M Joel W

I'm going to be shooting somethinge either on a mini35 or a Red camera using Nikon lenses. However, I need to do a shot with a rack aperture--along the lines of one of those shots that begins indoors then whip pans outdoors. But I can't mask it or do it in post--just trust me on that one. I also can't rent lenses; just trust me on that one--I need to buy the lens and it needs to be under $1,000 and faster than t2.0. I'd like to just remove the hard stops from a Nikkor and install a focus ring; is there a way? Otherwise, are there any fast lenses under $1,000 with decent optical performance? Thanks...PM me if you want details of the shot, but just trust me on this one.

He had the Black Maria! But, yeah, fair enough. The weather forecast is now "sunny" rather than "mostly sunny" so I may just start the shoot an hour or two early and make sure the weather is good. The shoot's on a roof so I'm not supposed to bring heavy equipment up, both because it could fall and because the roof isn't too strong. Heh... But the concrete pail muslin shade canopy advice is great. I think I must have intentionally set myself up for frustration (no crew, bad conditions, prohibitive location), but if I can't use that trick now, I'll definitely be using it in the near future. Anyhow, thanks again for all the advice. I'm still very new to cinematography, although very passionate about it, and this forum constantly proves to be invaluable.

Sorry if I sounded dismissive; trust me, it's the last thing I mean to be. I actually appreciate the support a tremendous amount. This particular project is borderline home video in budget and I have no crew (maybe one person) to help, so any negative responses on my part are mostly me (unintentionally) venting my frustration that I don't have better resources, especially since this is part of a project which I've been shooting and reshooting for over a year, now, and of which I'm extremely proud but with which I'm equally frustrated. I have some thin shower curtain that works a lot like light diffusion, so I'll see if I can build a frame out of it, and I'll buy some more foamcore as a reflector. Or would a shinier material work? I fear it would cause hotspots. Anyhow, thanks again, and I do mean it.

This is mostly great advice (as I've noticed you usually give), but it applies more to big budget shoots, I think. I really can't afford any additional equipment. I should have been more specific about how low budget this shoot is, though; there's basically no crew and it's on video. The plus side is that I can shoot all I want... And the set up time is next to zero. (No lights, a small tripod, no need for light meter readings.) The down side is that I have no control over light except, basically, black and white foamcore. If I shot the master while it was overcast, could I then shoot shot/reverse while it was sunny if I held a large shower curtain over the talent? I'm trying to cover all bases here. Sunny or shady: either look is fine, but I can't have massive continuity problems. Since I'm on a roof, I can't put the talent in the shade, either. (Plus, video's poor latitude would prohibit this in the first place.) Oh well, maybe I'm just unnecessarily worried...I only need half a minute of footage.

Short Question: How do I deal with partly cloudy conditions on a budget? (Reflectors, no lights powerful enough to make a difference (except maybe a 100w flourescent for close ups), no butterfly). Longer question: I have to shoot under partly cloudy conditions for a scene that will work either under completely cloudy conditions (at any time of day; this would be ideal) or in late afternoon with a clear sky. I have to shoot about 30 seconds of footage total, give or take, and it has to match--it's largely shot/reverse shot with an extremely wide master two shot. It's on a roof if this matters. Should I delay the shoot? The forecast is 12mph winds, and "mostly sunny." I only have reflectors and weak lights (tungstens 1k and under, a 100w daylight flourescent) and no butterfly. I can't get my actors back, but I can cancel the shoot and reshoot in three months, which I don't want to do either. How do I deal with this? I REALLY need help. Thanks so much, -Matt

My point exactly, although I can see how what I wrote was poorly phrased and may have implied that I meant otherwise. Con Air and the Rock had similar casts, the same producer, similar budgets (I believe), etc. One looked a lot better than the other. Michael Bay does have some unique style and talent.

Wow, great stuff! Thanks for the comprehensive reply. Since dichroic filters look "magical" I kind of assumed they might be more efficient.

Why would I buy this? http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller...oughType=search Why I could buy a sheet of CTB for five bucks? Is it more efficient or something? Or is it just more firmly secured?

I wish I didn't agree with you on this point, but I do--completely.

Okay, I'll buy that, with the exception that knowing how a film "works" means that films are harder to appreciate. Many of the best filmmakers are film obsessed, and watch tons of movies worse than their own, often repeatedly--and both enjoy and appreciate them. Understanding the medium should lead you to appreciate it, not dismiss it. That said, you're right about a lack of great films. What, from the past decade, has the promise of really holding up? Maybe The Matrix... Sadly, I can't think of much else... I would like to think that Festen was influential, but I don't think that is the case and its aesthetic is somewhat "radically reactionary" in that it's a call for storytelling over production values. But that doesn't mean one should dismiss the past decade of films entirely. Blame it on auteur theory, but I really enjoyed both War of the Worlds and Munich, and I didn't think either was a great film. By the same token, I don't think The Magnificent Ambersons was that great (very interesting, maybe) but it was a fascinating watch after seeing Citizen Kane. And because of film's brief, largely teleological history, a lot of truly influential films feel dated. For instance, I can recognize that Bicycle Thieves was hugely influential, but I just don't enjoy it that much, and it didn't even feel fresh because I'd seen so many films it inspired before I saw it. If you do want to get into Wyler (of whose films I've still seen very few), check out The Best Years of Our Lives. I actually prefer it, aesthetically, to Renoir, but its story is shamelessly Hollywood. Its use of long takes is pretty stunning, though, and is a wonderful reconcilation of high art aesthetics with Hollywood story-telling and extremely high production values. Lastly, at least cut Spielberg a break. He's making borderline avant garde high art under the guise of blockbusters. Re-watch Minority Report. Even more than Total Recall, even more than Blade Runner, and way more than The Island or what-have-you, it's a real masterpiece of cinematography and a stunning realization of a futuristic world. Just because it's deeply flawed doesn't mean it's not brilliant. And if you dismiss it as conventional or predicatble (especially aesthetically; the script has flaws) you either don't get film at all, or get it so fully that you're de facto the best filmmaker alive. I doubt either is the case.

I take a lot of issue with this statement and not just because you're positing "a book on film style" as somehow inherently superior to whatever other reference point people are using to judge a given director. I agree that Lucas is more important in terms of industry than style, and certainly Renior and Eisenstein (and I would add, above all else, Tolland to this list; his work with Welles and Wyler is mind blowing even today) have been more influential than Spielberg, but I think this is only because their innovations happened so long ago that the entire medium has absorbed them. Spielberg isn't the most influential director ever, but he's probably the most influential of the past 20 years. Also, the fact that you omitted Wyler and Welles from your list hints to me that you have an anti-corporate bias, of which I'm somewhat wary. Genius and commercial success are never mutally exclusive. I also feel that while Eisenstein may have been brilliant and a great formalist, many of his theories were horribly flawed. I've read some Eisenstein (beyond the few essays everyone reads) and not only is his prose incoherent and his structure digressive, a lot his ideas about parsing the image are fundamentally flawed, and many key sequences in his films are based on these theories. Sure, he did some great stuff, and certainly his experimentation has been key to film's evolution, but his most successful ideas were not his alone; they were shared by the other montagists as well and evolved accordingly. I think the reason people take issue with Spielberg is because the quality of his films is somewhat ineffable and impossible to quantify. He's both formal and intuitive and both artsy and commercial and while these are his great strengths, they are also the reasons he's so hard to pin down. Kubrick is pretty formally consistent, but I consider him to be the most "literary" of the great filmmakers. His choice of formal devices is based on the novel: metaphor (both visual and otherwise), symbolism, motifs, what have you. Relatively intelligent people who don't want to engage with the messiness inherent to film form love Kubrick because he's formally rigorous, but within an all-too-literary basis. He's easy to love, and it's easy to understand why you should love him. Heck, he even wrote almost all his films and they're almost all literary adaptations. He has some pretty fantastic and innovative cinematography, too, but I feel he engages with film as a unique medium less than, say, Spielberg, but still more than the average director. Michael Bay I feel is a competent director who can tell a story pretty well. He's also a phenomenally hard worker and a brilliant photographer, so his films are usually only decent, but gorgeously photographed nonetheless. There's an arbitrariness and predictability to his choices (fast cutting, high contrast, super rich colors) that almost makes their efficacy offensive, but his choices still work and are surprisingly hard to replicate. Con Air looks way worse than The Rock and is far less visceral. And when he's not shooting action, his films still look like Michael Bay and the "Suspiria Effect" comes in: yes, it's a stupid story, but it only seems THAT stupid because the photography is so beautiful. Bay is an average director who works hard and has a truly brilliant eye for abstract beauty; if he can transcend the limits of his prior films he has a lot of promise, but I think his work is purely intuitive and not constructed around a rigorous formal basis, so he will never be a true great. I'll still watch every movie he puts out. Spielberg, I think, mediates the line between Bay and Eisenstein. His love of spectacle recalls James Cameron, but I think Cameron uses film form on a very elementary basis. I enjoy his films for their "gee whiz" factor-what's onscreen and not how it's rendered. On the flip side, this is why Cameron is so technologically innovative; his films are more craft than art. All the same, he is an unusually good storyteller, if a poor formalist, and his willingness to enage with new methods of filmmaking forces some formal rigor into his style, because he has to cope with formal devices as-of-yet undiscovered by other filmmakers. (Avatar is going to be 3D and half CGI; its use of these effects will be elementary, sure, but it will also be new and therefore innovative.) But I digress. Spielberg uses form on a very intuitive basis; he engages so completely with film style (one has to assume Kaminski plays some role, too) that you can't really pick out how he's using it. War of the Worlds' use of long takes and aperture framing is just flat-out brilliant, but if I were to systematically try to figure out WHY this works so well and how Spielberg patterns these devices, I couldn't. A lot of formalists (Eisenstein, etc.) have a theory that they try to put to work and the stumbling blocks are that they don't realize said theory perfectly, and usually the theory is flawed. Intuitive directors try to communicate thought directly through the medium, but they fail to delve deep into its possibilities. Spielberg understands film on such a basic and profound level that he engages with it intuitively on a formal level. His films have incredibly formal rigor but not necessarily formal consistency; because he is a true cinematic genius his films are complex, flawed, self-contradictory, and ineffable. He also can't end a movie for his life; I honestly think he gets so involved in his world (so too with David Lynch, another brilliant intuitive formalist, but he uses sound more than image) that he can't find a valid way to leave it. So... Spielberg Rocks!

I made this on minidv. The only "professional" lights used were a lowel tota and a lowel 500w open face: http://homepage.mac.com/mwauhkonen/scenes.mov Only the first shots are effects.

A $500 budget is impossible to begin with, but if you were to shoot 16mm MOS this is even more true. You would need a decent timed telecine, the cost of stock itself, then the camera rental. For my money, an HVX200 is the best bet for someone who wants to shoot something very cheap and "kind of like film." The P2 workflow and variable frame rates feel really magazine-like to me, Panasonic has made this thing produce really pretty colors at the cost of some grain and the footage doesn't feel too different from a lot of medium speed (200ISO) 16mm I've seen and wide open f2.8 it has a similar depth of focus to 16mm at like f5.6 or something. Also the lens is surprisingly sharp wide open. It's also super fast to use; I worked with one recently and we shot for next to nothing, did a ton of set ups, and most of them actually looked pretty good, even without any color timing in post. I'd see if there's some way you could get an HVX, tripod and a softbank light kit for cheap. But $500 really isn't going to cut it; that's barely enough for food...and what locations are you using? If you already have a 24p camcorder, go with that and focus on lighting and composition, which are what really matter. Good luck.

Jason, I was considering doing something similar to this for a scene I want to shoot, but dismissed it as impossible. It sounds like it might not be though. If you don't mind, when you do shoot these scenes (assuming you do choose this method), could you tell me how everything turns out for you and the approximate cost of rental? Thanks, -Matt

Where are these availible? Also, how brights is a 1k (in tungsten watts equivalent)? Given that CTB loses nearly two stops (as mentioned above) would it be approximately the strength of a 250w tungsten bulb? (75w hmi?)

Wow, that sounds phenomenal. I looked briefly online and didn't find much but I'll do a little more research later. A few 575w HMI pars would be fantastic, and I actually prefer 4000K to 5600K in most instances, since I typically gel "day" motivated lights with 1/2CTB rather than full. If you have any more information on where you got your particular par cans that would be great, otherwise I'll just look online and request cataologues where I can. I've been using a 400w growth lamp for a while, by the way, but the shape of the lamp is really unusable for most situations and the ballast is loud. It sure is bright, though.

I've been looking around for a high output but very cheap fill light (to bounce off ceilings, so precise control is NOT an issue) and was considering either a lowel DP light, an arrilite 1k, or a 575w hmi with CTB3/4. I have very little money so the lowel DP light or even a totabrite were tops on my list. I gather that fresnels are dimmer and more expensive so this is not what I want. Then I heard about parnels, which are apparently a cross between a par can and a fresnel. I read that the 575w parnel is four times as efficient as a fresnel or open face, merely less controllable. Is this the case if I bounce it, or is it just because it is an intensely focused beam. What do people think of these lights? Also, are there any affordable 575w HMIs? I know it's a lot of money compared with the other options but it is much more versitile, too. Thanks, -Matt

My project was due the next day, and I don't have access to the photo lab so I just tried regular bleach. I actually wanted a weird effect to cue flashbacks, so I drew flame shapes with a grease pencil and put bleach over it. It removed everything that wasn't penciled in so I had these cool flickery fade ins (from white) that looked surprisingly great. The process sure smelled terrible and left me with a headache, but it was worth it. Thanks for all the advice. I would have loved to try more complicated effects, but my limited schedule got the better of me.

I want to dissolve some of the emulsion from 16mm reversal stock (200ISO B/W Kodak) so that it looks totally transparent. I want to do this over the course of a foot or two to create a "fade in from white" look for a flashback sequence, but with rough edges. The film is already exposed so I can't rack aperture, and it's reversal so I can't do it in lab. Any tips? What dissolves the emulsion but not the base and can then be neutralized so it doesn't destroy the entire film?

Thanks for all the help. I've decided to keep looking around for used inkies, and save on the 1k by buying the lowel rather than an arri, since I'll be bouncing it 90% of the time anyhow. The advice has been really helpful.

Building myself a lighting kit for DV. I want some inky dinks but they're kind of expensive so I'm considering this instead: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller...oughType=search With barn doors, of course. Would this work as well? I want to use it strictly for backlighting, and it needs to have a sharp, sharp beam that is very bright (since I like to put CTB 1/2 on my backlights, if I can motivate it.) Are there any cheaper alternatives to inkies? Also, I need a 1k for bouncing of walls/ceilings and using with a soft box. Will a Britek compare with Arri? I know the build quality will be poor by comparison, but I don't need much control--just a lot of soft light. Is this a good idea? I'll be using these with two 300w and two 650w Arri fresnels. I can't afford much more Arri gear now, though, since I'm a poor college student. Thanks!

Dudes...Oliver Twist had a digital intermediate. The "richness" of film was actually digital manipulation. Oh. Oops. Not saying it can't be done in camera. Saving Private Ryan and Munich have their moments of "wow." The frame grabs are nothing great in terms of shot composition, lighting, whatever. The colors also look a bit garish. But the resolution, lattitude (at least so it seems), and whatever else appears to be there. Sure, you may never get the exact same aesthetic, but whatever. Had I not been told Superman was digital I would have just assumed a strong 2K digital intermediate. And, whatever..it looked great. So give it a rest and give this time. It's exciting to people who don't have access to 35mm film (or have limited access) and even if it's not exactly what you want, it's a step in the right direction for the industry in general.

Yes, I'm a moron. My main character wears a bright white reflective mask and a white t-shirt. I'm shooting video with a 35mm adapter. (dvx100a) So lots of detail in dark areas (but grainy detail; the 35mm adapter and film lenses act as controlled flares) not much highlight headroom. Indoors, it's not a huge problem. I like high contrast so some blown highlights on the mask aren't terrible. I can keep detail in 80% of it, expose the face okay, and be happy in long shots. For close ups, I just light softer or underexpose 1/2 a stop or so and it looks great or at least good enough. Outdoors, well...it's horrible. I've been using a linear polarizer (I like my deep blue skys) and this fixes glare on faces and the most egreious blowouts, which are pretty bad at 3pm, which is about when I shoot (later and the light changes too fast, earlier and it's too close to noon.) But the shirt itself is still a mess. The mask is bad, too. Could I possibly use an "off-white" gray shirt without it reading as gray and find a similar mask and spraypaint it a slightly darker, slightly less shiny finish? There's a fade out between the only indoor shots with the mask/shirt and outdoor shots with a mask/shirt so it's not like a sudden switch, but I still don't trust this method. The dark areas wouldn't look true white I don't think, but I can't underexpose a whole stop or two (what it necessary for enough detail for me to be happy) because the dvx is noisy as hell. Suggestions? The polarizer helps and the results are "good enough" that I can life with them, but bad enough that they really really really bug me. Edit: I now realize this doesn't really have to do with "lighting" but with dealing with different kinds of light. My bad; feel free to move.

Sorry to revive a dead thread, but this has been bugging me for the longest time. In Munich he does the same thing, but highlights seem to bloom as though they were out of focus even when they are in focus. Street lamps have perfect halos around them, and windows give similar halos to the edges of characters in frame. It reminds me of a tiffen star filter but with perfect circles instead of stars. It's not just a double fog or diffused highlight look (which he has too) but something unusual and very cool looking. Does anyone know exactly how he does this? Also, was Munich a digital intermediate or merely heavily processed in lab? I'm kind of a newbie to cinematography, but I have to know how Kaminski gets this look since it's so distinctive and really brings a contrast and surreal power to the frame. (I also like how he integrated it with zooms and a grainy (Vision 500 stock?) aesthetic in Munich.) I hope American Cinematographer has an issue on it.