Phil Connolly

Wild card entry: "Bait" (2019) - not technically "good" due to the hand processing, but some very striking and beautiful images

I think it counts - same with black and white movies shot on RGB Bayer sensors and desaturated.. Like Roma, Nebraska Surely the interesting thing is how the end result looks and the creative use of the B & W colour pallet, rather then the specific tools used to get there. I would agree the black and white "editions" of colour movies like Fury Road and Parasite - perhaps shouldn't be considered "black and white" movies. But Deakins workflow was about improving the on screen image quality in a time when the choice of black and white stocks was very limited.

Sorry brain fart - meant "Nebraska", it seems I confuse my american states that begin with "N" Both great films

The Elephant Man The Man who wasn't there Nashville Pi

Also it's unlikely cell phones would actually resolve 8K. The file might have 8k pixels - but they probably won't have 8k worth of visible detail. The lens and the compression being the limiting factor. Also at the moment there isn't a D-cinema projector that's above 4K. So a 8 to 12k scan couldn't be screened - unless you lasered it out to IMAX stock and screened it in one of the 10 or so 15/70 screens. Personally I have to be very close to the screen to see a difference between 2k and 4k. Above that your into diminishing returns.

Cool work but very much a secret sauce I wish he'd release a product that contains his code... I think he'd sell many

Have a look at the display prep demo by Steve Yeldin http://www.yedlin.net/DisplayPrepDemo/ Shows you can pretty much nail the film look with post production tools. Doing a film out would also add some film artifacts, but as others have said it's expensive and print stocks are very finely grained so the look might be quiet subtle. I have also seen more homebrew film outs done by filming off a monitor, to get some interesting grungy looks - if you can the sync to work. This film's process was Hi8 video, filmed off a CRT monitor to super 16 and then telecined to HDCAMSR. At the time we all thought the director was mad. we were probably right

I saw it last night in 4K laser projection looked great. The level of craft on the film was amazing, some fantastic art direction. I thought the lighting in the flare's sequence was extraordinary, just stunning. The single shot idea I think worked for somethings and not others. At times it felt more immersive, but it also made me spot story beats and structural elements (particularly in the script) that existed only to continue the shot. The long take (as is often the case) draws attention to itself and actually reduces immersion - when your thinking "blimey how did they do that?", your not involved in the story and characters. Also I think they undermined the idea by going from Day to night to day in a 2 hour period, it didn't feel like a continuous shot or a real time chunk of time. The story felt "edited" because of those arbitrary structural elements. Because the light changed so much it wasn't a continuous flow, other single take films like Timecode, Hardcore Henry, Lost in London, Russian Ark - felt more like a continuous moment. e.g the french woman celler scene existed to hide the transition from night to day, rather than serving the story - it added nothing to the protagonists story and no new information was revealed. Same with the truck sequence - it existed for geographic reasons to move the character to a different location quickly - but in a conventional film, you'd probably cut it out. I would have probably enjoyed the film more as a conventionally shot and edited film - the pacing could have then been improved. But if you do that it becomes a much more conventional film and it wouldn't be getting the notice its getting now. We are all talking about the continuous shot and paying more attention to the film because of it. So the choice to make the film this was paid off in terms of box office and impact.

and this

hmmm Maybe look at music videos/promos - Dougal Wilson did some pretty cool oners(sometimes stitched): The Orange dance although a TV advert is basically a short film with story told through dance and shot on stedicam - so maybe relevant

A good visual inspection would give you an idea of the state of the wiring, a newer build would probably reliably supply. Maybe some locations would have higher rated cooker/kitchen circuit. It might be a time to transition to more LED fixtures, so maybe you end up using less tungsten. As well as reducing your power requirements, heat has got to be an issue in Australia at the moment. On those 40+ degree C days, a tungsten lit set has got be uncomfortable.

Juggling freelance work and parenting is difficult full stop. Pregnancy, recovery etc.. also necessitate more time off, which I guess at some point makes it harder to get back on the loop. My good lady wife VFX Compositor her indoors, had time off due to having our child. It coincided with the industry shifting to a different set of software tools (bad timing huh?). So her skillset and experience was obsoleted during her short(ish) time away. It was also difficult to learn the new software, limited external training, expensive license. It would have been easier to transition to the new software while in employment (the post houses trained the teams, mentoring existed, time was given to it). She looked at trying to get back into the work and everything had moved on and she'd be expected to be upto speed straight away. Add parenting duties into the mix and it wasn't practical. Things like that, can derail a specific career. Sure it's a choice and my wife is happier being a parent and has since retrained as is now doing something else. But she was working at a high level her team won the VFX Oscar for the Dark Knight and it would be hard to get back to that level. Other companies, in employment sectors manage parenthood better, with ways to support people back into work after having children. The rough and tumble world of London post production no chance - the attitude is "your lucky to be here", circumstances change they won't expend effort to try and make it work - they don't need too, they get 200 speculative CV's a week. The media infrastructure is too precarious and small prodco's working with mostly freelance staff, are not good at nurturing long term careers or supporting employees. Look at the way google treats its workers, it would be unthinkable in TV/Film. We wear the fact that working in this field is an ordeal as a badge of pride - putting up with years of crap, in the land of landing a nice creative HOD position in the distant future. Any business studies graduate working at entry level bluechip firm wouldn't believe the crap better qualified production runners deal with. I also worked in London post production for 6 years, work life balance was not that thing that's possible. It's a shame, I wouldn't have been able to be a parent and continue that career path. Hence I also made choice to step off that ladder. Is a shame that sometimes you have to choose between home life and career. This choice does impact women more, in some relationships Men's career prospects are less impacted by parenting.

Isn't there a potential issue with some 35mm lenses being too wide for some 16mm cameras hitting the viewfinder etc... The Arri 416 was designed be fine with 35mm glass but the SR3 can have issues?

Also, be aware that you might fail (I hope you don't), but you might not be talented enough or have a personality the fits or unlucky or get ill. Sometimes (especially in film) you here the mantra - if you want it enough and work hard enough you'll get there. That's nonsense, look at actors, the vast majority of them fail to have a sustainable career. You could be talented, but unlucky or personal circumstances get in the way, not getting to the top of the profession, isn't because you didn't try hard enough. You can do everything "right" and it still won't work out for you. It's important to know when to cut your losses or switch it up. This isn't to be negative, just realistic, sometimes we can discover the thing we are good at when we are failing at something else. There are absolutely things that I attempted that I discovered that I'm not talented enough to really excel. I like the director Shane Meadows anecdote about how he attempted to make films only after he met a really talented musician(Gavin Clark). The meeting demonstrated, why Shanes dream of being a musician was a dead end because he'd never be as good as Gavin.

We may not be able to agree on gender politics, but at least we can all agree that digital is better than film right? That's safer ground for discussion .... i'll get my coat

I made the point badly, i wasn't making a personal criticism - you should be able to hire anyone you want. Also right now even if you set out to hire a female dop it would be more difficult because there are vastly fewer to choose from. I also get the impression that your probably a cool and fair employer who isn't discriminating against people on gender grounds etc... but maybe your in the minority? I don't think my own productions have been too problematic either. But the industry as a whole potentially has issues. We can on our own productions try to do our best not to be a dick. But I think is wrong to assume because our experiences are X, that others are the same. I also don't know if its a problem or not, some industries are Male or Female dominated and that's fine. The nuance is crazy complex we are talking about things that very hard to define from our personal limited perspectives. Positive discrimination doesn't really work, at worst you risk inventing new resentments. I frequently get angry with the BFI, because I feel excluded by their fairly explicit biases that exclude me. And had I got an opportunity because I was in a specific ethnic group, I'd resent it because I'd feel like I hadn't earned it properly. It's totally not cool Buuuuut if you did some research and got meaningful stats that said Women for reason X were being discriminated against, I don't think we (as a society) should do nothing either. How that looks like would be complex and ideally more sophisticated than what some of the more clunky attempts to redress the balance look like now

I think i was arguing against positive discrimination, that's not the fix and individual hires can't enforce balance. But in camera departments at least I don't think it's happening constantly. Stuart, not getting a role because he's male, is one singular incident - it's not enough statistical data to ascertain if it's an actual trend or perceived one. I only have a my own perspective and I have been discriminated against for being male, and it totally sucks. But has it happened to me more in general then an average woman? I don't know - but I think we should be able to agree whatever the form discrimination shouldn't happen but it does. That's why I think education and training is ultimately the most sensible solution. Richard shouldn't be punished for not hiring a women DOP thats just going to piss him off, then he would sue Canada again or something, that solves nothing and might result in a Blue Brothers comeback film to pay the legal bills. But doing nothing and accepting the Status Quo (except maybe Matchstick Men), we don't have to do that either. We can all do small positive things to help encourage diversity when merited. And I say this as a person who has on occasion been sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, classist - its because know I'm a flawed person, with baggage and a ton of personal biases generated from my upbringing etc... I know for a fact at times I've been part of the problem. The overall issues are societies to fix, as a small part of society I can try and act in a way that is good and fair and to be honest I'll probably fail, some random bit of bias will kick in and I'll be unfair. The idea that anyone can be truly "woke" i think is nonsense. So I reckon there is a problem because I'm part of the problem, we all are.

Yep I've been doing my best, we've done some "kit" robots and she goes to coding club. Right now shes good, but even at 7 years old, I've spotted her picking up on boy stuff/girl stuff negativity.

I guess you can go too far in the other direction and I agree positive discrimination causes more problems than it fix's and patronising to the people it benefits. I guess the point I'm making is it's a good idea to have a system that gets the best person for the job is a good thing. If discrimination prevents that, then finding ways to reduce discrimination is a good thing. In the UK class based discrimination is quite a thing, most the senior BBC producers/execs are privately educated, my experiences are in the UK at least, the best person does not get the job, not in the media, it goes to Bunty/Tor/Topher/Alex the child of daddies friend at the club and that's why the bulk of the BBC's output is unwatchable. (bitter much?). Nepotism is a big an issue as gender based discrimination. Looking from the outside the US film industry seems a bit more "merit" based e.g if you good people will give you opportunities. My daughter is dual nationality with a US passport, so she has that option for the future. To be honest we'd have left for US already if American healthcare wasn't so precarious.

I've been involved in hiring panels where we used anonymised CV's. I guess it can help on the first sift - although because the people applying had their credits listed on their CV's I could have jumped on IMDB to work out who they are (If I wanted to break the system). When you interview people it's no longer anonymous, but for the first pass of looking through the applications and deciding who to invite to interview, there's no reason why the practice can't be done more. I found it really straightforward. The only issue is there is extra admin for the HR dept to clean up the CV's. Easier to do in big organisations with good HR. Film production is a bit slack on the HR front. Other simple thing to do is have both men and women on the interview panel and score the candidates mathematically - helps cut down on any unintentional biases. Its human nature to hire people that reflect your self back to you, a cambridge grad will hire a cambridge grade because of common ground. If you have male white middle class HOD's even if they are well intentioned, they are more likely going to hire people similar to themselves which keeps everything the same. Personally I don't think the diversity issue in film and TV production is mostly a gender issue. In the UK at least class is particularly toxic, the privately educated upper classes have big chunks of the entertainment industry sown up. Its very hard for us proles to break into the upper echelons, after all chucking Phoebe Waller Bridge a million awards/commissions does little for true diversity

Sure, thats why its not a thing that can dealt with on an individual production. I don't disagree with you, on a producer level you just want to get your film made and hire the best people. As long as your hiring practices are merit based - its not your job to "fix" the industry. My own hiring practices are similar, I don't positively discriminate either. But if you look at the sector, maybe there's a structural issue that could be improved. Diversity needs to be supported by society as a whole, how children are taught, what they see in the media, the way benefits and child care are provided for. The hiring choices of an individual film producer can't rebalance that. Also gender roles can be really hard coded into society, with negative stereotypes re-enforced all the time. I have a 7 year old daughter and it's very upsetting when she comes home from school crying because she's been told she can't do X, because X is a boy thing and she's a girl. Life choices are limited by stupid gender based peer pressure right from an early age. My daughter right now wants to become Robot Scientist (shes 7), I hope that passion for science doesn't get lost in her teenage years, if peer pressure forces her to conform to gender stereotypes. I'm not even joking the amount of work I have to do on a weekly basis to try and debunk all these stupid peer (and teacher) generated life limiting gender stereotypes. Hopefully she is allowed to like Disney princesses, computer programming and robots. I'm shocked at how little progress has been made and she is already exposed to bullshit because she's a girl. So my comments come as the parent of an awesome 7 year old girl - I don't want her life choices and dreams to be limited because of gender based discrimination that does exist in some sectors of employment. I'm also hoping she doesn't grow up in a Mad Max style dystopia either (more likely). I also understand that life isn't fair for anyone and success in many fields is now more related to your parents income then an individual's talent. But I agree its very difficult to resolve, society likes to categorize things and gender roles are pretty hard coded into humanity and males and females are biologically different. Personally I can't solve the world either but what I do try to do is: - try to be fair when I hire people, look at the merit of their work and try very hard not to allow any of my personal biases come into play (maybe not always possible) - I also teach film production, I try to mix up crew roles when I'm organising student productions and I screen examples of diverse filmmakers and I try to be equally demanding of all students. Things are hard. Maybe we should just argue about film vs digital, its less contentious.

Richard, I get why positive discrimination can get messy fast. But if the actual situation on the ground, for whatever reason makes it harder for equally talented/motivated women to succeed compared to their male counter parts. In that situation is it not better to try and level the playing field a bit more? Isn't it the case that we should aspire to a "fair" system? It can also benefit the actual films, the more diverse the people able to make film's, the more diverse and interesting the films could be. If you have mostly white, male, middle class, directors of a certain age, making films it seems you'd just end up with tons of boring superhero movies. Your not going to have a situation where David (or anyone) is or should going to step aside for a women, that argument is madness. I'm not going to give up on my career either, because white middle class men are over-represented in my field. But I'd like to think that if I was up for a job against a women, it would be a fair fight and they weren't disadvantaged for reasons of sexism etc.. I don't think it should be adversarial - it's not that women are taking jobs from the boy's. We shouldn't be on different teams. In an ideal world, we are all just filmmakers and should be discriminated by our talent/ability/work ethic etc.. not gender. I don't know for certain, to what extent gender discrimination happens in cinematography. As a male I don't experience it and I've not spoken to enough women about their experiences. But even if I've not seen it happen personally, It would be wrong for me to state it doesn't exist. As a producer yourself you hire the best people that apply, often for camera dept roles you don't get many female applicants. The question is are we fine with that or not? The opposite would be true if I were advertising for make-up artists. The issue in the camera dept is if there are excellent potential female dop's that would like to progress and are disadvantaged for sex reasons. The reality is complex and doubt any of the great women DOP's coming up would appreciate being considered victims either. The conversation on this board lacks female perspectives and as bunch of guy's we can't truly know what issues women encounter. It can be very subtle, few employers these days are going to be outright "sexist" but I gather at times the experience can be death by a thousand cuts that just wears people down.

Its very different to measure though, there are fewer female DOPs (particularly at the high end). But its going to be tricky to ascertain what percentage of that is due to: A: A smaller proportion of women want to be DOP's B: Fewer opportunities for women to become DOP's and move up The real answer is probably something of both and we'd agree A isn't a problem and B is. I do think its changing in my year (2009) at the NFTS the gender mix was 66/33 (male/female) on the Cinematography MA I'm teaching an undergrad cinematography elective at the moment and the split is about 50/50 really even - so the balance may shift. Some careers do make it harder for women to progress to the higher levels, in Academia in the UK gender pay gap is about 15% (in favour of men). In many departments there are similar numbers of female academics to men, also people are generally paid the same a Male senior lecturer gets the sames as a female. The pay gap occurs due to fewer women landing the more senior roles: Dean, VC, Full profetc... So is that because they don't want climb the ladder, or something else? In most western societies women take on the greater brunt of child rearing duties etc... and being a parent can negatively impact the mother more than the father. Very demanding jobs like academia can end up with this built in gender bias. The rockstar female academics at the highest level are less likely to be parents than their male equivalents. You only have to look at the lack of maternity time/funding. I've also been told by a previous "boss" he would never hire a women in case they took maternity leave and left him out of pocket. I understand both his position in struggling to fund 15 weeks paid leave, but he's reducing employment options for women on the off chance they "might" get pregnant. (it's probably illegal but there you go) So on some level women are still disadvantaged in some careers and if that's the case in the camera dept. As Richard notes women are more represented in the highest levels of some departments, particularly producing. So is producing more accessible to women then cinematography or is it just that more women prefer it? From a male perspective, I'm not in a position to call. The quoted article considers if the work of women cinematographers is devalued, I'm not sure that's not so much the case anymore. Sue Gibson BSc was a visiting tutor at the NFTS, while I was there and believe me, no one doubted her abilities. In my own experiences is been more of a numbers game, when I advertise a job looking for a DOP I get very few applications from women. As a director maybe 3-5% of the productions I've done had a female DOP/Camera op - so I guess this 5% statistic could be true.

It's also just hard There are many more good DOP's then decently paying gigs. Even with a good portfolio it can be tough. Building a career takes a lot of work. Either get trainee/assisting work and move up. Work for a equipment rental company Tips would be: - Get your portfolio looking as good as it can, if you have to do personal projects/unpaid work to get it looking nice, do that. No one will pay you to work if you can't prove you've done it before. You may have to set up a project to demo a skill - e.g offer a business a freebie if they are photogenic. - DOP portfolios have to be relevant to the job your applying too. If the job is Documentary/corporate video, you need to show you can shoot a nice interview, sending a drama reel would be a waste of time. As a director I have a seperate drama, corporate and music showreel and I'm working on pulling together a food photography reel, because I've done a few food things recently and it seems to be a growth area in demand in my market. - Cast your net widely when applying for jobs - look at jobs sites, freelancing sites (maybe avoid upwork), facebook groups - find all the networking areas. Apply to many jobs - early on you hit rate might only be 1 or 2 %, so it's very much a numbers game. Send every local production co your CV and Reel, follow up. Anything that pays is professional and lots of prod co's use facebook groups. I'm writing a BBC Worldwide documentary series at the moment, A job I got by sending my CV to a facebook advert. That sort of thing doesn't happen often but when it does its nice. - Once you have some clients, remind them you exist - touch base, show them new work etc... I sometimes got jobs from a prod co just because I emailed them to tell them about something else, it just puts you on their radar. - Be excellent on set/job etc... The work needs to be good, your attitude needs to be good, timescales and deadlines should be hit. - It is possible to get jobs from cold applying and sending CV but its rare. - Develop a range of skills/clients so your not dependant on one thing. - Network and talk to people. And when your not busy make opportunities, make personal projects get your work out there, be visible. You have to hustle to make it work. Having kit is less important than attitude. But at the end it's just difficult, lots of people want to work in the media (particularly the camera department), many of them will be really good, some will have advantages of money/connections/time. There are a finite amount of jobs and it seems freelance fee's have been driven down in many markets. Its hard to get work, it's hard to get paid - it's not impossible but takes time and work. Hopefully you can find a way to make it work and build up enough of a reputation that people start coming to you. Otherwise, you might find it's not worth it, there are easier ways to make a living (like brain surgery)

Many screens will be calibrated differently, so your footage will look different on different screens. You can't control the settings of every screen someone views your work on and will have accept it's going to look different on different screens. You other laptop screen might be naturally more green, but you only noticed it when you compair the same footage on both. The way we try to get the best result is to grade on a properly calibrated screen, that way you can be sure that when its shown on other calibrated screens the look is consistent. If your don't have a way to calibrate the screen of your laptop (and it will never be as accurate as professional reference monitor), look at your grade on multiple screens and try to choose a compromise that works well for the most screens.