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Scott Larson

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Everything posted by Scott Larson

  1. And that's the case generally in still photography. You will not hear the phrase "good flares" in a lens review. The distorted bokeh of beloved expensive anamorphic lenses would also be considered cheap and harsh looking yet no one in the motion picture industry seems to notice it.
  2. When "The Blair Witch Project" was released, I heard about lots of problems with audiences around the country making jokes at the screen and ruining the experience. Here, I only saw that happen once and the ushers kicked the troublemaker right out immediately as if they had been expecting trouble. This movie was a great audience experience. Everyone would be laughing at a joke then suddenly the theater would be silent once frightening noises began on the soundtrack. And it didn't look much better on DVD or Blu-ray.
  3. Is it unreasonable to expect at least DVD image quality in a movie theater these days? Every film I've seen projected in a theater for at least the past five years at has been incredibly blurry, clearly inferior to even a DVD at home. To save my eyesight I've been going to local digital theaters. They always look better than in film theaters even though most (maybe all) are only HD resolution. One theater sometimes projects (if that's the right term) foreign films that are from tapes intended for standard definition television broadcast in Europe. Even they look better than projected films. The most surprising thing is that very few people I've talked to have noticed how terrible these movies look on the big screens. It's probably not a factor in declining movie revenues.
  4. The showing of The Blair Witch Project I was at was unlike any other I've experienced. The movie had some improvised humor which the audience laughed at, but cut immediately to black footage with strange sounds in the distance. The audience instantly went from laughter to total silence.
  5. If you want the aperture in a Canon EF lens to stay at a certain f stop, you can use the DOF preview button to set it to that f stop, and then rotate the lens just enough so the pins on the lens no longer make contact with the camera but not so far that the lens falls out. This means simultaneously pressing the DOF preview and lens release buttons. I don't know why you would do this. The camera will not expose until the aperture is set correctly.
  6. Although I don't think David did this trick, Andrzej Sekula did a simple and clever in-camera trick for this kind of shot in American Psycho. When shooting Christian Bale running at night on ISO 50 film with New York in the background, he shot a few minutes of the skyline in the upper background at something like ten frames per second so it would be exposed correctly. Then he rewound the film and shot Bale lit in the foreground at normal speed as a double exposure. Nowadays I guess it's easier to do a composite in post than in camera.
  7. I'll be stealing that idea for my holiday season event photography. Another thing I like about the dance scene is that they let the actress be visibly taller than the actor. Could someone please tell Hollywood that it's OK for women to sometimes be taller than men?
  8. In the Showtime film "Rated X" there are what appear to be white outs and jump cuts in a few scenes. These started by accident when a camera battery started dying. Instead of reshooting it, they decided it was a cool effect and used it several more times in the film. So it's just a matter of making the flicker look like an intentional effect. :lol:
  9. One thing I remembered as a kid watching Alien was just before the "birthing scene" a couple of strange out of focus blobs and silhouettes suddenly were thrown on the screen: They seemed out of place and there was no other hint that anything horrifying was about to happen within the next few seconds so I've often wondered if that was subtle foreshadowing or just accidental.
  10. But they are available although not many new ones are left. I bought new one a few months ago for my five year old HDTV and some stores still have them. If not, check eBay or other places for a Samsung DTB-H260F or other ATSC set top boxes with component and HDMI outputs. Used ones are getting cheaper as more people replace their old HDTVs with ones that have built-in tuners.
  11. Depends on how many large men helped me! Note that we only see the upper part of the hallway wall so it could have been on wheels. Also if I remember right we see very little of the bridge set through the doors before a cut so it may have been moved just a few feet to the side. You know some guys were high-fiving each other when they pulled this off. Well, high fives weren't in common use yet but I'm sure they were doing whatever white guys did in the late sixties in these situations. ;)
  12. Oh yes, the "planets" were minimal of course. The strategic placement of huge boulders everywhere was to distract from the non-existent horizons which were clearly gelled lights. I don't think there was any precedent for creating sets like that on television, was there? You can tell they put some effort into the "ruins" in Man Trap. The budgets for these episodes were incredibly low. I could imagine NBC executives watching these early episodes on a projector looking for anything that didn't look right. Another fun cheap scene to look for is a shot from inside a turbolift. They appear to enter it from some nondescript hallway, and without a cut thirty seconds later the doors open and we see the bridge. Of course it was just a simple matter of using a "hallway" set to block our vision of the bridge while the doors were open and moving it out of the way while the doors were closed to reveal the bridge set when they opened again. No, that would be Vancouver, B.C. :)
  13. I had the opposite reaction. Nothing about it shocked me. The bridge didn't have just the "blinking lights" that signify cheap sci-fi but many of the "displays" and controls around the bridge had a surprising amount of detail that made them look almost realistic. They did replace close ups of some the truly dated props like Sulu's "analog" chronometer. One thing I noticed is how they "cheated" the focus in some scenes. In one conference room scene there were three actors at different distances from the camera. Instead of focusing on whoever was talking, they simply kept the focus on the middle actor and let the other two be slightly out of focus while they talked. This was barely noticeable on the DVD but is certainly obvious in HD.
  14. Sadly, running a public forum on even the most trivial subjects is inviting people who suffer from unfocused rage at the world to pick you as their target. I help moderate a forum on, of all things, automated cat litter boxes. We also have one crazy person who felt he was done wrong by being banned and has made it his mission in life to cause the owner of the forum and the moderators as much grief as possible. He had found out where we work, our home addresses and threatened us with legal action. It's most likely pointless nonsense but you have to take lunatics seriously because even they don't know what they're capable of. Unfortunately shutting your site down is exactly what they want. I'm sure the guy who attacked Deakins' site was jumping with glee in his basement since his mission was accomplished.
  15. Kodak released the DCS-14n in March of 2004. Canon responded with the EOS-1Ds Mark II with a 16.7 MP sensor in September of 2004. The Kodak sensor was very noisy and the product was a disappointment. Worst of all, Kodak was never able to solve the noise problems and permanently left the DSLR market to other manufacturers which continued to develop sensors with increasing resolution and sensitivity.
  16. Unfortunately the flat panel displays of today retain the concept of "overscan" from old CRTs. Even though they are perfectly capable of displaying each pixel precisely, most displays stretch the image several percent anyway. It's possible to convince some displays not to do this by telling them they're connected to a computer. When I do this with my display it will then have a one-to-one pixel ratio without overscan with my Blu-ray and HD-DVD players. However if my computer sends it interlaced video that makes it turn the overscan back on, as if I'm lying to it about being connected to a computer. Many television networks rely on overscan to remove distracting lines around the edges of their HD screens. NBC has a yellow line on one side for example.
  17. Dare I mention Conrad Hall's great photography in the first season of Outer Limits? There are a couple of surreal scenes in "The Man Who Was Never Born" (with Martin Landau) that have the most incredible diffusion I've ever seen, as if the scenes had been shot through a carefully oiled sheet of glass instead of a standard filter. These early episodes are among the best black and white television I've ever seen. I can't imagine the network was happy with the harsh lighting and extreme contrast in many of the scenes.
  18. If you want to learn about how incredibly unsafe stunts were routinely done back in the 70's and early 80's, listen to Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale's commentary on "Used Cars". They're amazed no one was seriously injured even though a camera man was nearly run over, an actor could have easily gotten his foot crushed under a car, and in one of the funniest scenes an actor narrowly avoided getting run down by a very fast car not driven by a stunt driver and didn't even flinch. Driving cars through crowds of extras was no big deal back then -- people always knew to move out of the way. Zemeckis also lamets about how the most fantastic stunt in the film was mostly ruined because the camera with the best view jammed because it wasn't loaded properly, Since then he demands that every last camera be double and triple checked before critical shots. They're also proud that in the very first scene of the movie, the camera is perfectly visible in the car's side mirror as it dollies to the odometer -- amateurs! :lol: The funniest commentary I've heard is "Rated X", with Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez. They point out every flaw in the film from their skull caps being unnatural colors to the cable cars obviously being in Toronto instead of San Francisco. You'd think they were making fun of someone else's film.
  19. The commentary by Haskell Wexler on "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" has lots of photographic information like how B&W allowed him to adjust light levels in scenes without worrying about the changing color temperatures. There's also lots of info on shooting night scenes including one scene where he had to dim the lights of a house in the background because lights can be distracting when out of focus since they take up more space on the screen (sort of counterintuitive that light sources become more vistible on the screen when they're farther away). He also describes how he used a technique he read in a Kodak "Learning to Take Photos" book to make a diffuser out of materials he got at a hardware store. Wexler's commentary on "Medium Cool" is also excellent. It's incredible that he improvsed a film in the middle of a historical event. He describes many documentary techniques he used (mostly because he had no choice) which blurred the line between what was part of the fictional story and what real-life events were happening beyond the control of the film crew.
  20. Yes, Kodak High Speed Infrared Film Since it's also sensitive to blue light, some photographers skip its infrared characterics and shoot it through blue filters. This can give photos a dreamy look similar to 19th century photos that is caused at least partially by the halation. Some shots look like they had been shot through uncoated lenses but I think that's more likely an effect of the film.
  21. Another thing that struck me was how Maria's shanty village looked like a real life version of a set from a creepy German expressionist film like "Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari". The buildings and even the telephone poles were leaning in every direction and looked like they were ready to collapse on someone. The distortion of the super wide angle lens made it even more disorienting. I've always thought the weird angles of the expressionist sets were too clean and exaggerated to be taken seriously but I guess places like that do exist (but not by design!).
  22. Cold Case uses a bleach-bypass technique? Is that one reason why it looks so distinctive?
  23. Absolutely listen to the director's commentary. You'll find out a bunch of clever tricks and why some of them didn't work out as well as others. I don't see why he thought he could shoot with available light in the outdoor fountain scene unless his light meter was too close to the lights. :(
  24. I'm surprised no one has joked that if a person's career in motion pictures tanks, they'll have another occupation to fall back on. :lol:
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