Jonathan Bowerbank

I doubt tape is going to save you in the event of a car crash, ha ha So long as the latches are taped, you're good. It's not so much to save light leaks as it is an ID to prevent anyone from mistakenly opening a mag and flashing it.

Such a good episode. I don't watch much TV, except for Thursday nights, and Fringe is the best show on TV right now in my opinion. SPOILER ALERT So great when Olivia appeared coming out of the tank. CU on Astrid while we saw her climbing out in the background, such a great way to do it, excellent choice :)

I usually do it away from the lens, so that when I'm wiping the filter I feel more secure about not pushing it out of the tray. Also depends on the situation & conditions. If it's a rough & rugged handheld type job, it may be best to load'em toward the lens just so they don't pop out.

"When We Were Kings" is pretty brilliant.

They're all perfectly suitable for TV. Just depends on what "look" they want. We're all familiar with the 5D/7D look that's prominent on the telly nowadays. Also, your font is incredibly hard to read :)

Precisely. Especially the man nearly being consumed by paper work :)

I dunno, I found the film quite painful for the majority. Sure, it's darker than previous films, but not an improvement in any way. Most of the performances were poorly executed with humdrum blocking and story pacing. Putting the films in 2 parts really left them open to spend A LOT of time showing people doing nothing, so I was quite bored during certain portions of the film. It has a lot of great moments, it just seemed when there wasn't a story aspect to pinpoint, the director decided to try and feebly copy "The Road", only by wasting our time with cheesily written exposition and Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys style mystery solving. Cinematography's great, as with all the Potter films. Serra's a great choice. A part of me wishes Terry Gilliam had directed it. If you watch it again, there are a lot of Gilliam-esque elements.

That's what I'm sayin'. Can't match Kubrick, but in terms of creativity, auterism, and making Hollywood work for him (and not the other way around), he's definitely of the same breed.

Beautiful, suspenseful and insane film. I've been so bold as to hail Aronofsky as today's Kubrick...and I think this film supports that statement. It was almost all handheld, but I only found it distracting early on in the film, always takes me a few minutes to adjust. After that, I felt it fit the story and the pacing well. Frantic & intense. Lighting was intentionally rough, mostly practical inspired sources, which left the operator free to roam with the camera. This month's AC magazing has a great interview with Libatique and a piece with Aronofsky that reveals some interesting details about what inspired them. They mention Polanski's "Repulsion" as an influence, but I believe elements of Rosemary's Baby are also present. It's Portman's best performance thus far in her career, and it was nice to see her be able to do a crying scene well. Before, her crying was always way overdone with the same expression on her face, in every film. But this time I found her completely convincing as she went through quite the transformation as the story progressed. I'd like to see it again, as there are bits I did miss, there's a lot of information and nuances that come at you.

Let me know if you need any more resources, besides the ones I already sent you :) Cheers! Jon

Just don't light "flat" ;) Light it as if you're shooting b&w, higher contrast, hotter keys, etc. This is just by word of mouth, but I hear there are benefits to shooting b&w in camera with the 5D/7D. Something about it being able to capture more detail than it would in color mode because the sensor & processor are working at their highest efficiency at that point. Again, very hearsay, but worth testing out.

I've heard good things about Flanders Scientific monitors. Their 17" models have red peaking focus assist, can't speak for them personally though. Sample from their site: Chapter 5m - Focus Assist

2" Velcro with adhesive comes to mind. Whenever I 2nd, it almost always gets called for. For attaching accessories to the camera body, or just so the 1st can attach his china pencil/pens & ID tags to the mattebox. Get a space blanket for covering the camera when you go to lunch, or if there's any downtime and you're out on location. Take a cube tap for plugging in chargers, and above all else, make sure you're on top of that aspect :)

I would get out to the location to find out what available lighting is already there and augment your lights to match that color temp. On the day of shooting, and if you so choose to go with the green look in camera, I would shoot a gray card just in case you decide to go back to a more balanced color temp in post. On a more creative note. If you're going for an overall green "The Matrix" type look, white balancing to make the image green is fine. However, in situations like at a train station where there are typically diverse light sources, you may want to mix color temps. Give your talent a cool/greenish backlight with a warm or cool key (or vice versa), for example. Find out if there is anything already built into the location to motivate such lighting. Or just ignore any motivation and make things interesting :)

I'll cocktail the bulbs like that pretty often. Depends on what you want them to do. When shooting daylight balance, I'll put in a tungsten tube on occasion to bring out flesh tones, etc. Try it out and see if you like it. If it doesn't work, just use daylight tubes and put in a gradient of CTO until it's the right level of coolness you're lookin' for.

Of course everything has its place. On big jobs, of course, you can't waste time or jeopardize your efficiency by pulling this stuff. But if you're helping out on some student or low budg film where everyone's there to just have fun and not take it so seriously, there's definitely room to tease someone. I've never seen any kid get pissed or get bent out of shape over it, it's usually taken pretty lightly and gets a great laugh while reflecting on it at the end of the day. I'm never able to pull this kind of stuff, since I'm Camera Dept., plus it's just not my style of working. Besides, camera usually has left AND right handed things ;)

Seems like he's retiring completely, but I can ask and see if he plans to keep LU alive in some shape or form once the shop has closed for good. The closing isn't so much to change gears as it is a telling of how little film is being shot in the bay area nowadays. They've been losing money for some time now. All the custom accessory stuff is mostly, I believe, Adolph Esposito's doing, the in house machinist. It'd probably be a good idea to stay in touch with him. But I can find out from Lee. The house manager Ryan Wilmot is on this forum as well. I'm sure he could chime in on any questions anyone has :) btw, they'll be liquidating their gear fairly soon. And some big name DP's & camera houses are already calling dibs on gear.

The end of an era in the SF Bay Area :( http://www.leeutterbach.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=36:time-to-say-goodbye-after-31-years&catid=13:news&Itemid=39

Gunnar, I would CERTAINLY be interested :)

The rental house should have 4x5.65 trays available. Should be an easy trade for them.

I dunno, when it comes to an AC pouch, for me, the smaller it is the better. That way I'm not overloading the pouch and putting all the weight in just one area on my belt. I prefer to have my tools distributed throughout my belt, so I have my tape measure, canned air, Leatherman and AC pouch evenly around my waist. I bend down and walk around too much to have an over the shoulder type pouch, so I need to have it secured to my waist. i love the idea of the light inside, and the zipper option if I need to close it up tightly. I have a Cinebags AC pouch, and even that's getting too poofy & big for my needs. I need something thin and minimal like the Lindcraft brand. Anything else I would rather just throw in a runbag instead of having to have it on my person all day.

Hey all, I'm prepping for a 5 to 7 week TV series shoot, workin' with a few 7D's, and I'm in the middle of sorting out the monitoring issues. Ideally, I want to send an HDMI signal to a BlackMagic or AJA HDMI to SDI Converter, then be able to run BNC's both to our on-board monitors and the directors monitor simultaneously. In the past, I've rented, and the rental houses provide a Panasonic battery plate that's been converted to power the AJA or BlackMagic. But the production is buying most the equipment, so I wanted to know if anybody knew of any sources for either purchasing these, or buying the pieces separately and building them myself. I know basic electricity/electronics, and am pretty sure I could figure it out myself. But I'd rather find a one stop shop, as my turnaround is pretty tight at this point. And I don't want to ask any rental houses, because I know they'd prefer we rent from them instead of fishing for information on how they do it. Thanks! Jon

That kit from Filmtools is just fine, or you could just rent suction cups at $5 a piece, a few gobo heads and arms and a baby pin with 1/4 20 male thread on one end. Does the trick.

Probably best to always round down, to prevent roll outs.

Save your money, buy a T2i :)