Memoirs of a Parapsychologist

Camrin Petramale needed an elective in high school, and he’d heard Photography 101 was easy. Little did the Chicago native know that from point on he’d rarely be seen without a camera. “As a child, movies were the only thing that could hold my attention,” Petramale states. “It wasn’t until my parents gave me the motivation and encouragement to enroll in Columbia College that I found my passion in cinematography.”

On a bet, a young gifted physics student in Memoirs of a Parapsychologist (written and directed by Andrew Papke) spends a week in a haunted farmhouse thinking it will win him easy tuition money. But when the farmhouse awakens the demons of his tortured childhood, the line between reality and the paranormal becomes blurs in this psychological thriller that explores the relationship between faith and science.

“From day one I knew that I was going to shoot Memoirs on 35 millimeter,” says Petramale, who opted for Kodak 5229, 5219 and 5213 stocks. “This story screams for the look of film. The natural, soft organic quality that film offers over digital and the added benefits of latitude, color gamut, grain and contrast are the reasons why I still feel it is the best storytelling medium and was a huge part of Memoirs’ visuals. Film creates a random array of silver crystals that create smooth, artifact-free texture, giving you an organic, non-repetitive grain structure; whereas digital formats never vary in their information, shape, position, or size, so the noise is repetitious and produces overly sharp edges.”