Matt Read

3239 Union Pacific Ave Los Angeles, CA 90023 323.981.1520 info@pollutionstudios.com www.pollutionstudios.com Office hours: 10a-6p Mon-Fri Studio facility plus grip and electric rental, crew and production services

(Sorry for making two posts, it wouldn't let me edit my previous one to add this info) If you've asked for more prep time and been denied, unless you feel very strongly that you need it, there's no reason to keep pushing for it. You've done your job by asking and covered your ass. It's now on the DP if there's a registration problem. You should always set the diopter for your eye when testing lenses. Point the camera at a white object or light source and throw it out of focus. Adjust the diopter until the ground glass appears sharp. It's always a good idea to make marks on the diopter for your eye, the operator's eye, the DP's eye and the director's eye (if he/she likes to check the frame through the viewfinder), so that you can quickly adjust it for each of these people.

Checking the gate isn't difficult. You need to do this after you're finished with every setup and before anyone moves anything. Take off the lens and shine a flashlight at the gate. You're looking for hairs or anything else that shouldn't be there, that may have blocked light from hitting the film. If you see anything, call it out immediately, as the last setup will have to be re-shot. To remove the object, gently run an orangewood stick around the edge of the gate. Only if this fails to remove the hair should you use a blower or canned air. Put the lens back on. If there is nothing in the gate, put the lens back on and call out that the gate is clean.

Seattle Grip and Lighting is probably the place to go. I'm interested in ACing as well. I'll send you a PM.

Shooting a watered down talent through a fish tank full of water will usually give a pretty convincing underwater effect, as long as your talent doesn't have long hair. The breathing out milk is a little more difficult, but I'd think that you should be able to do it in a similar manner to how one adds breathe effect. Shoot the milk getting dropped into water in front of a black background. Key out the black and composite it onto the shot o the talent.

You should easily be able to replicate that lighting with your gear. She's lit with a large soft source from above and straight in front of her. That gives her the nice highlights on her cheeks and nose. There's also some fill from below to help with the shadows. You can see all of that from the reflection of the sources in her eyes.

You're not getting a lot of bang for your buck with those lights and cheaper LEDs tend to have poor CRIs. I understand the need to work quickly, but the fixtures you picked will seriously limit what you can do because they are all small soft sources. If you're mostly shooting talking heads, then what you picked should do just fine, but if you're looking at doing anything more than that, you will need different lights. I would consider going with several PAR 64s (about $40-80 per fixture) with a variety of different lamps/lens (about $40 each), a few 650w fresnels ($300-400), a couple chinaballs and photofloods ($3-20 for the balls, $5 for lamps) and spend the rest on stands, C-stands, flags, sandbags, scrims and 5-in-1 reflector discs. Boards of foam insulation work work great as bounces (about $10 for a 4'x8' sheet at any home improvement store; get the kind with silver on one side and white on the other).

Are you saying that there are no lights inside the pool you will be shooting at? If that's the case, I wouldn't worry about finding underwater lights. You won't need them. In the stills you provided, the lights in the pool aren't actually lighting the pool much. In the wide, you can see a small area of orange in the pool in the lower right of frame and that's all the pool lights are doing. Everything else is out of water lights. The big blue area in the lower left of frame is lit by a source to camera left. All the water reflections on the walls are caused by hard lights reflecting off the surface of the water, not underwater sources.

Chris, Unfortunately, what you are looking for doesn't exist. Pretty much any light powerful enough to bring up an interior (assuming it's not a coat closet) by 1-2 stops will not run on a battery. Depending on the size of the area you need to light, you're looking at a Joker 400 or 800 or even a 1.2k HMI bounced into the ceiling or otherwise diffused. For smaller windows, you might also consider putting ND gel on the outside of them, either in conjunction with lighting or as an alternative to lights (though if you're using daylight as your main source, this will bring down the light level inside, too). Another option would be to shoot any shots of windows as lock-offs and shoot them twice, once exposing for the inside and once for the outside. Then in post you can replace the overexposed windows with the correctly exposed ones. Still photographers do this all the time with real estate.

You might consider LED Christmas lights. I have a string of 50 that only uses 3 watts and produces no heat. You could connect a couple strings and hook it up to a battery and stuff the whole thing in whatever you find to use as an orb.

Overall, it looks pretty good. The B&W section and the section after it looked very good. There were several shots from the first section with the old man that looked over-lit to me, namely the CUs of him in bed. I'd also lose the second half of the last shot of the servant going up the stairs. That will make that whole section look better. If you want to sell yourself as a documentary DP and a narrative DP, that's fine, but I'd split your work into a documentary reel and a narrative reel. If I'm looking for a DP for a narrative, I don't care that you can also shoot documentaries (or vice versa).

I'm not seeing too much noise. What I see looks more like compression artifacts. I have no way of telling whether that's from YouTube's compression, from blowing 720p footage up to fit fullscreen on a 1080p monitor or compression from the camera's codec.

Also, your math looks right, but you should still test to be sure.

The best way to check your math will be to just do a test, even if that just means shooting a still on a SLR. It won't show you exactly how it will look on film, but at least that way you'll know if It's within the realm of possibility.

I would suggest that instead of balancIng your lights to the flashlight, you balance the flashlight to your lights. With most flashlights you can unscrew the lens and you can drop a gel in behind it. This way the only light you'll lose some oompf from is the flashlight, which I'm guessing is just a gag light anyway. As for how to light the space, it really depends on the story. There's any number of ways you could light it. But if you're just trying to simulate daylight, bouncing your 2ks into something should work just fine. Use your peppers to give some detail to the background and your 650s for fill or backlight. If you want to simulate direct sunlight, a spotted 2k through some light diffusion should do the trick.

Looks good, Torben. You could have fooled me on this being your first lighting job.

It really comes down to how big the room is and how you want to light dry ice fog. If you just want to illuminate the fog so you can see it, then depending on the size of the room your 1.2ks should work fine as a back light. Slap them up on some stands and you're good to go. If you want to put the light below the level of the fog so that it diffuses the light and the fog becomes a source of its own, then I don't think a two 1.2ks will do the trick. They're too hard of sources to evenly illuminate all the fog from below. Something more like a bunch of bare Kino tubes would work better. However, maybe having beams of light through the fog would be interesting, in which case your 1.2ks would be just fine.

If there are doorways off of the hall, it would be easy enough to open the door and toss a light inside that room aimed into the hallway. You could do the same thing from the doorway that the talent enters the hallway from, assuming that he/she does not close a door behind him/her. Yet another option is to put a light directly behind the camera and bounce it up into the ceiling. You could aim it either at the existing practical to reinforce it or you could aim it at an empty part of the ceiling to either suggest a second unseen source or to provide some fill. If it's just the light level you're worried about, you could always put a higher wattage bulb in the existing practical (though make sure it doesn't exceed the socket's rating). If you want to soften the practical up, you can tape a piece of diffusion over it (assuming you don't see it in the shot) or toss a china ball over the bare bulb. If you don't see all of the ceiling in the shot, you could rig a coop light or some Kinos to the ceiling. I don't know if this would make sense for your specific situation, but you also have the option of having the talent carry a source of some sort, like a flashlight or a candle. Toby's silhouette idea and Teegan's suggestion to add more practicals (a string of Christmas lights around the ceiling is something that Teegan didn't mention) would also work. Plus you can combine any or all of these ideas. It really depends on what will work best for the story.

For the POV where you see the whole road, to get the most realistic night look without using any lights, I'd suggest you shoot during the magic hour and darken it in post if desired. You'll have a small window of time right after the sun goes down where the sky will provide enough illumination to get an exposure (assuming a fast ISO), but won't be overwhelmingly bright and scream "DAY!" If needed, you'll be able to match this footage to the footage from the rest of the scene, which could actually be shot at night. As for the interior shots, you can use the dashboard display to motivate a light on the occupants. Another option would be to shot the interiors using the poor man's process (since it's supposed to be pitch black outside you wouldn't need to create any background) and have a big soft source outside the car provide illumination for the interior.

Given the equipment you're working with, I'm not sure why the outside to inside transition is a problem for you in the first place. If the fixtures you have to work with are primarily daylight balance, there's no reason that you need to convert them to tungsten for interior work. You can just WB to daylight and use the uncorrected (or corrected down to 5500K, depending on what your WB ends up being) 6500K CFLs or 3200K sources gelled to daylight to light the interior. If you are worried about matching existing practical tungsten sources in the location, either gel the existing bulbs or replace them with daylight balanced ones. This will end up working better for you anyway, as I assume the room you are shooting in will have windows and you will therefore not need to worry about blacking them out. However, if there's something I'm missing and you need to shoot the interior under tungsten-balanced light, you could do either of the following: The most simple solution would be to eliminate the pan as the men walk into the room and shoot it as two shots with different WBs. A slightly more complicated solution would be to shoot the shot as you originally described, but shoot it twice, with different WBs, from the same camera position and use a foreground object to hide a cut during the pan.

I'd tell you, but there's no link to your video.

Your stuff doesn't look bad, it's just that it all looks the same. I'm seeing a lot of footage from what I would guess are teen dramas and not much of anything else. If you're only 16, then I'd say you're off to a good start, but in the near future you'll want to expand your subject matter to include something besides teen dramas. Also, there are a few shots that are noticeably squished (three shots beginning at 1:09, one at 1:44 and one at 2:00). You'll want to fix that as the bring down the rest of the reel. Lastly, unless Gigi Bigs is an actual company and not just a name that you put in the opening credits of your movies, you'll want to take that off. Every high school and college student with a video camera makes up a name for their fake production company. It's a sure sign of an amateur when you start plastering the name of your fake production company on things. While you're at it, remove the director's name too. You've made a cinematography reel, not a director's reel. It doesn't tell me anything about the director's work, so there's no reason for his name to be on there. If your director feels he needs a reel (though if I were hiring a director, I'd want to see full examples of his or her work, not a reel), it should be something separate from a cinematography reel. Combining them does a disservice to both.

I think putting a magnet near the camera is a terrible idea. You have no idea how the magnet will actually affect the camera without doing it. The worst case scenario is you permanently break your camera. Though using an upside-down monitor or camera will be more time consuming and expensive than the magnet idea, you know that either will work and be safe for all the equipment involved. Just stick with one of those.

Some of the more expensive off-the-shelf 35mm adapters use a prism to invert the image a second time so that it appears correct in camera. There might be a way to incorporate something like this into your design. The one time I have used a 35mm adapter, it was a cheaper off-the-shelf type and it did not have a prism to invert the image. We simply attached a 5" monitor upside-down to the camera or tripod and operated off of that. It worked, but was not an ideal situation. If you cannot afford a monitor, then you will either have to mount the camera upside-down, as John suggested, or simply deal with looking at an inverted image until you get to post. An upside-down rig should not actually be that difficult. Try searching the web for examples of what other people have done.

Eden, it is quite clearly a scam. There is another thread about film connection from a while back. http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=2571&st=0 As you can see, anyone who posted a positive comment was a new member, some of them with extremely bad fake names (Moe Hawke) and all of them had almost identical comments, which is a dead give-away. Furthermore, any career placement service which charges you up front is illegal. Stay away from these folks.