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Jon Rosenbloom

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Everything posted by Jon Rosenbloom

  1. Shoulder rig with a sound blanket and a 1/2 or 1/4 apple on your lap seems to work well for many of the shows I've done. It's a real pain to rig a high hat in the back if you can't remove the seat.
  2. User friendly, but I'll take the boom control on any Chapman over a Fisher every day.
  3. It's a pretty good gig; you're right in the middle of the action. As far as operators being "fun," I don't know that that's the right question. Usually, they're professional, pleasant, thoughtful. Supporting someone in making his work look good is often a good basis for a good relationship, but - as with anyone, there are no guarantees. It's very important as a dolly grip to take charge of your own work. You can't be the operator's puppet. If you get a monitor and demonstrate you can follow the action without being baby sat, you'll have a mutually beneficial relationship. That said, the one's you have to worry about are the AC's :) .
  4. I'm not so great at math, but, isn't 10 meters more than 30 feet? For a head to toe on a 50mm? It seems a little much. If you want to wait till tomorrow, I'll stand up my tape measure and check it through my 50mm on my old Nikon and then pace it off.
  5. Relax. It's not really important, as long as the lighting is consistent with the setting and the time of day. (A DAY-INT can't have black outside the windows.) The need to see actors' faces kind of over-rides any concern about sources or directions of lights.
  6. There's a good bit in here about lighting "Blue Valentine" with only practicals. Lighting with practicals can be great, but they take a lot of prep. As DP, you have to have as much say in the practicals as the Production Designer. Also, it gets rather time consuming to hide tiny pieces of tape and gel onto practicals and lampshades during the shooting day; you and the gaffer have to have that kit sorted out and ready to go in prep. Go to home depot, get lots of zip cord, quick plugs, hand dimmers. Mix color temps; it's real and dynamic! And build yourself a little paint bucket light (an socket in a white paint bucket - better than a chinese lantern IMHO) to use as a handy key light.
  7. For some reason, I'm not permitted to edit my post, so: It's kind of a waste to worry over whether you can find a middle grey part of a frame; an ambient meter gives you the same reading you would get if you spot read a grey card. You dig? A spot meter can help you analyze the scene in front of you. But, if you have a complex scene with deep shadows, bright skyline, and so on, the critical thing is that you have to decide what's most important to you in that scene.
  8. If you can still shoot reversal stills, that's a great way to get a feel for spot metering. The idea to get used to is that the spot meter tells you what f-stop will render whatever you're pointing at as middle grey. It's simple enough, but does take a bit of practice before it becomes automatic. Before my meters began their long slumbers in the back of the dresser, I would check them against each other by taking an ambient reading at arm's length, then holding my hand in the same place and spot reading it. If the spot reading was a stop higher than the ambient, I was good to go.
  9. Can I refer you to my reel from 39" seconds to 1'18", which is footage from a noir short we shot on Red. (http://vimeo.com/31770723) The background got a lot of hard sources and hard cuts, while the actors' keys were softer, though not nearly the industry standard large booklight. 3 open face lights is quite the challenge ...
  10. Certainly he was a genius, with an artist's eye, but also - from what I gather from his various interviews (like the one above) - rather a practical, down to earth fellow. (Ask some older technicians what Gordon meant by "Cape Cod Lighting.)
  11. Seems the problem is keeping the background from going totally black. Maybe you can have a small genny off-site that can charge some batteries that can run some pocket pars, which could kind of look like moonlight. Also, there are now all sorts of battery powered LED lights that you can distribute in the background. (Maybe there's another group of people who are lit by a couple of LED lanterns.)
  12. Has anyone mentioned that Dave Thompson is an absolute beast?!
  13. I guess I skipped the important point that the railroad rep - flagman or engineer - comes with the permission to work on the tracks. The production may have learned the schedule, but that is a seperate issue from whether they had permission to work near the tracks or on the tracks. We are inundated with memo's attached to our call sheets; was there a track safety memo distributed to the crew? What does the call sheet for that day say about working on the tracks? I'm a bitter old grip who's happy to say, "No." Sarah Jones was young and working in a slow market, following the instructions of the head of her department, the DP.
  14. As Variety reports, no representative of the railroad was with the production. It's not enough to have a good guess of the schedule to work on an active track; you have to have an engineer or flagman - someone to communicate with the trains. Director, Producer, AD and maybe the DP should go to jail.
  15. Experience is a briefcase full of mistakes, and you're at an age where you're supposed to make them. Back when everyone did their first films on 16mm Bolex camera, a good quarter of the class would load the film backwards. I shot a mostly beautiful short film that is almost unwatchable due to the sound cables going into the wrong inputs. To paraphrase Norman Mailer, you have to get all the bad work out of the way before you can move on to doing the good work. That said, you have a camera, and looking through the viewfinder is the best way to see if your ideas are working or not. If you look at something and it looks wrong, change it. Answer the bell. The ease with which a professional fixes problems, or avoids them, only comes with practice and hard, often mortifying experience. More practically, the DP is in charge of the camera, electric and grip Depts. Spend a little time in each.
  16. You could try a bungee rig, which actually uses surgical tubing. It takes some practice to get the "hang" of it, but the main thing is to make the pick point as high as possible.
  17. Sounds like a good time to buy your own and get into the rental game :)
  18. Hey David, I was on set one day where you did the fantasy transition not with a cut, but with a push in to a mirror and a lighting cue that was pretty spectacular; is that available? Also, where is "Marylin's" hair on the waveform? It's off the chart, right?
  19. Thanks for looking. I'd be interested in talking about how I shot it because it's a challenge to articulate what I was going for. I wanted the film to be "easy on the eyes," but I didn't want it too pretty. Also, the image had to have some weight, but I didn't want to over-sell anything. I think I owe much of the "look" to the location. There are rather drab diners, and then there are diners that are over the top. This one seemed just seemed attractive - easy on the eyes, without being distracting. All this stuff is so intuitive, if I were interviewing for the job, I'd make a total mess of it. Anyway, I believe I have secured permission to have people enter the password - jrocam - and watch the full length (6 minutes!) film. Thanks. PIE http://vimeo.com/58089331
  20. For the shots from behind the cyclists, would you consider mixing in footage from a gopro or hdslr mounted on a bicycle? As for smoothing out those shots, the big budget solution is a stabilized head. Low budget solution is a vibration isolator. Micro budget is finding the smoothest surface you can get.
  21. Way, way, way back in my career, I got a tow dolly from U-Haul, and made a camera platform by bolting a sheet of plywood to it to get some cycling shots. It requires someone to have a drill, bits for pilot holes, and a few bolts and nuts, but it's still a pretty cheap way to get down to street level. The bed of the pickup may well be too high. (Of course, it also requires a vehicle with a tow hitch.)
  22. And, here's the whole film: http://vimeo.com/58089331 ! Password = jrocam
  23. The only problem with sitting on a slider is that most operators are heavier than is good for the slider.
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