Mark Kenfield

The quality of Proaim’s machining is generally junk. I would be very wary of using them. just get something like a Dutti Dolly and expand it as necessary.

It's a wonderful podcast, with so many fascinating stories from so many different corners of the production sphere.

I generally find that 21mm is as wide as you can go (in terms of focal length) without getting problematic perspective distortion on close-ups. So yes, I'd say it's the perfect choice for what you describe. 👍

If you want to know where the exposure sits across a larger space, you'd have to have someone walk through it slowly with a grey card, so you could measure the reflected value at each section - you'd also have no way to measure how hot any backlight is in that situation (without moving to the opposite side of the room/space. With an incident meter, you can just walk through yourself and take readings as you go. I rely on both spot and incident readings. That's why I put up with the stupid bloody user-interface of my Sekonic L758-C - because it give me both meters in one unit.

You do, but it sounds like what you’re trying to create is an impression of darkness, and in a white/light-coloured room, that rarely requires adding much light to the background itself, as it’ll pick up and reflect whatever small amount of light you do put in (say to light your subject). It’s the trickiest aspect of low-key lighting - highlighting/revealing what you do need the audience to see, whilst keeping enough light off the environment surrounding them, that you can maintain the impression of darkness.

Ah, well that'll do it! Thanks for the clarification Uli. 👍 I was told (by a sales person at Kodak no-less) that 2-perf had a native 2.40:1 aspect ratio. So I never understood why it didn't see a greater take-up, the stock efficiencies seemed too good to ignore. But if it's a tighter extraction, then that explains a lot.

The 120D in the hallway is having a somewhat strange effect because the light is coming straight through the doorway (and playing high up the bedroom wall). If it were an actual practical light in the hallway, it would be mounted in the ceiling and the top of the doorframe would be cutting off a lot of the light that plays higher up the wall. If you simply lift the 120D higher, the top of the door frame will act as a cutter and you'll get a tighter pool of light on the bedroom wall. This will make the image lower-key overall and should help a bit. I'm with David though - white/light-toned rooms are incredibly difficult to make low-key - you really have to keep all of the light off them for a truly dark feeling environment. Do you have a snoot or the fresnel attachment for the 120D? A more controlled backlight/edge light on the subject as he sleeps would probably be your best bet for keeping the overall scene low-key, whilst still being able to clearly discern your subject.

The Rokinon XEEN lenses have some quite "vintage" optical characteristics (particularly wide-open), and they're super cheap and cover full-frame. They have two different styles of mechanical housings for them now, a carbon fibre and a metal version (which are very CP.2-esque). Canon's new version of their CN-E primes, the "Sumires" also have a lovely vintage feel wide-open. That said, you can only really use them wide-open for that look, because as soon as you start stopping down they clean up remarkably, and look like normal Canon CN-E/L-series glass.

I've heard this same description mentioned so many times, and I still have no idea where people get the notion from. 2-perf S35mm is the exact same width as 3-perf, so shot on the same stock, and projected on the same screen (at the same width), the grain is going to be identical between between the two. The only difference would be the taller aspect ratio of the 3-perf frame (if it wasn't cropped to a matching 2.39:1 extraction). Am I missing something here? Did some people actually shoot 2-perf and do a 1.78:1 extraction from the smaller negative? I've never heard of that.

You also want to consider, does the chsracter sleep with their windows uncovered? (I certainly don’t). And if the curtains are drawn, where is the light coming from? Is it just a soft ambient light? If so, where do you bring it in from, directly over-top? Angled in from a particular direction? This is the only source of ambient light in my actual bedroom (though of course it’s much dimmer at night), but because of how it leaks through the sides of the curtains the ambient light in the room comes in very much from the side rather than overhead. These are the questions you need to ask yourself. Do you want the lighting to feel realistic and motivated? Do you want something more stylised? And build from there.

Exercise. Move. Build some muscles. And someway, somehow find a way to maintain some of it whilst in production. The difference it makes to your days when your body is strong is something you simply can't fully appreciate until you go to work in good shape.

You'll be amazed by just how awfully you can light a truly beautiful woman and get away with it!

To be fair to Greig, he did clarify quite clearly that it was the texture and imperfections in the roughly shot film that was drawing younger people to it, and that it was precisely because the rougher the film looks, the more distinct it becomes as a format. I don’t know if the tone is somewhat obscured by the Aussie accent, but he genuinely wasn’t having a go at her. Just highlighting the difference in approach to the medium between those who came up on it, and those who are discovering it now. (And I couldn’t agree more with you about Kate’s work 👍 )

Huh? Which version of their podcast have you been listening to? 🤔 A different one than me I guess. Their episode with Bev Wood they did basically nothing other than wax lyrical on film and its process. Indeed that episode is one of the most in-depth discussions of the analog process that I’ve ever heard anywhere. The only thing I’ve heard them steer away from is the “Film vs. Digital” debate, which they seem pretty sick of talking about. They’ve also made it pretty clear that their hesitancy around shooting film these days, relates to serious problems they’ve had with some of the processing on their more recent film jobs. And not with shooting film itself.

Combining totally different metrics into an average seems like an intrinsically flawed methodology to me. As each of the measurements is looking at different things (so the relationships between each measurement aren't 1:1). CRI is a common reference, but it uses far too limited a sample size to be of much use. At best it's a coarse measurement and has to be treated as such. TLCI has a number of detractors (on the basis that it was initially measured using primarily broadcast cameras), however, to-date I've found it the most useful and reliable measurement of the bunch - anything in the 90s (and particularly 95+) seems to work very solidly on single-chip cameras, and never requires any target correction in grading. SSI I like because it's no nonsense, and simply gives you an exact comparison to a "perfect" black-body radiating reference (tungsten or daylight). And when you overlay the spectral readouts of a particular illuminant over a reference spectrum, you can see instantly the colours in which that particular illuminant is going to be deficient.