Tim O'Connor

There is a lot of other nice stuff on there in addition to this cool book. Glad you posted this link, nice website!

A helpful saying sometimes is "Don't kill the job." If you think that you can shoot something good for them within the budget/equipment/production constraints and get paid acceptably, take the job.

Also, keep your eyes peeled for good deals on used gear. I've found some old Mole-Richardson units on Craigslist and some Strand-Century fresnels too at really good prices. Just keep checking every day. You can buy a can of Mole-Richardson paint from your rental house too and then your used lights will look a lot newer.

I took this picture of a boxing match on tv Friday night. Why would this be broadcast like this?

That makes sense; It is tv news, thanks.

Several times in this news clip. the camera tilts (at :33 to the sky, another at 1:43, a whopper at 3:00) and the picture goes kind of fisheye. It doesn't start that way, and when it zooms full wide the effect seems more extreme than typical barrel distortion but it does look like it's to do with the lens. http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpp/news/special_reports/canton-using-landfill-for-solar-project-20110620

Just sync it the way that everybody does anyway when you record audio to match something that was shot previously. Put it on your timeline and move it around to get the best match. It's unlikely that it will ever sync in any true sense but it can match up well enough so that people will never notice, if you get good audio quality and good line readings. Programs like you mentioned are for synchronizing recordings from double-systems that were rolling at the same time. For ADR you are recording picture and audio at different times.

I went to the links above because you emphasized the impact of his articles on your approach. Thanks for posting such a great resource. I had to tear myself away for now because I have stuff to do but I enjoyed reading his articles so much that I was glad to see that there are many more of them on that site. They're well worth reading for people who have been doing this for a while as well as for beginners.

I don't have any but if you picture nice sets and actors who once looked believable in a world that looked believable and then you see them again some time later and they still look pretty believable except for moments when they look artificial in some weird, anti-human way, like they've been replaced by really high quality cyborgs who are just about perfect except for hot plastic patches on their skin, and their world is kind of changed like that too, that's kind of the eerie drift.

Hi Phil, thanks for the detailed answer. For the sake of discussion, what do you suppose is it in the glycerol based food-additives that, along with the de-ionized water which are the listed ingredients in my fog juice, gives the fog/smoke its white color? I'll bet somebody must have leapt from reading that to running some food coloring through one of these.

Has anybody ever used anything in a fog machine that produces any color fog/smoke other than the regular white color? I have a bunch of inexpensive fog/smoke machines and was wondering if there is anything available or if anybody has ever experimented with adding something for color to the regular fluid.

Sometimes I would watch a really well-acted show and feel badly for the actors because the production/studio saved on money by shooting in video and yet lost so much in the impact of the show. Have you ever seen behind the scenes footage of a film in production that covers an actual take and frames it really well, and even when it shows only the actors, no light stands, cameras, crew, etc., it just feels fake? Sometimes shows that use that footage as part of interviews with actors will also use the edited scene from the film and, even considering music and grading and different things, there is just something about video that robs actors. If technology had developed differently, and the first movies were shot on handcranked video cameras, and now the industry shift were to the reverse of digital-cinema cameras, to these new film cameras, would anybody be able to say that the film look didn't look like a movie should look? Maybe people now might argue that scenes on film seem believable and video has a harshness that often doesn't work like that, because people have been conditioned to associate the look of film with believability more than with video, but I think that film simply has inherent qualities that soften and smooth out the details of artifice and fiction which when noticeable take a viewer out of the story.

With a lot of point sources there are usually many shadows, also usually on the sharper side. My question is why aren't there more shadows in this situation? I think that Robert's answer means that there are just so many lights that they wash out the many shadows that are there. I guess that if you could see the rink with just a couple of banks of the lights turned on, there would be many visible shadows and much harder light.

I caught L&O SVU tonight, haven't seen it for a while. I think that it shoots on Alexa now, don't know how long that's been the case. Overall the show looked great but there were some scenes that just looked really...video-y, which is I guess how some shows would be described back in the days when it was so much easier to tell instantly what had or hadn't been shot on film or on video. The scenes that felt this way to me were mostly interiors and it was mostly with faces that I got this feeling, enough to pull me out of the story. There's something about faces on film that is just right and that is now regularly accomplished with video but in this show tonight it seemed often that faces had that smooth, unnatural look that seems kind of like cyborg-plastic skin. I should mention that I watched on an older tv, in SD. Did anybody else watch?

He was somebody who challenged many conventional ways of looking at things. It was exciting to hear what he had to say.

For the record, I meant to say the steam will hit, not heat, the window. Typos are one thing but typos that look dumber than they are ...agh.

One way would be to power up an electric kettle and set it safely in the car. The steam will heat the windows and fog them up. Then remove kettle and replace with actors.

Looks cool. Any idea of the budget on this?

Yes, people working with the best digital equipment with the most dynamic range and the most supportive post-production paths are in a more favorable position to light for the requirements of the scene and the story but for many people who are shooting digitally and recording to heavily compressed codecs, there is much less freedom to disregard the restrictions of the format being used. You can light for the scene more readily whether you're shooting 35mm or 16mm or with an Alexa than if you're comparing shooting the same scene between an Alexa and say a 5D or an EX1 or an HVX200 or ....

"Renting" may be showing your age, based on some conversations I've had with younger people this week who watch but won't pay. To what extent do any people who were disappointed by Citizen Kane, or any other legendary film, think that part of the letdown might be due to such high expectations? I watched Stagecoach again this week. It's great. I realized too how many of the shots in it have been repeated so many times through the years, especially with tv westerns, that for anybody who sees Stagecoach after years of exposure to hundreds of Stagecoach-influenced films and tv shows, it's going to look more familiar than it should, through no fault of its own. On the other hand, something that is really good and original is likely to hold up well, isn't it? I think that we hope so, because if something seems to lose its luster then that questions if anything has inherent value or is just completely relative. If movies keep being made, what will it take for something to be considered the greatest film of all time ten thousand years from now?

It's funny though how in some of the wider shots of DFN in the scenes with the car parked up near the woods, the feeling comes much closer to looking how things look when your eyes have adjusted to the ambient light. Wider shots in night scenes often look fake because they're so obviously lighted. In "The Wild One" there are some DFN scenes with Johnny taking the woman from the diner for a ride on his bike and the way the sky looks through the trees in the background and the light lands elsewhere, it feels like you're looking at an ethereal B/W dream on Mars. Patrick, for fun you might also want to watch Truffaut's "Day for Night".

Yes, I saw that during an eclipse on a bright summer day. It was eerie in a cool way because everything looked normal but then when I looked at the blacktop beneath the trees, it looked subtly but completely different than I'd ever seen it. You described it perfectly with the hard crescent shadows.

How are you determining exposure? ASA 160 is plenty fast for most shooting outdoors and you can get an f8 with a light level of 500 footcandles, which should be available most of the day on an average day. Check a chart such as this to see the relationship between aperture and footcandles exposure table Don't worry too much. I shot tons of Super 8 and usually relied on the camera's meter anyway or with one camera just set aperture by eye. I'm not sure how accurate a Super 8 lens aperture marks really are anyway, if you're hoping to take a reading from your meter and get that exact stop with your Super 8 camera. I wouldn't want to get involved with pushing Super 8 either but if you're shooting outdoors with Tri-X, you really should be all set for exposure while the sun is out. Edit: Just noticed that you were asking about a stop of f1.8 In that case, you might have to ND a camera shooting outdoors with ASA 160, even in the shade. In Super 8 filmmaking, it's probably much easier to just stop down. If you have at least 25 footcandle (and you might have more even in the shade) you can shoot f1.8 and you'll be right on the money.

Good thanks, staying busy. I love the snow and have had a blast shooting with it this year. I have a couple of Altman ellipsoidals that I use for various things. I think that sometimes using them or a small fresnel with a snoot or blackwrap is a good way to clean up eye sockets fast when there are a lot of things going on and many variables. Check out those space saving stands too. They're great for studio stuff like that but not for much location work.

As I recall, it is not a fast change at all. With that camera, people seem to stick to a zoom for everything or shoot MOS with different lenses, or get each lens its own blimp and have it already installed before getting to the set.