to feel like that.
We wanted the audience to immediately recognize that they were watching something operating within a different visual language.
The reference wasn’t necessarily degraded VHS. It was professionally produced television recorded to tape.
That’s an important distinction.
Older television could still look extremely good. It was lit professionally, operated by professional crews, and photographed using broadcast cameras designed to produce a clean image. What makes that material immediately recognizable today isn’t simply noise or low resolution. It’s the combination of camera movement, depth of field, highlight behavior, frame cadence, lens characteristics, and the immediacy we associate with broadcast video.
That made a traditional professional camcorder an interesting creative tool for Mittens.
Why the Panasonic AG-CX350?
The AG-CX350 occupies an interesting middle ground for this application. It’s a modern professional camcorder built around a 1-inch sensor and integrated 20x optical zoom, rather than a large-sensor cinema camera configured around interchangeable cinema lenses.
For most productions, those characteristics would simply be technical specifications.
For Mittens, they became part of the aesthetic.
The deeper depth of field and integrated servo zoom helped move the photography away from the visual grammar of our RED package and toward the feeling of studio and location television production.
The form factor mattered, too.
There’s a different way you operate a traditional camcorder. The zoom is immediately available. Reframing is fast. The camera can react to a performer rather than every composition feeling predetermined.
For the Country Stuart material, those characteristics weren’t compromises.
They were part of the look.
There was also a personal connection to choosing the camera. Before Mittens, I had spent a lot of time around the CX350 through my work with Videoguys and Broadfield Distributing. That experience was really the reason the camera occurred to me in the first place.
I already knew what the CX350 was capable of, and when we started discussing how Country Stuart should look, I realized that a camera I knew primarily from the broadcast and professional video world could potentially become a really interesting narrative cinematography tool.
At the same time, the CX350 gave us a modern acquisition platform rather than forcing us to deal with an actual decades-old tape workflow.
That was critical.
Recreating Tape Without Actually Shooting Tape
One of the temptations when recreating older television is to make the image intentionally terrible.
Add noise. Crush the resolution. Introduce tracking errors. Throw some scan lines over it.
Suddenly it’s “VHS.”
That wasn’t what we wanted.
Country Stuart isn’t supposed to look like someone discovered a damaged home movie in an attic. He’s supposed to look like he came from a real, professionally produced television program from another era.
So rather than intentionally destroying the image during acquisition, our approach was to capture a strong modern master that naturally possessed some of the visual characteristics we associated with that style of television.
That’s where the CX350 became particularly useful.
It allowed us to separate acquisition quality from aesthetic intent.
We could create something that felt fundamentally different from the RED material without unnecessarily sacrificing the technical quality of the footage.
That’s especially important when you’re making an independent feature intended for modern distribution. You don’t necessarily know every screen, platform, deliverable, or exhibition format your movie may eventually encounter.
Creating the illusion of an older format is one thing.
Permanently limiting your source material to that format is another.
The Sensor Became a Creative Choice
One of the most interesting parts of the experiment was working with the CX350’s 1-inch sensor after spending most of the production working with the RED.
Large sensors have become so closely associated with “cinematic” photography that filmmakers sometimes treat shallower depth of field as automatically desirable.
But cinematography isn’t about making every image conform to the same definition of cinematic.
It’s about choosing the image that supports the story.
For Country Stuart, having more of the environment present and recognizable within the image helped sell the television aesthetic. The image doesn’t behave exactly like the rest of Mittens.
And that’s the point.
When the movie moves between the primary world of Mittens and Country Stuart’s world, the camera itself helps tell the audience that something has changed.
The 20x Zoom Was More Than a Convenience
Another advantage was having the CX350’s integrated 20x optical zoom immediately available.
Modern cinema production tends to be dominated by primes and relatively restrained zooms. Traditional television production developed around a very different set of tools.
A long servo zoom could be part of that language.
Being able to zoom, reframe, and respond quickly gave us another way to distinguish Country Stuart’s material from the primary photography without relying exclusively on post-production effects.
Even if an audience can’t identify exactly why something feels like television, those small technical decisions accumulate.
The camera body, sensor size, lens, depth of field, zoom, and operating style all contribute.
Why Not Just Do Everything in Post?
Could we have shot Kellin’s scenes on the RED Scarlet and recreated the entire aesthetic afterward?
Absolutely.
But there’s a difference between creating a look and photographing with that look in mind.
When the camera behaves differently on set, everyone responds to it.
The operator frames differently. The lighting choices change. The performer occupies the frame differently. The director sees something different on the monitor.
Those decisions become part of the visual language of the sequence before anyone opens an editing or color-grading application.
Post can then enhance those characteristics rather than having to invent all of them.
For me as a cinematographer, that’s much more interesting.
Keeping It Cinematic
The other side of the challenge was making sure Country Stuart’s material didn’t suddenly feel like it belonged to a cheaper production.
There’s a fine line between an intentional format change and footage that simply looks inferior to everything surrounding it.
That meant we still approached the CX350 as a cinematography tool.
Lighting, composition, production design, camera placement, performance, and exposure still mattered. We weren’t trying to make bad footage.
We were trying to make good footage that spoke a different visual language.
That’s ultimately why using the CX350 worked for this particular concept.
The camera helped us move away from the visual characteristics of our RED package without forcing us to abandon a professional modern workflow.
Choosing Cameras by Story, Not Hierarchy
One of my biggest takeaways from Mittens is that cameras shouldn’t necessarily exist in a hierarchy where one is the “A-camera” and everything else is an inferior substitute.
Sometimes the technically different camera is exactly what the scene requires.
The RED Scarlet and Panasonic AG-CX350 were designed around very different approaches to image acquisition, and that’s precisely why pairing them became creatively useful.
For most of Mittens, the RED gave us the visual foundation of the movie.
For Kellin Quinn’s Country Stuart sequences, the Panasonic gave us something we couldn’t get simply by continuing to photograph everything in exactly the same way.
It gave Country Stuart his own visual world.
And in a horror movie built around the idea that something comforting and familiar may be hiding something much darker, making that world feel like it came from another era of television was more than an aesthetic decision.
It became part of the storytelling.
About Mittens
The official poster for Mittens has now been released, marking the beginning of the film’s public promotional rollout, with an official trailer expected shortly.
Mittens was written and directed by Louis Rocky Bacigalupo and produced by Oliver Ricketts, Sam Jacobs, and Paul Travers.
The film stars Kellin Quinn, lead singer of Sleeping With Sirens, as Country Stuart, the film’s supernatural primary villain. Quinn is joined by Arina Bacigalupo (Cursed Hearse), Bridget Rose Perrotta (Hell House LLC), Zoe Hudson Travers (Mermaids), and Cassadee Pope, winner of The Voice and lead singer of Hey Monday.
As part of the film’s promotional campaign, we’ve also brought Country Stuart outside the movie itself.
Fans can actually call Country Stuart at 850-7-STUART — (850) 778-8278.
Callers can hear from Country Stuart and leave the character a voicemail, allowing audiences to interact with the strange world of the film before they ever see it on screen.
The best place to follow Mittens as we release the trailer, additional artwork, footage, behind-the-scenes material, and other announcements is the film’s official Instagram account:
@mittenslives
Oliver Ricketts is a producer and cinematographer with more than a decade of experience across feature films, commercials, branded content, and live production. He served as a producer and Director of Photography on Mittens. His previous experience with the Panasonic AG-CX350 through Videoguys ultimately helped inspire the decision to use the camera to photograph Kellin Quinn’s Country Stuart sequences for the film.