Search Results for 'no'

[arthurkent]

Agreed—The Wild Bunch, The Getaway, Junior Bonner and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid put Straw Dogs and Cross of Iron in the shade. Apart, that is, from the hospital scene in Cross of Iron, one of the best-ever motion picture renderings of PTSD. Well suited to Peckinpah’s emotive time shifts and jump cuts.

Records in the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library show the Cross of Iron shoot was many times on the verge of collapsing. Johnny felt Peckinpah’s plans called for 3 Panavision cameras plus a high speed Pan-Arri IIC. Budget blues left them instead with one Mitchell BNCR, two Arris and a high speed Mitchell. The German co-producer failed to come through with the on-set camera tech Johnny felt would be needed to keep the cameras rolling. Alarmingly, only the British co-production entity’s half of the budget was in place when filming commenced. Chaos ensued.

A Mantis dolly failed to show up. A Fisher crab to take its place was late arriving, then didn’t function properly. Johnny wrote to the German co-producer: “Tomorrow we must continue to shoot with an increasingly noisy main camera, and I must warn when we return to the confines of the studio the noise level could well become intolerable…” And later: “It is suicide for this matter not to be treated with utmost urgency. For three weeks now this equipment has operated under tough, dusty conditions… Can you permit/afford this to continue?” When that didn’t work, he finally wrote: “Now the kidding must stop. I must demand that we have the services of a FULL TIME qualified engineer…”

The picture pulled through, just, at 50% over budget. However mixed the reviews, James Coburn, David Warner and James Mason recalled the film fondly. As did Johnny, who felt it was a miracle the film ever hit the screen.

[Exajoel]

Hello,
May I suggest using low-hanging LED or flourenscent tubes. As you’re shooting B/W, there is much less reason to worry about color reproduction, so even the cheap consumer-grade ones from your local hardware store might do as long as they’re bright enough. Quality and contrast can be easily manipulated by hanging the fixtures lower or higher and the size of the tubes themselves.

[sanghamithran]

ah yes, got it James, I had shot a couple of works with blacked out for 2.35 and it had worked for me, would be interesting to see not doing that and trying out this approach to see how it is affecting my framing,

Thanks.

[ThatGreasyFootball]

Howdy all. Just finished filming at the parking garage and managed to successfully navigate it without getting arrested or robbed. Thanks again to Dmullenasc and Roger for all of the advice! However I am now moving on to my next segment.

I am looking to turn ~350 square feet of bedroom into detective office. I want the lighting to be hard and overhead. The film is B n W so temp doesn’t matter, but i am struggling to find something that might accomplish this. I was thinking a chandelier because I would love the added visual element of it, but I am unsure if this would be enough to practically light the scene. I also have an amaran 60d that I was thinking of bouncing off of the ceiling to supplement, but I am also unsure of this as the light might be too soft. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks, Godspeed!

[rama lingam]

Dear master Roger I just saw your one of your BTS picture on Old asc magazines. There is a one incandescent bulb you were holding but above there is bunch of different bulbs. I know it’s your part of your lighting tricks. For which film you have done that kind of incandescent lamp lighting. Why did you change the bulb shape above. Did you use same watts. What kind of wrapper you used?

[James Parsons]

Operators often want a “surround” view on their eyepiece or monitor to see what’s just out of frame to know what to avoid (or what to include) before it encroaches on the shot. Same can be helpful for focus pullers and DPs, or really anyone on set watching a monitor. Sure, it could be distracting at first, but it’s easy to get used to. Most monitors allow you to grey out or otherwise diminish the image outside the frame lines, but its rarely useful to fully black it out.

[Roger Deakins]

I really don’t consciously think about ‘composition’ when I am composing. Not in any theoretical way, that is. Of course, you think about the lens you have on and whether the shot would be wider and closer or further away on a slightly longer lens. You lean your body to the right or left when your intuition tells you there may be something better from a slightly different angle, but its not like I am analyzing why I am doing that. I lean my body and use my eyes.

[dmullenasc]

Kurosawa shot deep focus with longer anamorphic lenses in the 1960s — it’s just a matter of stopping down the lens. The depth of field with anamorphic is just lower because the focal lengths are longer, but jumping up from Super-35 to FF35 is not a big difference — in terms of anamorphic, if the 35mm sensor area was 18mm tall and the FF35 area was 24mm tall, that’s a 1.33X difference so that is also how much you’d have to stop down to match depth of field once you matched field of view and distance. So getting more depth of field in anamorphic is not insurmountable either by using more light or a higher ISO.

With 35mm film, the advantage of anamorphic over cropping spherical was the larger negative area for less grain, better resolution (though at wide apertures, often spherical lenses are sharper) but that’s less of an issue with digital where the main reason to shoot anamorphic is the anamorphic look (flares, stretched bokeh, some barrel distortion.) If you want a shallow focus or deep focus look, then you can shoot either spherical or anamorphic.

[halfgrain]

I didn’t listen to this podcast, but don’t you think he just meant that he had to up the ISO in order to get to a t8 or t11? Depending on how close you are focusing that still will render things in the far background out of focus, just not a complete blur. Other aspects like distortion, flares and the shape of the bokeh will also stay typical anamorphic.

[sanghamithran]

Also how did you operate the composition in 1917 which was shot for wide aspect ratio with a 16:9 sensor, did you black out the top and bottom frame or similar to the above image only, asking espicially since 1917 was a more dynamic camera movement film than say no country.

[James Parsons]

This doesn’t solve every mistake I make, but I find it solves at least one problem on almost every project… shoot a little something before the director calls action, and definitely after they call cut.

If you’re on an actor before the scene starts, you often get a beat of “focus” or “intention” or even “anxiety,” and if you’re on them for a few beats after you can get to see them release tension, or shift focus, or physically adjust position or look or even just twitch a small muscle in an undefined way. Invariably, a director/editor (who you alert to look out for those moments) can Kuleshov effect a clip to create a emotionally appropo  cut away for a flubbed line or a focus bump or a transition in or out of a story beat.

If I’m not on a face, I do the same thing on hands, props, set dressing, background actors, pan around on a location or set, pop off a few frames on clouds or the skyline, etc…. Especially on indie projects there’s never enough b-roll, and there’s definitely never a pickup day to go out and shoot inserts and establishing shots, so I just try to get as much of that as possible informally as I go.

[James Parsons]

This may be a bit of a cliche answer, but whenever I think of a character’s subjective POV in a shot, I think of Jonathan Demme, especially (but not only) Silence of the Lambs. And of course, that’s a detective story which is powerfully concerned with diving the objective facts of the case from these subjective interactions…

[James Parsons]

If the camera is close enough, especially for a clean single, my eyeline mark is almost always a piece of tape on the matte box, sometimes even inside it.

If your reverse shot is at an entirely different time, bring a still frame from the first set up to compare the eyelines directly.

[James Parsons]

I’m part way through an indie project where I’ve set a bit of a compositional rulebook for myself. I’m center punching subjects as much as humanly possible, being extra careful to be at right angles to whatever the dominant elements in the background are, finding symmetries wherever I can. Trying to put a little formal distance on the story, maybe make it a bit presentational. Then there’s a handful of shots and a couple of specific scenes where I’m breaking those strictures, and hopefully it’s gonna be seamless for the audience, but they’ll feel the shift maybe before they can name it.

I think the frame you share above is typical of Mr. Deakins, perfectly in control and precise without being the least bit regimented. The horizon is perfectly level, of course, and he’s almost but not quite centered up in the squared off room. There’s no mathematical formula to the offset angle, like shifting all the way over to be 45* to the room. Instead it’s near enough to squared off that it still conveys the strictness and formality of the interrogation. Far enough to feel the empty space and isolation of the prisoner, no help is coming, and to be overwhelmed by the queasy oppressive yellow.

If the prisoner is perfectly centered by bringing the camera left, then the interrogators are pushed too far to the edge of the frame, no longer drawing attention and demonstrating command of the room. If the camera goes right, then the interrogators end don’t have enough space to maneuver without overlapping with the prisoner, muddying the separation between the opposing forces before they’re ready to engage. I take Mr. Deakins at his word that (assuming my interpretations are reasonable) that he probably isn’t consciously debating any of those effects either to himself or aloud. The camera just feels right in one spot and wrong everywhere else.

[James Parsons]

If I understand correctly, you’re not trying to illuminate the interior with these lights, just blow out the spaces between the slats and let the light beams glitter in the atmosphere, correct?

I don’t know how big a space you’re dealing with, but my instinct wouldn’t be to cluster them, but to line them up horizontally, aimed in parallel, not at a single point in the set. If there’s no structural elements interrupting the gaps across the width of the wall, I guess I’d probably slightly overlap the edges of the beam spreads, try to keep the light level reasonably even left-to-right. That should keep you from getting multiple shadows.

If you really wanted to turn four bulbs into a single close source, your trickiest puzzle will be getting the heads right up next to each other if they’re each on a separate stand. You might have to get creative and invent a sturdy way to mount them safely on one or two stands. The other option of course would be to aim them all through a diffusion frame so that that becomes the source, but then you’re losing some of the punch you’re trying to build up by clustering them together in the first place.

If you’re imitating the sun, the “point source” of the sun is far enough away that all the rays are coming at you in parallel, as if from the entirety of the local sky, not from a single nearby point.