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Was it just me, or did anyone notice how horrible OPEN WATER looked? Even on DVD the film looked 1000x worse than any xl1 clip I downloaded from the internet. Highlights where XTREMELY blown out, resolution was fare and in-between.

 

The story itself was ok, but I could barly stand to watch the story because of the poor quality of the image.

 

Any comments?

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Any comments?

 

Actually I watched it after watching four other low budget movies shot on DV and I was so thankful that the story was intriguing and the acting good that I didn't really care about the look of it. In some ways I thought the fact that it had a home video ish look to it was sort of interesting because of the whole vacation aspect to it.... you know... how you see past vacations... or how I see other people's past vacations as I've not taken a vacation. ;)

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Guest Charlie Seper

I thought it looked very good, but they obviously weren't concerned with getting a film look. Not that it mattered because the storyline seemed to have been written by a 10-year old at the bottom of his class. And talk about gratuitous nudity. The nudity was not only totally unnecessary, it was just stupid within the scripting. It was the worst low budget thing I sat through since El Mariachi.

 

I keep seeing a lot of posts at this website about the way a movie looks. I frankly don't get it. Nobody with the IQ God gave a mushroom gives a damn. Even blind men will love "good" movies.

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I keep seeing a lot of posts at this website about the way a movie looks. I frankly don't get it. Nobody with the IQ God gave a mushroom gives a damn. Even blind men will love "good" movies.

 

Call me crazy, but I think it has something to do with the fact that this is a CINEMATOGRAPHY forum. If you don't "get it", then what are you doing here?

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Call me crazy, but I think it has something to do with the fact that this is a CINEMATOGRAPHY forum.  If you don't "get it", then what are you doing here?

Actually, its a DVD/TV forum. You're crazy.

 

If anyone thinks a movie is about anything other than a good story then I don't think they're mature enough to be making movies, which may explain why there have been so few good ones since 1945. If you watch the festivals you'll find a lot of young 20-somethings submitting crap. No one should think about making movies (or writing novels) until they're old enough to be well-read, and few people are well-read before they're in their 30's.

 

To stress my point, I watched, "Final Cut" week before last. It was written and directed by a "kid" who made a film that was full of visual effects and absolutely no story. "Rebirth" is another example of a movie that was meant to look great but went nowhere. "Gone With The Wind" was a story with no ending and practically no plot. The cinematography was beautiful, but so what?

 

I get the impression that a lot of young film makers try to sit down and noodle out a story to film. That's not a reason to write or to film. You should write and film because you have something that you simply MUST SAY. Not because you're looking for something to do. Good stories erupt out of you. They insist on being told. If you try and hold a conversation today with 90% of the film makers in the world about great authors, i.e.--C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Borgia, Chaucer, George MacDonald, Spenser, their eyes would gloss over inside of 5-minutes. Its disgusting. They should be in the audience, not behind a camera.

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Guest Charlie Seper

"What was the best under 300k movie you've seen?"

 

"Primer" far and away. Under 7k actually.

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If anyone thinks a movie is about anything other than a good story then I don't think they're mature enough to be making movies,...

 

Thankfully Andrei Tarkovsky and countless others did not share your opinion.

 

I take it you don't like 10 minute shots where nothing happens?

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what are you doing here Charlie Seper?

 

This is a cinematography forum (www.cinematography.com/forum2004) hint hint! You are in the wrong place if you could care less about the cinematography of a film....

 

i think your rude and have nothing to offer to this forum. Sorry to be rude, but go somewhere else.

 

If anyone thinks a movie is about anything other than a good story then I don't think they're mature enough to be making movies, which may explain why there have been so few good ones since 1945.

I dont think thats true....

 

They should be in the audience, not behind a camera.

Again, rude as you can be...

 

By the way, what great films do we owe Charlie Seper for?

Edited by Landon D. Parks
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Thankfully Andrei Tarkovsky and countless others did not share your opinion.

 

I'm not flaming on your Tarkovsky mention at all, but it did inspire me to just to wax philosophic a bit. I think there is often a confusion between story and plot. I would almost say that Andrei Tarkovsky would believe that story is everything. But you can convey story a 10 minute shot where nothing happens.

 

I don't know if Mike Nichols said this originally, or if he is being credited for it recently - but here goes: "Plot is the king died and then the queen died. Story is: the king died and then the queen died of a broken heart."

 

I think that's a fantastic summation. I would then argue that the story is happening in the moments of a broken heart. You can have a 10 minute shot where nothing happens yet the entire story is contained in there - it's the

 

Remember Tarkovsky was hugely inspired by Haiku and how the addition of one line in the middle or end can put a whole subtle spin on the other lines. Even if unrelated, they become a story.

 

I think a cinematographer really can take his work to the next level by looking for how his work is a part of the story.

Edited by Mark Douglas
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I agree with the separation of plot and story. In my directing class we went through that whole thing about how the plot is the "this happened and then this happened" but the story is in the details, about who characters are and why they do what they do among other things.

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"""If you try and hold a conversation today with 90% of the film makers in the world about great authors, i.e.--C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Borgia, Chaucer, George MacDonald, Spenser, their eyes would gloss over inside of 5-minutes. Its disgusting. They should be in the audience, not behind a camera"""

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

So just how many overwritten spec screenplays have you sent off and not gotten back yet?

 

You do know that there's a difference between film and books, right?

It's an entirely different medium with different rules.

No one in the film industry wants to read "intelligent" (and most of the time they're just shallow, masked diaries of self obsessed amateurs with Hollywood-itis) screenplays. Movies are different. And that's not to say that there aren't profound, inspiring works of pure celluloid genious out there -- it's just that movies aren't books.

A film that's too 'deep' can quickly lose its audience.

As a filmmaker, you're given 1.5-2 hours to entertain, teach, provoke, etc.

Not 10 hours.

 

Take the L.O.T.R trilogy for example.

The books are sick. I loved them all word for word, but I'd never sit through a film that long and I wouldn't think of reading or writing a script that long either.

It would be torture for the audience and for the filmmakers themselves.

 

Instead, Peter Jackson & Co. devised a theater-friendly version of the STORY which was not only a tremendous worldwide success, it led people to rediscover the magic of Tolkien's work through a medium EVERYONE CAN ENJOY.

 

If you don't like the fact that movies aren't always as profound and deep (to you) as some books are - then go write novels.

 

And I'll second what J. Lamar King said.

Edited by TSM
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I'd also like to point out that everyone has their own version of being well read. Not everyone has the same tastes. I don't want to read C.S. Lewis because i know his politics, and the only other author I know on that list is Geoffrey Chaucer, and while I like SOME of the Canterbury tales I don't like all of them. I much prefer Dante (whom you have left off YOUR list) to Chaucer, and as a theatre major I'm fairly well versed in Shakespeare.

 

Does my reading Hunter Thompson make me any less well read? No. He's a wonderful author who has his own style and his own observations about the world. I read what I like to read, and occasionally things that I MUST read, but the fact remains that I consider myself a fairly well read person.

 

As a twenty-something I know that I can produce quality product because I'm not grabbing a camera and running around shooting whatever I can like other people my age. I know how to work with actors and I know what makes a good script.

 

And good writing does NOT usually "erupt" forth from the writer. When I write nothing ever just spews out onto the page brilliantly and I look at it and say "Oh, there it is!" The process of good writing, I think, is marked by the little discoveries along the way. You write something and you move on and forget about it only to find out that it is foreshadowing, or that a minor detail has become a major plot device. I always wondered how those kind of things happened, and in the last script I wrote I found out because it came together on its own, but did not ever "erupt" out of me. I have a story to tell right now and it's kind of sitting there, building. But it isn't erupting anywhere.

 

And the thought of something erupting forth brings to mind someone who writes a first draft and says "That's it!" But even the great writers change their work, redraft their work, and make it into something through a thoughtful process. (Not to mention the editors who help them out in this regard.) Good writing is as much work as anything else is.

 

But just a question for you, Mr. Seper, how do you feel about the BOOK Gone with the Wind? Is it part of your subjective idea of being well read? What about The Grapes of Wrath? Of Mice and Men? The Sound and the Fury? What about poetry? Eliot? Ginsberg? Frost? What about James Dickey? Do these people constitute being well read?

 

My point is simply this: you should not come onto a forum and begin your very ignorant criticisms of the world and throw around your blatantly ageist views (20-somethings shouldn't produce anything?) and expect anyone to really take you seriously. I'm sorry I haven't read the same authors you have and can't carry on a conversation about them, but that does not make me anything less than you. Hold your head high, friend, because an education is a wonderful thing. But don't hold it over other people because you have a different taste in books.

 

There are many intelligent and talented people on this forum, Mr. Seper, and I think you should realize that there is not a true objective measurement for that. It is not in the books you read, but in how your mind operates. It is not in your criticism of the work of others, but in the work that you yourself create. Age and education are not indicative of either of those things. Some things you can learn, some things you can't.

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There are many intelligent and talented people on this forum, Mr. Seper, and I think you should realize that there is not a true objective measurement for that. It is not in the books you read, but in how your mind operates. It is not in your criticism of the work of others, but in the work that you yourself create. Age and education are not indicative of either of those things. Some things you can learn, some things you can't.

 

Very well said.

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  I would almost say that Andrei Tarkovsky would believe that story is everything.  But you can convey story a 10 minute shot where nothing happens.

 

Very interesting observation. I think I agree. Actually I think Tarkovsky got a bit too literary or at leat chatty sometimes. But he's true to what I think he saw as his tradition. It used to bother me that Bergman went off into theatrical motifs so often, but finally I thought, well Theater is where his muses live, why not honor that. (I think it was "Fanny And Alexander" that showed me this truth).

 

And then again I use his (Tarkovsky's) phrase "Sculpting in time" almost as a definition of what film can be.

 

-Sam

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I don't want to read C.S. Lewis because i know his politics, and the only other author I know on that list is Geoffrey Chaucer, and while I like SOME of the Canterbury tales I don't like all of them.

 

Josh,

 

I noticed in your exchange with Mr. Seper, which I don't want to get into, that you mentioned that you had not come across G.K. Chesterton. He is a pretty conservative writer. That said, I've read your website a bit, and it occurred to me that you might like an essay by Chesterton called "A Piece of Chalk". I think that it is one of the great essays in the English language, and certainly one of the most charming. Just thought that I'd mentiion it in case you have a few spare minutes to check it out.

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In fact, here is the essay, now in the public domain:

 

I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up a walking stick, and put six very bright coloured chalks in my pocket. I then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house, belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village), and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brown paper. She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she mistook the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper. She seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must be wanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted to do; indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental capacity. Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of toughness and endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only wanted to draw pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in the least; and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a question, not of tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I wanted to draw she offered to overwhelm me with note paper.

 

I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I not only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper, just as I like the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer. Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood red, and sea green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness. All this I said (in an off hand way) to the old woman; and I put the brown paper in my pocket along with the chalks, and possibly other things. I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

 

With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper, I went out on to the great downs. . .

 

I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place to sit down and draw. Do not, for heaven's sake, imagine I was going to sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper. They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of a cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all beasts. But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.

 

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but they sat on the great hills to write it. The gave out much less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had stared all day. . . The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

 

But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper, it began to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a most exquisite and essential chalk, behind. I searched all my pockets, but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential. I cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the wise and awful truths which this brown paper art reveals, is this, that white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red hot, it draws roses; when it grows white hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel, or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.

 

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours; but he never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. In a sense our age has realised this fact, and expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it were really true that white was a blank and colourless thing, negative and non-committal, then white would be used instead of black and grey for the funereal dress of this pessimistic period. Which is not the case.

 

Meanwhile I could not find my chalk.

 

I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town near at which it was even remotely probable there would be such a thing as an artist's colourman. And yet, without any white, my absurd little pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for expedients. Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and again, so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely of white chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece of the rock I sat on: it did not mark so well as the shop chalks do, but it gave the effect. And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realising that this Southern England is not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition and a civilisation; it is something even more admirable. It is a piece of chalk.

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Thanks, that was truly a beautiful bit of writing. So now I have been acquainted with Chesterton.

 

If you're looking over my journal you should feel free to throw up a comment here and again. It just lets me know that people are reading, and I keep it up so I can share with the world (I don't see the point in keeping a journal strictly for myself. writing is made to be read by others).

 

I'm curious about your comment about Chesterton being a conservative writer, but do you think from my website I am a conservative person? Curious, because while I may be dashingly liberal in my great state of Texas, I'm quite moderate elsewhere and just like to know where I stand occasionally.

 

Thanks again for the essay. It was really worth the read. And beautiful.

 

Later,

 

Josh

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I'm curious about your comment about Chesterton being a conservative writer, but do you think from my website I am a conservative person?

 

I mentioned Chesterton's conservativism as a writer only in acknowledgment that much of his work might not appeal to modern readers. He is, like two of the other authors in Mr. Seper's pantheon, a distinctly Christian writer. Fans of murder mysteries like to debate whether G.K. Chesterton or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the better detective stories (the Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes stories respectively), but except in those circles, Chesterton is these days rather unfashionable.

Edited by R. Edge
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Guest Charlie Seper

I only allow myself 10-hours of Internet time per month so I'm back only briefly. I copied the responses here and will post more when time permits. Just off the top of my head though...C.S. Lewis was the most apolitical person I know of besides yours truly. I don't understand why anyone would say they disagree with his politics since he almost never mentioned anything about politics unless it was just in passing. He went out of his way in his autobiography to tell people that he had very little use for newspapers and politics.

 

Chesterton was another matter. He "did" own a newspaper after all, so of course he was extremely political.

 

Also, Chesterton penned some real gems. "The Man Who Was Thursday" may well be the best novel ever written in the English language. However, when he was "off" he could be a very poor writer at times. This was especially true of his later works; "The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond" was dreadful. He wrote some outstanding theological works. Catholics like to talk about "Orthodoxy", but it while it had its moments it was nowhere near his best work. "The Everlasting Man" was a phenomenal tour de force in comparative pre-Christian Paganism.

 

Unfortunately, "The Man Who Knew Too Much" is still the only thing by Chesterton ever made into a film. The Orson Wells Players did however once do a radio performance of "The Man Who Was Thursday". Amateur Filmmakers looking for material that could work in a short should check out his short story collection?"The Club of Queer Trades". Its in Public Domain and can easily be found online.

 

As to some comments concerning Dante's Divine Comedy, T.S. Eliot and others... George MacDonald and Lewis' friend and fellow Inkling writer, Charles Williams, were probably the two most knowledgeable people on the subject of Dante and Beatrice that I know of. This is especially true of Williams. Nearly everything he wrote had elements of "Romantic Theology" in them. Personally, while I enjoyed "Paradiso", I felt "The Inferno" and "Purgatorio" were poorly written. (It would be nice if Dante could have been able to simply decide if a person's hand should or should not be able to go through a ghost for instance). However, I suspect few people read the "Commedia" because of its great writing. They read it for its heart.

 

Eliot could be great at times. However, his "Wastelands" was ill-conceived at every turn. An editor friend of mine, Roger Paris, commented a while back about Jessie Weston's, "From Ritual To Romance" having influenced "The Wastelands" and its unfortunately true. Reading "The Wastelands" leaves the same bad taste in my mouth as the childish nonsense of "The Da Vinci Code ".

 

As to Shakespeare, certainly a world class wordsmith. Even his greatest admirers would have to admit however that often his stories didn't really go anywhere. "The Tempest" comes to mind. I've got the complete works but I've never read them all. His sonnets were his best writing in my opinion. But it bugs me the way certain people with an unhealthy interest in occult affairs like to read something spiritual/mystical/occultist (take your pick) in nearly every line he wrote. Its like Weston's stretching to find Gnostic connections between the Arthurian legends and fertility cults. She took "The Golden Bough" and simply ran amuck with it. I still shake my head today and wonder what the hell Eliot was thinking when he was reading her ramblings.

 

Quite honestly though, I think Twain is still the only "great" writer America has ever produced.

 

If its poetry you fancy, try "Kilmeny". I think its still the best piece of poetry I've ever read.

 

http://www.bartleby.com/101/514.html

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Wait, you're talking in depth about authors on a cinematography forum.........why? Please take these comments to somewhere else.

Use your 10 hours of internet time to bore a group of people who care.

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Wait, you're talking in depth about authors on a cinematography forum.........why?  Please take these comments to somewhere else.

Use your 10 hours of internet time to bore a group of people who care.

 

No, we're talking about authors in a TV/DVD forum. And my conversation with somebody else is none of your damn business kiddo. I've got a real low tolerance for the morons-r-us club. If you've got any other tidbits of stupidity to offer me in the future then I suggest we meet in person and talk. Here's my address:

 

345 West H Street

Belleville, IL.

 

What's yours?

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