Kay Madsen

I came out of the cinema with mixed feelings... my dop eyes shure noticed everything from the heavy and inconsistent grain to strange muddy looking underexposed interiors and extremly sharp and unforgiving shots of actors skins where you could see every little blemish... but still the movie grabbed me... especially the shootouts and violence seemed to have more impact than any full on splatter flick... I´m still not shure if it was only because of the way it was shot and acted or if it also has something to do with the video look that may have made them appear more real and gruesome on a subconcious level or something like that... I don´t know... Watching the film from a professional point of view I sometimes felt embarrassed imagining I would have shot it... if it wouldn´t say "Miami Vice big budget feature" I think producers and directors watching it on your showreel might just switch it off and think you´re no good... somebody mentioned it before, it looks like any amateurish student film on atomfilms... I´ve seen a lot of features shot on DV and blown up to 35 that looked much better and more consistent... They would have been really brave if they´d just taken a mini DV, HDV or DVCPRO HD cam and just shot it with minimal lighting in a real documentary cinema verité style... like HBO documentaries... that would have been a real bold approach for a couple of hollywood filmmakers... but they just have to much money and maybe bad advisors... what a pain in the a.. having to haul around all those recording decks and cables if you could shoot it with a little HD cam... But that´s only from my professional point of view... after the show I talked to a couple of people I know that have nothing to do with filmmaking... and surprisingly they noticed some difference in the look but had no problem with it whatsoever... I guess if the audience can identify with the characters and story they don´t care about what you shot on... the dogma films have proved this sufficently I think... in the end I at least want to make movies for an audience and not to satisfy my collegues... On another level I felt quite good after seeing MV, because if Michael Mann and Dion Beebe get through with this bad/new/different look and audiences get accustomed to it, then the door is open for all indy filmmakers who have a great story to tell... and that´s what it´s all about... if you´re not only interested in technology... I wanted to grab my HVX200 and just go out and shoot my first feature film right away... 1 more thing about the grain... judging from experience with image sensors I arrived at this theory that you can reduce the amount of grain and get real deep blacks if you always have an area in the frame that is close to or 100% signal level... might be a streetlight in the background or something like that... when I saw the inconsistency of the grain in Miami Vice I looked especially after that... and as far as I could tell that was the case with the inconsistent grain levels in a lot of reverse shots... I don´t know to much about electronics... can anybody with more insight into how image sensors work tell me if that might be true and why?