Alex Wuijts

Great work Gregory, must have been intense. I think the film is a masterpiece, nothing more to say about it.

A couple of Woody Allen films have great moving dialogue scenes

Wear good running shoes and focus your workout around compound exercises that resemble what your body will go through. Prepare your muscles for the kind of things you want them to be able to do. Don't waste time on pumping too much iron, instead combine endurance and strength. Core strength is also very important. Treat yourself to a long massage on off days. Balance your diet and stay off alcohol.

Hi Joseph, I've been in your situation and the problem is that all prices are variable. I've tried for months finding a good starting point of comparison between 2-perf and Alexa prores. I agree with Stephen that you shouldn't take Arriraw out of the equation, but unfortunately that option was far too expensive. Especially nowadays you can get very good deals on stock and film camera packages. Labs are also willing to help you out. Often when asking the price of something, we would get the reply: how much have you got? That's what it's come down to I'm afraid. I was able to shoot on 2-perf, but not without some sacrifices which I though were well worth it. I had to be very specific on which lighting I needed on different shooting days. I would be working with reflection boards and a maybe a couple small lights one week and a cherry picker lighting a whole street the other. Also crew wise you have to be specific. One week I just had a gaffer and an intern. The next we'd be working with a full team. That was a risk, but everybody was willing to take it, because with good planning you don't need a lot to make 2-perf look exceptional. I won't have a lot of time for grading, but I know I can work a lot faster with film so that'll be fine. Last but not least, make sure your team has your back. They have to be willing to make unorthodox choices, but for me that was the fun of it!

James you don't know whether shooting had already started. Obviously Artyom had every right to stop before he got himself into something he didn't want to do. Most of the times you find out well before shooting the director is a dumbass (or dp in your case). Although I do agree with your sentiment. Once you agree on working together you do your best to translate his/her vision to the screen. And if ugly is a conscious choice, than you go for ugly with all the energy you have. If it's not you better run and don't look back!

Sounds ridiculous. Maybe he hates film ;) I did a 2-perf feature and I used a 1 to 15 shooting ratio. Production bought 150 rolls and it was about what we needed. We did an average of 20-22 setups a day. I shot about 6-8 rolls a day, and I would seriously have a hard time shooting double that amount. We got low quality digital rushes though, but who gets film rushes anyway these days.. Ofcourse it all depends on your script and shooting style, but this was not a 'hey let's make a feature out of 30 wide tableau shots' kinda project.

Is it daylight or dark? If it's daylight, you could hang your diva's above the window side, just out of frame. It it's night, you could make more of a toplight. Lighting from the door will look probably look flat in this situation.

I just did a feature on 2-perf. We used a Penelope from Camera Rentals in Amsterdam. It's a great camera. Light and reliable. 150 rolls of film and not a single magjam. We got the hair or two, but most of them were in the safety, because you have a little bit of that even with 2-perf, fortunately. I think the biggest problem is light leaks, where you have a bright spot in the bottom of one frame which leaks to the frame below. That can be very distractive.

Hey guys and girls Just wanted to share an experience I've had with this lens. I was working on a commercial where we wanted the flexibility of a documentary crew, but also obviously very good image quality. I've been in this situation before a couple of times and never really got around the problem of the weight of the lens and the quality it gave. I knew I wanted to shoot with the Alexa, but an Alexa with a zoom can be one hell of a heavy setup, only suitable for handheld if your last name is Schwarzenegger. Also, I was never too fond of the combination of digital cameras with supersharp, contrasty lenses, like the Optimos. Anyway I saw this lens in the catalogue and decided to try it out. I do not regret that decision at all! It's a T2 lens over the entire range, and it's very, very nice if you shoot wide open. There are no issues like breathing or bad distortion, the sharpness is also very good. Because of the range you have to move in when shooting close-ups, making it a very 'personal' and human lens, if you know what I mean. The setup was reasonably heavy. You don't want it on your shoulders all day, but combined with an easyrig 4 even that's possible. Anyway, if you, like me, sometimes wonder how to deal with this situation, I recommend this lens. And I'm in no way affiliated to any company :)

Great work!

Thanks Stephen! I thought I should provide a little more info on the shown frames. I can't post stuff that gives away too much of the film, that's why they're all a little nondescript. As far as lighting: frame 1. Just the sunlight coming through the kitchen window. It blows out ofcourse but hey, that's life. I love the texture the lenses give faced with strong light like this. The bland colors help too, I think. frame 2. obviously natural light. I was happy with the detail in the bright skies. frame 3. A fluorescent key light, a small reflection board to give a faint eye light, and a silver reflector as a small backlight/kicker. I lit the background with one of those weird six-lights. frame 4. just the sunlight coming in through the window frame 5. a 100W bulb as a keylight and the six-light coming through the window.

Hey guys and girls Just thought I'd share some frames of a short I shot last month on the island of Curaçao. The story is about a young guy who faces a big moral dillema when his mother ends up in the hospital, and the only way for him to pay for her surgery is by helping out an old friend smuggling drugs. I used an F3 with a PIX240 recorder set to 10-bit 444 RGB. Lenses were the new Schneider Cine Xenar III. I knew I had to shoot most day stuff with natural light and a couple of mirrors or reflector boards. For night stuff and interiors I wanted to stick to lighting that was available on the island, like fluorescents and a couple of bulbs. I also had two weird looking lights with six energy saving bulbs screwed into it that gave me a good backlight on the wide exterior night shots. I tried to keep all night exterior stuff completely monochrome, so no warm contrast, except when he was at home. For a film like this I believe the best approach is to pick your locations, colours and angles carefully, and let the natural light guide you, so to speak. I love it when actors go dark when they enter a room, and I would ask the director if they could open a window or door in the shot so light would fall in. The sun on the island would be as top as it comes for most of the day and then plunge quickly into the sea, so I let it all go. I thought I would be compromising the feel of the natural light on the island if I were to fill everything up, and in the end the s-log on the F3 captured so much information in the shadows that I'm not too worried about faces going too dark in day stuff. I used a T1 filter to filter out UV-light, and that gave a nice greenish hue, so I decided to leave that in for everything. I shot most part at a 2.8/4 stop. The lenses look very nice at this stop. They have quite a (I think) nasty rainbow-like flare if you open them up to T2, but stopping down to 2.8/4 would eliminate that very well. The PIX recorder makes the F3 a formidable machine (also literally unfortunately). As far as ergonomics go, it was a b*tch, but I really liked the image I got out of it. I had to check every take to see if it had recorded it, which was also a big nuisance. Don't know whether it was the PIX or my setup (genlocked and tc synched with a lockit sync box). All the frames are ungraded jpgs. Let me know what you think!

You can also try using another blue filter on your lights than CTB, for instance one that already had a little bit more green in it. Your rental house probably has all kinds of funky filters to try out.

Maybe you can get an internship at a rental company, meet all the ac's and dop's who come there and let them know you're an ambitious young man who wants to work hard and learn. The best advice is: meet people and make a good impression.

or this one: If City of God is shakycam, and the makers of City of God are the ones without the 'scrap of creativity', then I think you're missing out on a lot of good things, to say the least.

Intuitive also means 'following a gut feeling', but let's not get into semantics. Do you think this is shakycam?: It's a film of which the entire visual presentation is a little shaky, and where you can clearly see what I mean by 'more intuitive camerawork'. The frame is unstable, little mistakes aren't cut out, you can see the operator making small corrections. This is the least extravagant example I could think of.

Why not look at it from a directors point of view? Although I agree it's misused a lot, there are movies where the performances are based on (partial) improvisation, and I think it's perfectly reasonable for a director to want to shoot the film handheld, following the action in an intuitive way, more than telling the story through the editing of elaborate setups. Cassavetes is a good example of this. Andrea Arnolds films are another example I guess.

I have no idea why I thought she was Italian, must have read it somewhere on the internet (so it must be true)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=195DIZY-C3Y Very funny video of the Italian clapper loader for Inglorious Basterds. Sorry if it's old.

Thanks Marque. Do you make checksums using R3D Data Manager or something else?

Yeah I like Redcine-x because I can just drag the file in the player instead of going through the folders, but other than that it's not different from watching the proxies in the finder. The project I'm working on now is just small enough so I can render some 1/8 resolution h.264 quicktimes for the director to watch in the evening. Anything bigger would be too much on the processor, I agree. And I hear you on the assisting of the camera dept. I wasn't born to sit behind a laptop all day!

Thanks John and Gus. Now to get it all straight, would you hire me if I did this? 1) load the media 2) check the clips with redcine-x to see if there are any problems 3) use r3d data manager to create checksums 4) copy the files to a number of locations with data manager 5) verify the files using the checksums 6) create reports for post 7) render small quicktime rushes 7) render a number of tiffs for the d.o.p.

This thread creates a lot of question marks: 1) Would you only use the dmg-method because of the fact that disk utility does everything one at a time, instead of the finders multitasking capability? Or are there other reasons? 2) Isn't it just safer to watch all the files you copy? Going through the r3d file with redcine-x or some other software? Why would you need checksums if you can just check the raw files and see if they play correctly? 3) What kind of reports do you make? If there's a continuity report then the editor can easily match roll numbers with scene, slate and take numbers, so to me it seem like a waste of precious time to make those. What information would be useful?

How about if you use redcine-x to go through all the r3d files and see if they play, and maybe scroll through the clip quickly? Would that be a failsafe way to check your files?

I've used one by Bosch which costs around a 100 British pounds which worked well in a dark studio but the laserpoint was very hard to find in daylight so I found it to be useless there.