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Spectre mixing film and digital


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Really? 120k is not enough for working a few times a year? You make it seem like it's impossible to live off that much money, yet most of our population lives off less than half that and works 5 days a week every week of the year. Heck I've never made anywhere near that and I hustle my ass off.

Perspective man

Tyler, I realize we come from different backgrounds and experiences. No problem there. But my "perspective" is to be in a financial position to provide for a family, put one's children in good schools and pay for college, taxes and whatever one's cost of living is and still have a couple of bucks saved for retirement. In my definition, that's having a professional career. My opinion of course.

 

G

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We work more than just a few times in the year, and when we work, it can often be 14 hour days or more -- so it's a lifestyle of very intense work with some time gaps. Hey, if we could be guaranteed only having to work an 8-hour day with, let's say, 40 weeks of full employment a year, I'm sure many of us would take a lower day rate. But it doesn't work that way, we can have months off between jobs and we have to think in terms of average income over a three or more year period, because we can have good years and bad years.

 

Again, it comes down to whether you believe that someone who is in their forties and fifties who is highly trained and responsible for very expensive equipment or decisions that can cost a company a lot of money, should be able to earn what would give them a middle-class lifestyle. If you think that every film worker should think of themselves as some garage band drummer living off of their girlfriend's office job salary while they are "living the dream" until they get into their sixties, then they should be fine with what non-union indie features typically pay.

 

I spent a decade living this lifestyle, earning my dues and building a resume, but once you hit your forties, you start to feel like either you should give it up and get "a real job" or you have to step it up and get into the higher paying union jobs.

 

The crazy thing is that this country HAS a non-union film industry -- I should know, I've shot 25 features that way! You want to make films for half a million or less and hire people at $100 a day and work them for 100 hours a week with no overtime, well, nothing is stopping you if you can get that half a million or less. So I don't get this desire to kill the higher tier of filmmaking where workers can earn a middle class income and bring everything down to the wages of a Walmart greeter, working long hours with no benefits, no pension, and no healthcare. That low-budget filmmaking system EXISTS right now PLUS there is a union world of higher wages. But no, for some reason, that's no good, we have to get rid of the second tier where workers make more money!

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Its the non union business thats needs to get sorted out.. its literally killing people.. why shouldnt film workers get paid a decent wage.. producers dont complain about getting their beamers serviced,or pool houses showers being fixed .. at massive hourly rates.. or their lawyers and accountants charging way more than most jobbing DP,s..

Edited by Robin R Probyn
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Is their any moral foundation at all for thinking that the unions should protect the middle classes at the expense of the poor?

David Mullen believes they should do. In fact they do do so.

 

So what are/is the union, what was it historically, what should or could it be? Rhetorical question, but feel free to riff on that.

 

Now it seems that an income of USD120 000 is barely middle class. If this was true, then the social problem we might worry about is much worse than we might imagine. But of course it's not. Unless one lives in, who knows, Dubai or perfhaps a gated community in California that has claimed sovereignty.

 

Perhaps Greg (one g at either end) can explain that.

 

And where is that tin man weiding a social/political axe when circuimstance really requires him

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It's not pleasant to visit a cinematography site to give advice and to be constantly told that as a union worker, I'm not worth what I'm being paid. It's not helpful and it has nothing to do with cinematography.

No, it's not. I've spent nearly 20 years working in this industry, and I know what I'm worth.

 

It's a sad fact that the so called 'democratization' of film-making touted by companies like RED has led to our skills being devalued, not just by producers, but by other people within our own trades.

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Now it seems that an income of USD120 000 is barely middle class. If this was true, then the social problem we might worry about is much worse than we might imagine. But of course it's not. Unless one lives in, who knows, Dubai or perfhaps a gated community in California that has claimed sovereignty.

 

To live in LA, where a mortgage can easily be over $60,000 a year, where property tax is high, where tuition in schools is expensive, where healthcare is astronomical? Yeah, strange as it may seem, $120k does not go far if you are raising a family.

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You'll get no argument from me by preferring film over digital. I had to do a cost analysis a couple of years ago for a producer just for camera equipment rental. Digital was about 40% more expensive than film. That was just for the gear - no labor!

And when you add labor, it's more like 60% more. People get more money to use equipment that takes less talent to operate.

 

But who's to say that $45/hour is too much? Why shouldn't an employee be compensated for working over 12 consecutive hours? That's up to the free market values, labor laws, collective bargaining and not anything else. These opposing comments really sound like sour grapes.

It's bullshit. Laze around on a film set sleeping in the cab of a truck all day and make more money then someone who builds the damn truck! Then when someone like myself wants to pay someone a fair rate for their time, the union says I can't. I need to pay 20x more so those drivers can sleep all day long in their truck. Is that fair?

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It's bullshit. Laze around on a film set sleeping in the cab of a truck all day and make more money then someone who builds the damn truck! Then when someone like myself wants to pay someone a fair rate for their time, the union says I can't. I need to pay 20x more so those drivers can sleep all day long in their truck. Is that fair?

Ok. Tell that to the professional driver who has to move the company to the next day's location at 3am having had a 5am call the previous day. And he has to guarantee the truck will be in working order for our call time. He deserves all of the sleep and the income he earns. You are way off base on this. Without the base camp set, we have no set. Let's move this conversation to the proper forum: Business Practices. We've lost our way on this topic.

 

G

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You do know I'm not talking about the physical creative shooting crew right?

 

Its just those blue collar truck driver types.. Im sure they dont know Kubric from a Kitkat bar.. hanging around in the sun all day..hell they probably watch football on 4-3 tv,s.. and have never seen a Nolan sisters film..

Edited by Robin R Probyn
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I think this is sort of the operative point here.

 

 

 

Again, it comes down to whether you believe that someone who is in their forties and fifties who is highly trained and responsible for very expensive equipment or decisions that can cost a company a lot of money, should be able to earn what would give them a middle-class lifestyle.

 

I think everyone should be able to earn what would give them a middle-class lifestyle.

 

 

If you think that every film worker should think of themselves as some garage band drummer living off of their girlfriend's office job salary while they are "living the dream" until they get into their sixties, then they should be fine with what non-union indie features typically pay.

 

That's pretty much what everyone outside the US does.

 

P

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Tyler...why on earth don't you simply shoot non-union? Hundreds of movies a year are being made outside of the unions, there is nothing that can stop you. I have a friend here in Ontario that made a movie called Sleeping Giant with no unions of any kind, not even union actors, well the movie premiered at Cannes and he was signed by ICM. The list goes on.

 

R,

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Tyler...why on earth don't you simply shoot non-union?

You can't get honey wagons or 5 ton + grip/lighting trucks. Without union drivers, you can't even rent them.

 

We're skirting around the carpenters union by simply hiring friends.

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I see that the debate has shifted from Spectre to Film VS Digital to unions, so I will be rambling a bit about the second subject if I may.

To me, there is a huge difference between digital and film. And when I say digital, I mean digital that hasn't been manipulated to look like film (which most of the time is unsuccessful anyway, but I am not sure I could never be tricked). Such manipulations are in my opinions dishonest and conceptually wrong - they are different than other movie manipulations (like CGI, VFX, green screen work, photochemical timing etc.) in that they try to actually fool the viewer that the medium they are looking at is something else than it actually is. This just feels so wrong to me and no rationalization ("what is important is only the look of the final image, it doesn't matter how it was achieved" etc.) does it for me.

Anyway, about digital looking much differently than film. In my city (Ljubljana, Slovenia) we have a cinema/film museum that shows mostly film prints (both old and more modern). There are 2 showings per day, and it's always something else, they have a huge library of films, and I've seen cinematic classics like The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Blade Runner, Ben Hur etc. projected as well as some almost B-movies and student films. In all cases it's a special, almost magical visual experience, especially after being mostly subjected to impoverished DCPs. There is *such a huge difference* between a film that is done and projected traditionally to a film that is scanned, digitally manipulated and digitally shown; it's unreal. And it's sad that instead of continually going forward, instead of improving that great picture quality, we rather took a huge step back.

But even if both digital and film are shown digitally, there is a huge, huge difference between the two. The latter is digitized reality, and the former is digitized physical medium on which reality is imprinted in a very peculiar, beautiful, magical way. And all these atributes don't just disappear when they are digitized. The same way you can see the texture of the oil painting on the high quality photograph - it's not the same as watching it in reality, but you surely notice it's unique properties.

And the analogy with oil painting reminds me that it's not just live action film where we see this unfortunate shift. There is an impoverishment going on in every visual field (I won't go into audio this time). Let's look at the animation for example. I love Rick and Morty for it's writing, and I actually also love it for it's visual content (eg. the way aliens are imagined), but the medium just sucks. Instead of drawing the frames and backgrounds by hand on paper and cels, we get some lousy flash/toon boom vectors. The same is true for most of the current animations. And I really liked the way animation worked when it was photographed on film. The movement of grain made the static frames (eg. when the character doesn't move) look alive and overall there was a hypnotizing, almost psychadellic quality to it. Just look at the blu-rays of some Frank Bakshi stuff for example and tell me if you can make anything that gives you such a powerful visual experience in Flash. Another field where digital has started reigning is commercial illustration. People are trying to emulate oil painting, watercolors and pencils with all kinds of disingenious trickery only to produce flat-looking and dead images. It's sad. Also, photography: I have just recently scanned darkroom prints of some old (20-15 years approx.) family photos and they looked so great, despite them being shot on some cheap plastic cameras. And it lead me to thinking that the less manipulation you do to a digital file, the better. That is why I have kind of started hating the idea of scanning negatives and converting them digitally. Negative is not a finished object - a darkroom picture is a finished object (or a slide), and that is what you should be scanning. The same with movies - I much prefer the idea of printing negative and then scanning the print without doing any color manipulation digitally (except converting it to a proper color space of course).

The same way I approach stuff that has digital origins. I also don't consider the stated resolution (of the DSLR for example) as the "actual resolution" - when I zoom to 100% the image just doesn't look good, there is something very fragile and syntethic about it. That's why I have a rule to downsize the dimensions by the factor 4 - it's a radical and probably excessive measure, but this way I consistently get a good-looking, solid picture, that has actual color information in every pixel (the latter is more "philosophically comforting" rather than me making any technical argument about the quality of Bayer interpolation), and this is what I consider a final image. So a 5814x3456 image from my DSLR becomes a 1296x864 image. And I like the look of it - it is very clean, naturally sharp, no noise at all, what a digital image should look like imo. That of course means that I am very limited with the size, but that is fine - I just consider the digital to be in its early beginnings and that it will take some time before I will be able to afford a digital camera that will make high-res pictures according to my standards. This is why I find comments like "why do you even need 4k movie cameras when most screens are 1080p?" so funny/stupid.

(btw, if I shoot at higher ISO, like 1600, I might downsize by even a factor 6 to arrive at the picture without any noise).

Another rule I have is to not do any digital manipulation besides converting RAW to whatever standard picture profile is made by a manufacturer and then downconverting. I turn off all sharpening, I don't do any color correcting, I won't even recover the highlights - I just don't blow them while I am shooting. And I find picture quality completely fine and natural using this process - actually, I find it much better looking than heavy processed stuff on the internet.

So the last 2 paragraphs are my (radical and unusual) rules under which I find digital images legitimate. They are completely different to film, but they have their own aesthetics that I also find pleasing (in other ways) when done correctly. What I don't like is compressed/manipulated/noisy/bayer-interpolated stuff at 100% (or even up-resed) etc. I think digital should be all about the cleanliness, quality resolution (I mean actual resolution, not the number of pixels camera have) etc. It should strive to be as accurate representation of reality as possible. If you want a low-fi look with a character go for a physical medium that can be scanned at a high resolution on a CCD scanner and still retain solidity (to me there it's not about the resolution of the content as is often times stated, but about the quality representation of a physical medium).

Hope my rambling wasn't all over the place.

Edited by Peter Bitic
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You can't get honey wagons or 5 ton + grip/lighting trucks. Without union drivers, you can't even rent them.

 

We're skirting around the carpenters union by simply hiring friends.

 

Having only worked as a non-union spark, could you explain that? Are you referring to shoots where every craft and department is union? Are you confusing the need for a CDL/air-brake cert./tractor trailer experience with the fact that some companies won't rent out their trucks without using their (union) drivers? Or .........?

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Wrong thread, please Tyler would you delete it?

Thanks.

Miguel is correct. I don't believe Tyler really needs to delete his post but would everyone kindly move this Union/non-Union discussion over to the new thread in Business Practices forum? Many thanks to all...

 

G

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Somehow I managed to shoot 25 non-union features with honey wagons and grip & electric trucks... I've never heard of a rental house in Los Angeles requiring that a teamster drive their trucks off of the lot. There are plenty of non-union shoots going around town; most commercials and reality TV shows are non-union for one thing and they all have equipment trucks. All those thousands of Lou Levinson productions for Hallmark over the decades are non-union, and so are the Roger Corman stuff for the Sci-Fy channel, and they all use trucks and honey wagons.

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