Tim O'Connor

I've learned that when I come across a good deal I have to think when would I really use these items? There were a couple of lights this past year that I wanted but held off on and I never really did end up having a call for them, or at least nothing that couldn't be done with something else. If you can put them to use then this might be a good purchase for you. How often do you use a temporary cyc, or would you if you had these or other lights that could work on that? Scoops take up a bit if space. Will you have a good place to store them?

I've seen some good deals on them this past year, good in the sense that several times I've seen used scoops that are in great condition from having been in one studio for many years and never moved and are selling for not much at all. Ask yourself though would you ever use them on location? They're okay in a studio if you have them and leave them up on a grid and maybe use them once in a while but I would never want to haul them around or wrestle with them. They're not heavy of course but they're unwieldy. I use some in a small studio for some greenscreen work because they're there and they do the trick. If you can pick up some lights that you can offer as part of your kit, that can be a good move. I picked up seven more used 1K fresnels this summer and have used them on jobs.

Cool, I debated whether to post in general discussion but I figured it was the best place for anybody to see it in time, sort of the Cinematography.com hotline. I really liked the segment showing the matte shots and the way the before and after views were shown. The Jack Cosgrove part was really good too. I couldn't stay up for all of it but what I saw was all interesting. Oh, the section on the big setpiece showing the Confederate casualties showed how some of the extras operated mechanical dummies next to them to make them move as if they were wounded. Once they showed that and then showed part of the shot from the film, I noticed how a lot of the soldiers had the exact same arm movements which I would never have noticed otherwise. Plus, did you see that slate that they were using in the screen tests? It went by fast but there was some sort of opening, perpendicular to the sticks, that had some kind of vertical marker lock into it when the sticks closed. It was old-fashioned but pretty cool. Seeing all those big old Hollywood lights in the actual behind the scenes footage and on the interview sets was fun too.

Turner Classic Movies is showing a 2 hour plus program right now "The Making of Gone with the Wind". I just watched a bunch of b/w screen tests of well known actors who were considered for roles, as well as some (faded) color hair and m/u tests. Pretty interesting.

It depends. What if you cut somebody a deal, maybe your best ever deal because hey, it's in the Bahamas. Then you go two days early because they want you to and evidently they can afford it and you think hey why not, it's in the Bahamas. Then they want you to work and when you ask to get paid they say Dude! We thought you were cool. C'mon it'll be fun; you're in the Bahamas. I have done a lot of low budget productions when I sign on knowing that I may end up making six dollars an hour when I average out my rate against the hours. That's okay when it's clear. The producers say we can pay you only this much; anything more and we can't rent that HMI or have to cut into the dolly budget. I's easy to get caught up in indignation. I've shot myself in the foot a couple of times too! Won the battle, lost the war. However, if I signed on for some killer low budget production and they ask me to be there a couple days early to get a good start and they kind of sell me on that by saying that I'll have a couple days wherever, and then they change that and maybe I sense that they might have been counting on doing that too then I would be inclined to set things straight right then. If the same thing happened and it weren't a low budget production then I would want to see if this is the way that they operate. If you can afford to fly me to the Bahamas and put me up for two days, then why can't you pay half a day if I work? What if they had asked for an extra day of Steadicam work? One shot of ten feet, easy than some days scouting but you'd have to be on set all day? The culture is getting harsher with producers who ask for more for less. Many of them come through the Craigslist world or similar and you hear more these days oh I know it's a low rate but you'll be shooting so and so or shooting in the famous such and such or whatever. It's kind of like what I heard about the early days of music videos when everybody was excited and worked for low rates because it was cool. The first time; hey it's Rock and Roll. The second time hey it's Rock and Roll. After that it was a job again. a good one maybe but one that should pay like any other.

You're selling it for a fifth of what you paid for it? It looks nice but you paid $25K for it? Or if you sell it for $3K, you paid $15K?

It can be a difficult balance between being compensated fairly and avoiding being exploited. If it's a job you really want, then it may be worth it to put in well more prep than what your deal covers. Who is not going to do the prep to be ready to do a great job? How would anybody get hired again who argues that he/she is going to do a mediocre job unless paid to prepare well? On the other hand, there is a limit to how much you can give up just because you want a job. I think that sometimes people can get so frustrated at not getting remunerated that they take a stand at the wrong time over a largely symbolic point because they're so fed up with previous poor treatment. Most of us wouldn't take not being paid in another line of work. People know that though and they exploit it. "That's the deal. If you can't do it, I'll get somebody else who will do it." The problem is that there are many other people who will do it in this business. What I want to add to what has been said here is to keep in mind a useful phrase, "Don't kill the job." I've seen it done by people who put their foot down indignantly, on the wrong job, because they hadn't done so before, or because they were insisting on unrealistic deals out of losing patience with this recurring situation. You have to figure out what is right for you right now. Your time is valuable and you can always spend it preparing your own projects. If you're going to work for someone else for free, at least for part of the job because you aren't getting paid fully, be sure as you can what it's worth to you. Also, for everyone who doesn't want to hear about what your time is worth, there are those who will respect your time if you show that you value it.

Wow David what a great list and short essay. Thanks for taking the time to put this together. I'm without a list right now to offer but I'm going to think about it and I see some movies on your list that I'm going to get on DVD. I especially like this comment "some TV shows today are as well-lit as some of the best-looking movies of the 1990's, while some big-budget movies look worse than your average TV show." A part of my early teenage years that helped me a lot with movies was the summers when my friends and I would go to the old movie house one town over four or five nights in a row. It had a huge screen and we would watch the same double feature night after night. Now partly, well mostly, we went to meet girls (the girls were different every night and there was a big old Art Deco lobby where everybody hung out) but my cinematic education was fed then by seeing lots of great movies on consecutive nights on a real big screen.

Hi Brian, If you can check out the PBS "Independent Lens" program about Laszlo and Vilmos "No Subtitles Needed" you might enjoy the discussion about the shooting of "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." A shot that had great dramatic effect for me is the freeze frame at the end of "The Four Hundred Blows". Yes, I know it wasn't shot that way ("Freeze the camera!") but the effect is so powerful that I wish other films that end with a freeze frame would have found another way to end. I know that it's a technique and that saying that is like saying nobody else use a zoom or something but in Truffaut's film freezing that shot is such a profound cinematic expression of how Antoine Daniel is trapped and seemingly out of options. The technique has been used a million times since, and it is inherently powerful but I've never seen a film or tv show (and tv shows love ending with freeze frames) that has used it so well. When I first saw the film, I gasped when Antoine is running and turns to face the camera and the shot froze. How often does that reaction happen when watching a movie? I'm so glad that I saw it in a theater. What a movie going experience.

I caught most of it today, fascinating stuff!

It is a great idea and will likely catch on when it can be done feasibly and people have good quality screens at their work stations. However, some people won't and will be screaming orders to adjust the color or whatever is actually wrong with their screens. Then of course there will be the producer viewing it on a cell phone who won't appreciate the wide shot on his tiny screen and will be firing directors until he gets one who does nothing but close-ups. Used right it'll be a good tool. There certainly is a lot of wireless tech available; I haven't seen it for production monitors in film situations but it's used in sports a lot so I'm sure that it'll be scaled to fit soon. It may be a while before WiFi is used because that may not be the ideal way to get a good quality image transmitted wirelessly but for sure there are times when it would be helpful to monitor a camera that is in a remote position and even on regular living room sets it would be convenient to not have to be tethered in the conventional ways.

Hi guys. James, had you seen it before or did you catch it Monday? It was good but I think that it would have been much stronger if there were a clearer outlining of why producers and others push long hours so strongly. What are the business beliefs, models and philosophies? How have they evolved to what they are now? The film argues that European, or some European, unions simply refuse to entertain working longer hours and or on weekends. It would have been illustrative to examine that system. Do they still produce as much as they want? Is it efficient in the long run to work more days (do they?) and fewer hours per day? What is driving the faster pace of productions? Have you seen many HD productions that could afford to have shot on film but want the faster turnaround? How does that thinking affect production hours and the lengths of production days? Society has changed a lot. It must have been great back in the old days to work on the backlot on a show and be home on time for dinner every night. That's not the case so much anymore in the film world nor is it in many other workplaces as well. Paul, I think that the 10 hour day would be especially critical for shows on which people are exhausted from commuting because they're close enough to go home at night but not far enough to get a hotel for a month. However, the production is going to likely want at least 12 hour days and people would probably be happy with that, even more so if the work days are consistently those lengths but still, driving a hundred something miles each day with those hours for weeks is going to wear people out.

I think that it would be terrific to have such these departments on here. There would be a tremendous blend of cross pollinating going on with so many different people offering insights and new people joining. I also often have questions that I would like to ask about these subjects.

The Centric cable channel is running the NBC series "Homicide" twice nightly five nights a week. It was a great show, one of the best ever on tv. It's fun to watch how relentlessly handheld the show is and how it works without being grating, which isn't always the case with constant handheld.

Take advantage of the time lapse features, the overcranking, the undercranking, the opportunities to adjust so many aspects of your shots with the all the options in the menu such as gamma choices, color, color temperature, sharpness, detail. You can learn a lot by designing and storing some scene files on an SD card which you can put in the camera (different than P2 cards I mean something SD cards.) There are also several options for shooting in low light and reducing the noise by choosing certain gamma settings independently of what comes default with say Cine V or Cine D. Experiment and also search past threads and you'll find a lot of info.. The shot marker is a really useful feature to assign to a user button. You can mark takes about which you have concerns and later this makes it easier to review and delete those takes and free up P2 space. I've shot scenes with three, four pages of dialogue, well covered and had it all on one 8GB P2 card, which at 720P 24PN holds 20 minutes. You do have to commit to ditching certain takes but if you have the authority to do that and willingness to do so; it makes editing a lot easier when your whole scene is captured in say 20 minutes of raw footage. If you're shooting for somebody else or just dislike making those unchangeable decisions on set then bring some more cards. Oh, if you have a situation when you would rather not bring a laptop but do need to offload at some point, you can go directly from camera acting as a P2 player via Firewire into a hard drive. This has been useful to me in many situations in which I have my hands full and not a lot of help and a location on which I'd rather not have to worry about a laptop too. Many people have told me that they haven't heard of this but it is in the manual that comes with the camera and that you can also find online in many places. Barry Green's book and DVDs are also excellent resources. Look for more info. in the HVX-200 forum on DVXuser.com too.

Watching this now and probably would have posted in "On Screen" but it is going to be reshown at 2:45 EST TODAY on Sundance Channel. Thought more people might notice this post here. Hadn't heard of this but quite interesting. Would like to hear what other people think. Credits on Sundance say that it came out in 2006.

Hi Annie, Did you switch departments (to sound?) Are you all done teaching down South? I guess that was a while ago.

That's good to hear then. I like the EX-1s. One time on a shoot a guy stole my pizza and I threw the EX-1 at him and it smashed by his feet and scared him and I totally got my pizza back.

What struck me about the example shown is how much the blacks improved in one of the shots. Have you noticed them being affected?

A discussion this week led me to some research which led me to some really good info. on the Abel Cine Tech website about this problem, quoting here from Abel website "A complaint often expressed by Sony EX1/EX3 owners is the infrared or far red contamination frequently seen on dark fabrics. Sony’s EXMOR sensors are designed to see a huge amount of color, or what Sony calls “broad spectrum colors.” This is a great thing, because these Sony cameras can capture more color than ever in a digital image. The negative effect of this, however, is that they’re also able to see some red colors that our eyes cannot see. This shows up particularly in dark fabrics, where the red contamination turns greens into muddy brown and some blacks will turn magenta…not a good thing. Up until now there was not much you could do about it, but thankfully Tiffen came up with a solution. They have created the T1 IR filter, which is designed to reduce this contamination but still maintain the wide range of colors. I’ve done some tests to compare an EX1 camera with and without the filter, and the difference is quite obvious. In short if you are an EX1 or EX3 owner, the T1 IR Filter is a must have. Keep reading to see comparisons and how the new EX1R and PMW-350 perform" There is a pretty cool series of stills showing images with and without Tiffen filter at this page http://blog.abelcine.com/2009/10/29/tiffen...the-ex-cameras/ Also, there are some good informative videos on there. I watched the one on white shading. When I was a kid, there was no internet. I am amazed every day by how much info. I can find on stuff. We had no internet, just a net with which to catch (we hoped) wild encyclopedias.

Hi Brian. That's great about the nomination. Glad to hear you're working on finding a new position. Use your Glidecam and make that XL2 sing and you'll land someplace where you'll have the cameras you want.

Dimmers work fine with tungsten units but I wouldn't plug a ballast into one.

You can get a 1.4 with 12 footcandles with 200 ASA at 24 fps. That might be a good place to start for a baseline. If you have the opportunity to do some tests that is always good. You might want to see how your strobe light works out so that the flashes are hitting when the shutter is open.

If you have limited resources, one approach that can work well is to shoot out of a vehicle such as a minivan with the sliding door open. You can shoot off of the tripod. Just be careful and have a good driver. Going slowly helps a lot too. Any type of hatchback car can work too if you can fit in the back. That might be useful for shots of the lines in the road, before and after, "dollying" past the work.

Really nice, congratulations.