Phil Connolly

I've sometimes seen adverts for Female camera op's that relate to the content. For instance documentaries that are are shot in spaces that aren't accessible to men. Or you can imagine a doc about sexual abuse, you might have a preference of crew gender for certain contributors. In those cases I think specifying is justified - if the role is gender specific and sometimes it is (but it's very rare). Same with casting actors, your not discriminating by advertising a role to specific gender. Women are massively under represented in the camera department, for no good reason and I do think its a good thing to encorage more diversity in the role. However us just having conversations in male spaces (such as this board pretty much) are only going to be able to express one side of the story. Personally, I don't like the idea of positive discrimination - but I have remember I'm looking at the issue from the perspective of a white, middle class, male - so I'm looking at it from a privileged position. Something like a DOP role should be given on merits only, however the meritocracy isn't working currently in terms of diversity. I like to have more open ended job adverts that don't discriminate specifically, but you could say "We would particularly like to see applications from female DOP's..." then it's going to potentially encourage more women to apply or if you have more adverts that open to diversity, that filters down and encourages people organically. If you male you can still apply, but you'd be going in with the awareness that you might not be what they are looking for and either decide not to go for it or make a really compelling case to be hired.

nice... works better on wider sensors. Looking at getting one of those SLR Magic Anamorphics to experiment with

Indeed I've never been able to get my zooms to look that good on a servo I directed a Multi-cam music show at the NFTS and they hired a team of retired BBC ents cameramen. So they proabably had a combined experience of 300 years. The operating was scary good - zooms and moves transitioning into each other. this is also while booming up and down on the Ped and pulling your own focus. At the high level broadcast operating is amazing - and when your live your having to hold concentration for hours at a time and offering perfect shots the whole time. I have upmost respect for live TV guys. It's really challenging - the concentration factor is a big part of it.

Indeed I've never been able to get my zooms to look that good on a servo I directed a Multi-cam music show at the NFTS and they hired a team of retired BBC ents cameramen. So they proabably had a combined experience of 300 years. The operating was scary good - zooms and moves transitioning into each other. this is also while booming up and down on the Ped and pulling your own focus. At the high level broadcast operating is amazing - and when your live your having to hold concentration for hours at a time and offering perfect shots the whole time. I have upmost respect for live TV guys. I dont have the concentration for live multi-cam - too nerve wracking

I do like the Barry Ackroyd twitchy zooms, more about added energy to the frame then a "move" per se. I used to do a bit of multi-cam ped work, mastering the zoom on those productions was the key to success. Often you have to use a combination of Zoom + Move - to get the shots quickly enough on a live production. The really good operators could transition from a push in to a zoom in on the same shot so smoothly you can't spot the difference. Also on multi-cam you can't always put the camera in the "Best" position because of straying into other cameras shot - so your typically working the zoom much harder. I use zooms less in my own work now, because generally primes look better and it's not cost effective to carry both. I don't want to spend budget on both zoom + primes (its either or) and 35mm Zoom's tend to be big and heavy. It's easier to be mobile with a small prime. So even if I want a cheeky zoom I won't have a lens to do it. Also at a pinch on a 4K camera - I can add it in post

Rode are just a bit uneven - the NTG-3 we still have, work great and sound great. The dead ones are dead - but they worked and sounded good for 4 or 5 years. I've used the NT1 for years in music production and for a long period of time it was crazy good for the price. You couldn't get a large diaphragm condenser as good at the price point. Rode did disrupt the market and bring prices down. They make a decent wind zeppelin and fluffy for the price. I've never had an issue with them sonically, they perform well at the price point. Just some reliability issues on the NTG-3's, but that was on mics manufactured 10 years ago. I can't comment on their current build quality. There are more options on affordable mic's now, so it's probably worth shopping round. But the mid range sennheisers seem to be the most common mics, I encounter on most productions. There are higher end audiophile mics, but the 416. MKH50 and 60 suit most circumstances. Also in cinema screenings some nuance is lost, because the speakers are behind the screen - some HF detail is rolled off. So ultra high end recording won't be heard by the audience also horn loaded cinema speakers aren't exactly hifi. Also sometimes it's about having different mics for different situations. e.g on my last shoot we had a MKH50 and 60. The 60 is more directional and less forgiving of poor boom swinging. So in some locations the MKH50 sounded better and outdoors the 60 was preferable. Sometimes the Lapel mic audio sounds better and sometimes the boom (we recorded both). Ideally being able to be flexible is good. Booms for instance don't work that well on wide shots and lapel mics are dependant on costume choices. I once spoke to a sound recordist that did period drama with quite a lot of nude/sex scenes and he had to resort to hiding mics in the actors wig's...

At the higher end of the scale. I'm editing a short film with a scene shot close to a lake, where lots of children were feeding the ducks and gulls. On set it sounded like the Birds - with loud screeches and quacks. The location looked beautiful on camera but it was not a good choice for audio. I was expecting to probably have to ADR at least some of the scene. We had a Sennhiser MKH 60 on the boom and I was incredibly impressed how well it rejected the background noise (we also had a great sound recordist/boom) swinger. The audio turned out totally usable. In that situation with a less directional mic we would have been forced into ADR and expensive post production fixes. Its an expensive microphone, but with sound often you have to deal with less then perfect location sound. Sound can be improved with post techniques, but once you get into ADR its slow and expensive to nail. At that point its better to have just spent the money upfront and hired the better gear/sound recordist. Comparatively sound gear is cheap. A £1000 microphone is up with the best there is and will last (as Aapo states) 20-30 years, paying for itself many times. On the budget end, I've found Rode NT3's to sound very close to the Sennhiser 416 they are based on. Its difficult to tell the difference. But at the University I work at, they brought 10 NTG-3's and 4 x416's about 15 years ago. Since then about 4 of the NTG-3's have just died but all the 416's are still in service. We have been replacing the NTG-3 with the MKH 60's which sound noticeably better. They cost quite a bit more, but are hopefully a good investment and will last as long as our 416's which we still use. I've found (in the UK at least) hiring microphones isn't that expensive or just find sound recordist you can bring on with all the gear. For a drama shoot you ideally need at least 1 or 2 boom mics, 2 or 3 radio lapels and multichannel recorder. An investment that's going to be in the £5k+ bracket. Still much cheaper then camera gear, but a big investment if your not planning on doing sound as your main line of work.

The wikipedia article mentions split screen

Nah, just seems like cheating. Its not proper cinema unless your using a 3 strip camera with 5ASA rated filmstock - and using carbon arc lighting. Digital, natural light? bah - true cinema happens on a sound-stage.. with a camera the size of a fridge and enough light to cook a steak and kidney pie

Guess you've never seen Bladerunner then.

It depends on the mic - you didn't say which sennheiser - for instance the ME66/K6 doesn't sound as good as the MKH60 I would be very surprised a $15 mic was in the same ballpark soundwise to a proper sennheiser shotgun, the off axis rejection and noise in the sennheiser should be noticeably better. So maybe your not monitoring the recording on the best speakers. e.g all mics sound similar monitored over laptop speakers. Sometimes you can get a cheap bit of kit that sounds surprisingly good. I've used the built in mics on zoom's etc and they are quite usable. In good conditions its possible to get usable results. The place where a sennheiser shot gun will come into its own is when the location sound is more problematic - maybe there's more background noise or you can't get the mic that close. In those situations a better mic is more noticable. In situations where the background noise is low and you can put the mic in a good position you can get away with a cheaper unit. In terms of cost vs performance. It's similar to comparing a GOPRO vs an Alexa. The Alexa is better, but its not 200X better as its price dictates

The formula for conversion is a standard piece of maths , everyone does it the same way: Y = (0.257 * R) + (0.504 * G) + (0.098 * B) + 16 Cr = V = (0.439 * R) - (0.368 * G) - (0.071 * B) + 128 Cb = U = -(0.148 * R) - (0.291 * G) + (0.439 * B) + 128 Different companies may compress the chroma resolution different ways e.g 3:1:1, 4:2:0. 4:1:1 etc.. but it would affect all the colours together rather than lose resolution in the red's etc... Both U and V contain red information for instance. And you need U and V to be the same resolution to get a proper image... Historically the chroma resolution would have been crushed using an analogue low pass filter. All low pass filters can potentially create artifacts - so different companies may have used different filters that "might" have produced artifacts that might have caused colours to decode wrong. NTSC suffers from Phase errors that messed up the proper decoding of colour. PAL flipped the phase of the signal on alternating lines, to cancel out any colour errors - resulting in better colour. Also with analogue formats the Chroma would need to be encoded on a carrier signal so it can be transmitted - this carrier also can be accientially decoded as "colour" resulting in moire patterns. In digital land - the RGB to YUV conversion is more accurate and repeatable. Its still a good and simple way to compress the size of the file with limited visual artifact. We don't need Y:u:v any more (since black and white TV's aren't a thing) but it's still ubiquitous in broadcasting and cameras.

Nope - 4:4:4 maps to R:G:B But 4:2:2 is Y:U:V Y = is luma (or black and white image) U and V are colour difference signals (not actual colours) RGB can be mathematically derived from Y:U:V In terms of thinking about resolution. 4:2:2 is basically the image has a full resolution black and white image and the colour component is half the resolution as luma. That's for all the colours as they are mixed together in the U and V colour difference signals 4:1:1 - colour is 1/4 the resolution as the luma. In some formats you have 4:2:0 - that means full resolution luma. Half resolution U for one line and no V. Then half resolution V on the next line but no U = so two lines need to be averaged to get both colour difference signals. So that results in a file that has half the vertical colour resolution of 4:2:2 Basically it's a way of compressing the data without losing much resolution. It works in the way a water-colour painting works. If you take a splody low resolution watercolour painting and then go over it with black pen and ink - it suddently becomes a high resolution image. The eye responds to the detail in the black lines and even if the colour is soft - the image looks sharp. In YUV - the fine detail is carried in the luma signal and the colour difference only needs to be good enough. That's why for broadcast 1/4 resolution colour difference is considered acceptable. In YUV - the 3 colours are encoded with the same resolution. The process stems from NTSC - where they needed to make a colour TV format that was backwards compatible with Black and White TV's. To do that a Luma (black and white) image would need to be transmitted. Its more efficient to transmit Luma + 2 x colour difference. Compared to separate RGB and Luma

The Black Magic Video Assist is very good and you get a handy field monitor in the package

I'm sure it did, but it can't technically be better then a 4K DCP on a Laser projector . So the preference comes from enjoying the artifacts of film - e.g grain, flicker - they perhaps add to experience while degrading the image - interesting I guess the vinyl trend is the same thing. Records can't reproduce music with the same degree of accuracy that digital systems can. So when people prefer the sound, they are responding to the formats flaws - e.g the added distortion and HF roll off. Sometimes distortion makes a thing sound subjectively better, even when its not technically better

You also get slightly better contrast the Xenon DLP projectors and a 70mm print from a 4K source is probably higher resolution then the more common 2K projectors. But outside the "film-look", its a combination of a sales gimmick. And didn't studios agree to buy a certain amount of filmstock to safeguard film manufacturer. The odd 70mm print of Aeronaughts keeps the film infrastructure alive ready for the next Nolan effort. I guess if they make more money of tickets from "film fans" they will keep doing it. Lots of rep theatres make a big deal of classic screening's on 35mm, even in many situations the prints aren't in a good state and DCP would look a lot better Personally I don't seek out 70mm prints from digital productions, not much point watching something that's a couple generation's away from the master and potentially scratched. It's not going to look better than a 4k laser screening of the same film - it can't add quality on potentially add artifacts. Roma for instance, wasn't that printed on Colour stock? Black and white films on colour stock don't look good.

Persistence is the main thing and it can't really be taught. I've been starting to get what feels like a bit of traction this year... ten years on from graduating film school. Sure I get frustrated when you see people racing ahead and finding success quickly. But in my own case, it's taken me awhile to actually focus on the thing I want to do and find an approach that works for me. Sometimes you end up going down a lot of blind alley's trying stuff out. But i'm also a better filmmaker because of it.

A jumper allow's you to plug a light/cable into a domestic 13 amp mains socket. You'd normally run the lights off the 16amp cable and add a jumper if you want to plug it into a domestic socket

Did you try Bell? https://bell-theatre.com/35mm-70mm-optical/

I've found the same, be versatile or be out of work. I've had a varied career that's covered everything from Broadcast Engineering, Camera Operating, DOPing, Directing, Editing, entertainment development and most recently I've been writing the scripts for a BBC Documentary series, which I would never have seen coming 5 years ago. The downside is my CV/resume can look a bit confusing to potential employers and I've not fully mastered one thing. I most like directing drama and I'm pushing in that direction, but have to take jobs in multiple fields - which at this point is frustrating. Because I have less time to develop my career in my preferred direction. I'm not complaining its good to have interesting work. I'm enjoying the challenge of researching and writing 4 x 50 min scripts for this current gig. But on the flipside progress on the edit for my short narrative film has stalled because all my creative energy is working on the doco thing. Still you have to take the work that's offered and I'm happy I'm able to pay the bill's working in a creative field - regardless of the specific role. I think portfolio careers are more common especially in the UK. And sometimes people can have very diverse talents and not be put in a particular silo- e.g Mike Johnson was a really excellent Focus Puller/1st AC who went on to write Guy Richie's "Sherlock Holmes" and "Mute" with Duncan Jones

I guess it depends on the school. But there are some roles that are hard to learn without actually doing it. Sure you can now buy and camera and affordable edit software and learn that way. Things also have changed - I went to film school 12 years ago. Film was still a going concern and good colour correction needed to be done on a £250k Quantel/Baselight system. So the advantage of film school then was getting experience on the best tools that were hard for an individual to access. Now tools are less of an issue, digital gear is accessible to more people. The amount of tutorials on youtube has exploded for technical instruction. You can cover the basics yourself and get crew discipline from working in junior role on set. In my own teaching (I teach on two Bachelor of Arts production degrees), I've found myself concentrating less on the technical instruction. Because it's available online. My focus is being rigorous about content, structure and story and that's usually the area the needs the most work. I do have students that are very technically accomplished and on their projects the role of a tutor is to act as a sounding board for ideas and question their practice and ideas. Basically to push them out of their comfort zone.

That's not what you said. Be precise in your language. Also I don't think 98% are a joke, what evidence do you have for that? If you don't have direct experience of many courses you shouldn't make sweeping statements. Film education needs to be looked at in a nuanced way and there are plenty of people that come to this board looking for unbiased advice to base life changing decisions on. Banding around "everything is a Joke" when you really don't know, isn't that helpful. I do think there are problematic film courses and fee's charged can be very high. But it's not really possible to gauge the value from an external view point. Even if you encounter a student that has a bad experience and is critical of a course, that could mean so many things - from either the course is bad, to they just had a bad time. Measuring the success of a course and its value is really difficult, you need a lot of data to do it properly. There are plenty of people the don't need film school, they have a good work ethic, natural aptitude and an ability to "self-learn". There are plenty of self-taught filmmakers that do amazing work. Other people learn in other ways and many students do benefit from the structure imposed by a formalised education. You can't lump everyone in the same boat.

Except when it isn't - as stated earlier the NFTS isn't. It has excellent equipment, A decent size soundstage for ambitious set builds and full service post production including Dolby Atmos mixing. There are plenty of rubbish film courses, but don't make sweeping statements. What ever flaws the NFTS has, its an excellent place to learn cinematography These clip of NFTS student work look's pretty good to my eyes: But of course not the only route. I've worked with great NFTS trained DOP's and great self taught/industry trained DOP's - attitude and approach is the most important thing.

It's a more subtle take - but the first clip is pretty close to the look. The clips all exhibit mixed colour temperatures with warmer and blue/green on screen at the same time

I once read that Aardman put alarms on all their lights, in case a bulb blows during a break and they don't spot it. Probably overkill for a small project, but if your using quite a few lights in a set up. It's probably worth double checking they are all on, each time you step away and back.