Johnathan Holmes

Consider this: IATSE 667 Trainee Program That's how I got started. It's a great way to work on union shows in the camera department and learn how to be a good 2nd. They admit trainees once a year and put you on a rotation so you work about 5-6 weeks on different shows with different crews at a time. The program takes about a year and then you upgrade as a 2nd AC in 667. Things have been quite busy lately, so it's a good time to join and get started.

We were shooting a dream scene in a school hallway, and SFX had pumped in dry ice to cover the floor. Unfortunately the only way out after slating was through a patch of freshly pumped dry ice. My eager footsteps sure stirred that cloud up! So be careful not to run out too quickly after slating. Nothing is more embarrassing (and hilarious!) than tripping over a sandbag in shot after slating and knocking over a light. Also, as a general rule, I tend to tilt the slate slightly downwards as custom faceplates can be very reflective, and if the Op/AC says "tilt", that's what that means. Be aware of how much light is on the slate. Sometimes you can tilt it left or right a bit to catch some light, and sometimes when outdoors you may need to shadow it with your body to waste some light. Always have a flashlight handy just in case. Finally, be aware of where the boom op's mic is and turn your head to verbally slate into the mic in your appropriate "indoor" or "outdoor" voice, and then look right back at the 1st for visual cues to adjust the position of the slate. Directions given by the 1st ("left, "right") are always camera left or camera right. Also, when tail slating I've learned not to turn and walk away while verbally slating after marking, as is pretty instinctive. Stay there and call it out with your head turned to the mic. Oh, and if you're slating letters, please, for the love of God, stick to the standard phonetic alphabet and don't throw in your own dirty words. "21-Boobies, Take one" gets really old fast and is unbelievably unprofessional and distracting. "Sixty-Nine, Take(s) Two", however, does not get old. Ever. The key to pulling that one off is in a very subtle and soft "s" after "Take". They don't know if they heard it, but they think they did.

Good lord, that box is LOADED!

As well, if moving in and out of the cold on a video shoot with B4 lenses, be sure to perform frequent back-focus checks. As the lens and camera warm up or cool down at different rates, the back-focus will change drastically. Regarding condensation: The key is to allow the equipment to equalize to the indoor temperature and humidity. I've found that using a hair dryer and circulating it around a lens speeds up the process of equalizing it. You're not using any heat, you're just circulating the indoor air around it. It's important not to touch the lens as well with your bare hands, as the heat from your hands will cause it to keep fogging. The same goes with filters when outdoors in the cold. Be careful taking filters out of their pouches with your bare hands - they will fog very quickly from the heat from your fingers. A good thin, dextrous pair of gloves at the outside temperature would be handy for situations like that. I've often wondered if the heating-blanket-in-a-bag for the batteries idea was really all that practical. It seems to really struggle to stay warm, and at best the temperature might be a few degrees warmer when it's below freezing outside. As well, it requires constant power. It almost seems more practical to keep the chargers going and keep the batteries on trickle charge right on set if you're going to always need power! I have also heard people say that LCDs (monitors, on-board monitors, certain viewfinders, dial displays) can freeze in sub-zero temperatures and not work. I personally haven't seen this happen, has anybody else?

We recently shot in the cold and had a cooler bag with a couple electric heating pads set up for our batteries. It seemed to keep them warm enough to last reasonably long, but they still died very quickly. As well, to prevent the F-900 eyepiece from fogging (or any eyepiece without a heater), we strapped a few hand warmers to it with rubber bands. The hand warmers don't work so well when exposed to the cold, they're better in enclosed spaces, but it seemed to be fine on the eyepiece. And get yourself a Canada Goose parka - you'll find yourself laughing at all the other North Face bums freezing their asses off.

P-Touch is a must-have for any camera assistant. I use it for just about everything from labeling my own gear to making filter tags with velcro backs, to labeling the slates. Most bigger-budget features or TV shows will have a faceplate made up that fits over the timecode slate with their specific show title and information on it. The faceplate is usually a thin piece of white plastic that is velcroed on.

Some 2nd ACs here will use a stopwatch to time from when the slate it marked until when cut is called and then calculate how many feet were rolled during that take to figure out the dial numbers and footage numbers without having to ask. I have never objected to reading out dial numbers if a 2nd asks me to, but I usually work out a system of hand signals to automatically let him know at the end of each take. The stopwatch trick is a safe bet if you can keep up with it. I've laminated and made up a small table that lists running times and footage counts for 16mm, 4-perf and 3-perf and I tape it to the back of the slate so I can quickly look up the time and see how many feet were rolled.

Yes, I remember him wearing that during his last 4th of July BBQ. I think you were there too.

I'm still confused. Seeing as this is something that has been bothering me for a while, I decided to go all out and explain my logic here. Take a look at the image that I drew up in Illustrator instead of sleep tonight. "Please excuse the crudity of this model as I didn't have time to build it to scale or paint it!" Figure 1 shows a cross sectional of an awkward looking long lens and how it sees a typical scene. We have the frame with a subject, and the light coming from the frame shown in blue. The light within the frame (blue) hits the lens and is refracted onto the film plane (brown). This is pretty simple, and again all theoretical and illustrative. Now consider the red light rays that represents "everything else" in the world not within the frame. Logically any light that is emitted from a source outside the frame is not going to hit the film plane (otherwise it would appear as part of the image on the negative). This can only mean that the light hitting the lens (red) is somehow refracted in such a way that it bounces around within the lens and within the camera. As I understand, lens manufacturers take great care to eliminate the amount of reflections within the lens resulting from this "red" light bouncing around. I'm not sure what the technical term for this light bouncing around is (ghosting? glare?) but logically it would seem that it could only affect the exposure negatively by raising the base black level (see exposure curve) and reducing contrast and saturation. I always thought that a lens flare was an extreme case of this where a light aimed at the camera is positioned so close to the edge of frame that some of this "red" light bleeds into the "blue" light and fogs the image. Am I correct here or am I missing something? Now look at Figure 2 which shows what (I think) happens when you use a matte box with a hard mask smaller than the diameter of the lens, yet just small enough to not vignette. The blue light is still transmitted to the negative just fine, but now all of the "red" light originating from outside the frame does not hit the lens. Logically I can see how this would appear to lower exposure, as I would assume it lowers the base black level and increases contrast and saturation. Less stray light means a cleaner and deeper black, no? So according to this logic I can see how it would appear to make the image darker, where really what is happening is the blacks are becoming deeper and this creates the illusion of the image becoming darker. Now I'm certainly no authority on lens theory and optics, so I'm just using my own logic and experience to come up with this theory. I certainly hope anyone out there can tell me if I'm on the right track, or if there's some huge flaw in my logic that I'm not seeing. Looking forward to some discussion here! Aaaand I have no life.

I may be wrong, but I thought back-focus adjustments were made on the video lens and not on the camera body? The SharpMax is a life-saver for me as well. Also, be sure to check black balance periodically throughout the day. My Achilles Heel!

Roddewig?!?

Wanted to know if this was absolutely true or not: One should never use a hard mask on a matte box with an opening smaller than the diameter of the front element of the lens, as it affects exposure. As a general rule, I never do anymore but I'm curious if anybody has actually tested this and proven that doing so does in fact reduce exposure, and what the maximum reduction in exposure is. I used to think that any stray light hitting the lens that wasn't part of the image wouldn't be wanted, even if it wasn't flaring the lens, as it would reduce contrast and saturation. I imagine the light coming into the lens in a cone-shape spreading out from the lens, and anything outside that cone is not part of the image that the lens sees and should therefore be matted out. Then again I can also see the the hard mask acting as an aperture, and maybe even a pinhole effect. So I'm confused about this issue. As well, a DP told me that when punching in on tighter lenses for closeups, it is necessary to open up by 1/3 to 1/2 a stop as going on a longer lens doesn't let in as much light. I'm confused about this as well since lenses are rated in T-stops, and theoretically all lenses should compensate for that exposure difference in the glass. My feeling is if a lens is properly calibrated, a T/2.8 on an 18mm should look exactly the same exposure-wise as a T/2.8 on a 300mm. After all, isn't that why we have T stops? Thoughts? Proof?

Having gone to NYU, I found it was geared mostly towards those who want to direct and write. Very little focus (by comparison) is possible in the other technical positions (camera assistants, electricians, etc). As a result, I found my three years at NYU to be rather useless in a practical training sense. While film schools may own "state of the art" equipment, it doesn't compare to the kind of equipment used in the real world. The only thing I can say I got out of my $180,000 experience was networking with some excellent people with great potential to be great directors and cinematographers. Nevertheless, working on a student film shoot is very different from working on a real union show. Almost shockingly so - at least for me it was. My best advice is to go to a cheaper college and study anything you want, but most importantly get out there and start working on film shoots as early as possible - start with student shoots (you don't have to be a film student enrolled in a film school to work on many student films), but don't get stuck working on student shoots for too long. They will distort what you perceive a real film shoot to be like.

Some may also use a "mousepad" style donut, which is essentially a black mousepad that is cut in the shape of a donut with the inside diameter just smaller than the lens diameter, and the outside diameter just larger than the matte box opening. This, of course, if you don't have the appropriately sized donut for your matte box. Common with many large-diameter zoom lenses. And cheap rental houses.

One thing I'm curious about, having used the Red only once and having two more jobs booked with it coming up... Is the mount on the body affected by temperature? I pulled for a feature that had a Sony EX1 mounted to a MovieTube with Superspeeds in February and during our exteriors (in -20 degree weather), the MovieTube shrunk just enough to put our shots out of focus. It was something we only noticed during playback much later on. To compensate, we had to adjust the focus on the EX1 to approximately 5' instead of Infinity. This was an extremely dramatic shift in back focus and troubled me constantly. I wonder if the Red could exhibit a similar problem, and if so, is this the cause of your shots being soft? Curious to hear from anyone who has shot with the Red extensively in extreme cold or hot environments, and their results.