Mike Simpson

well 16 is grainy, and stills always look grainier than when its playing. Have you seen any of the actual footage? Is it maybe underexposed? What kind of lenses were you using?

I wanted to try something different with music and editing. Im pretty happy but I'm curious to hear other reactions. its here: www.mike-simpson.com Website is under construction too =D

The reason they arent banned is because the files arent actually on the websit ( on torrent sites people upload a part of the file and the downloader pieces it together from a few or sometimes hundreds of different people). I think the idea is since the website never touches the file they have no legal liability. Im also pretty sure they have been trying to get rid of them for a couple years.

I guess its just an issue of reference. When I think of the "technicolor look" I tend to think of my favorite films or the best films, rather than the majority. =D

I like a mix of white flame and ctb for a nice blue-ish green color (I usually use it for night/street light, but it could do the job here too). I think plus green will be a bit too yellow for your look. But I still think its mostly a color cast.

They are standard. 0.3 is one stop (although generally it will be spoken as "ND 3.").

Maybe its just me but when I think technicolor I think low-con and pastel, but with really saturated colors, so I would probably shoot a fuji stock thats as slow as I could get away with and bump up the saturation in the transfer. But in my experience the s16 fuji stocks seem pretty grainy so you might want to test. I agree with Satsuki that direct light is also the way to go if you really want to stay true to that look. heres some pictures: Colors seem a bit off in the last two. Check out the eyes though. You can see they were throwing alot of light. The shot of the prince has 4 (or 5?) huge eyelights! You might also want to check out the article on The Aviator in AC. They built their whole technicolor and I thought it was sucessful.

I agree. The trailer is pretty terrible though. I had no desire to see it and probably wouldnt have were my ticket not a gift =p However after about 20 minutes I was really into it. The film gets better as it goes and it stands up pretty well. Only thing I'm unsure of is if I like or hate the fact that george clooney always seems to be playing a version of george clooney.

I think you'll see right away that that wont work. The tape just wont be in focus... Plus, when you get to your longer lenses the tape would be unnoticeable, or possibly just vignetting on the top and bottom and on your wider lenses if you did manage to get it in focus it would be pretty distorted.

Hard to tell on youtube but to me it just looks like post processing. You can just lightly tint the blacks with that green/teal that you want. Other than that its just a matter of keeping color out of your costumes and production design. Ive managed to get that look in still photography on film without post processing, but it was luck more than anything. I basically try to see what kind of strange effects I can get with my film by leaving in the car (texas summer), microwave, etc. I think these were just from leaving them in my car a week. Ill upload others later. doesn't seem to want to let me add anything else.

so they process 2 and 3 perf for cheaper than 4? Is this pretty standard?

its actually really easy to get a good idea of what it would look like since when you are recording or watching in real time you are essentially watching step printing (which is also why everything looks video-y when you are shooting high frame rates before playback). Its only when you play back that the footage is basically dropped into a 24 frame timeline and you see fast motion. So just set to 6 frames and take a look =p If youre wanting playback you would need to download and jump through all of those hoops though.

Wong Kar Wai plays music while he shoots.

Nice stuff Jon. I like the video alot.

they should work fine. You either crop the sides and use anamorphic lenses, or crop the top and bottom and use spherical lenses. Basically the debate goes the same direction as it does for 35.

why not put it on wheels and just keep backlighting with the sun if the background is the same everywhere? =D

it depends on what you were metering when you say "overexposed by 5 stops" too. =D

i would treat it like any highly reflective object. A combination of large soft sources that show up white in reflections and flags. I think, just to satisfy my curiousity though, I might try just backlighting it at first to see what happens (assuming its clear). Seems like that might be enough.

getting a better on the exposure on the window will be nice if you can somehow get it composited in fine. The trickier part will be the fogging around the actor (I presume there is an actor), so I still think the easiest thing to do would be to bring the window down while shooting. Chromatic aberration is another concern that could be tough to deal with in post.

The best is probably to drop a net behind or ND on the window, or bring up the interior light as much as possible. I personally like hanging a big net outside the window because it feels like it reduces the harshness of the light hitting the lens to me. Another thing it consider are your lenses. Higher quality lenses tend to deal with that sort of thing better, as well as optically perfect lenses. If you lens has alot of scratches in it, when the light hits it it will scatter and you might end up with a foggy or pretty low-con looking image. When a significant portion of the frame is very bright that will obviously come out pretty nasty. You really need to do some tests with your lenses and your post options. To some extent you can try to add contrast in post to make up for the fogging, but its hard to say how far you can go without having all the details.

So Ill try to keep this as neutral as possible. This definitely isnt to bash the camera, but just some things to keep in mind if heading somewhere remote, or just far from other reds. I was the 1st AC and shot a little bit of 2nd unit. Overall Id say the footage was great, and I was very impressed. However, we had alot of technical problems. Heres a quick overview of the shoot. We were shooting in pretty remote places in Macedonia, sometimes many hours of driving up a mountain to get to the location, where there was little or no electricty, plenty of heat, and tough terrain. Our first day the camera overheated to the point of the board melting (the camera always said TEMP: OK). We had to send it back to red and scramble for a new camera. The second camera (rented from somewhere in Romania) had some issues as well, but mostly worked fine and the rental house and person they sent were both great. Our third camera came from slovenia, and worked well. Eventually we got our original camera back from red and it worked the rest of the shoot. Overall I feel like the red is not ready for situations where you are far from other reds and red HQ. Shipping the camera back to the US was a pain, and having to scramble for a new camera (red did not want to send us a loaner while ours was being repaired) was also a pain. At the very least a backup camera seems pretty essential. Heres a little list of the problems I personally had: The batteries had serious issues. By the end of the shoot the contacts were so bad that if someone bumped the battery the camera would shut off. The charger also stopped worked. We had to rent a Vmount charger and some generic batteries. The dove tail is really loose. We mostly used the cheeseplate for tripod work, but it would have been nice to be able to just keep the dovetail on as switching between cheeseplate (tripod) to dovetail (it has padding for the shoulder) took about 10 minutes. The red handle for handheld doesnt completely lock onto the rods. It wiggles and is basically unusuable. We had some metal workers in a village build us something out of bike handle bars that worked much better. We had wierd scan lines when shooting at 60 frames. I was pretty sure it was just a monitor issue (since there are tons of monitor issues, ill get to those), but when we checked the footage there were these wierd scan lines. We never really figured out why. It was the romanian camera though so it didnt effect too much. We also shot something that when we imported it, it only had the red channel of color (which is kinda funny in retrospect). The monitor has a few issues. First it would freeze the camera if it was plugged in while booting. it also has the wierd strobing effect, which can be fixed easily by toggling the zoom, but only when not recording. Playback is totally bugged. About 30% of the time when playing back a clip the camera would get an error, freeze, or just decide to reboot itself. And this is when you slowly press the buttons and wait, if you try to press two buttons in a row your chance of freezing etc. triples. Heat was our biggest issue. Macedonia is hot and there was very little air condition inside. And we were especially paranoid after frying our camera the first day (the heat warning never came on that day, and I think I only saw it once the entire shoot so I didnt really find that too reliable).. The camera seemed to get very hot very fast. I guess its a thick black box with poor ventilation. When it was even a little bit hot we had a fan near the camera that, when we werent rolling, was always running. When it was hotter, or when we had alot of long takes, we attached ice packs to the camera to keep it cool. It felt pretty silly but seemed to be the best solution. Overall, though, the red was pretty impressive. The footage looked great, and it was probably worth the trouble. However if I was going to take the red to another fairly extreme or remote location I would take a backup camera, and probably backups everything (cables, monitor, etc). Also I would avoid most if not all of the red accessories (batteries, charger, dovetail, hand grips for sure). And heres me with a kalashnikov and the red for good measure (No prop guns in macedonia) Theres also a few photos from the shoot at www.flickr.com/photos/mike-simpson

Hilti has the glasses. They are super cool looking. Wouldnt use them for much else other than impressing people with your style though. =D

For what its worth I've shot with 3 sets of these lenses. The first two were somewhat soft and could not handle flares at all. Even a bright window with no direct light coming through looked terrible. Then the 3rd set looked amazing. Id easily compare them to superspeeds. Id shoot tests and check the coating.

I just recently got a Hilti PD42. Its signifigantly better than anything else ive used for two reasons really. 1) the laser sight. In situations where its really bright and or the object is mildly (~100ft seems about right) far away you can actually hold the hilti to your eye, look through a mini viewfinder, and get extremely accurate with your measurement. I owned a different laser meter and took it back because it didnt have this feature and it was fairly useless outside. This feature is amazing. 2) its fast. Lately ive been working on sets where actors dont really stand around and wait for me to get marks. Its nice to be able to shoot the laser and get a mark on a moving target as well. On the lecia that I was using I would have to wait as long as 5 seconds, which made it impossible to get anything useful on someone moving. The 42 also has a continious measurement mode too which I can think of plenty of uses for but I have yet to use it for them.

"Hi monkeys. Can you help me get to that jeep faster than than if i was driving?"