John Brawley
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Posts posted by John Brawley
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How far will 2 4x4 Kinos throw? Lets say I am 10 feet in the air horizontal at a 45, barndoors wide open? Will that sufficiently key light me to 2.8 on video, say 15 feet away?
You can work it out by looking at the photometric charts that Kino publish.
This gives you foot candles which is a better universal measure of light because it's independent of ISO and exposure variables.
You can then work out your exposure at that distance, but you'd have to make an assumption about the ISO of your video camera, something which is more hotly debated around here than Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.
jb
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I've always just had a few lights on stands, keep the top knuckle loosened and then swing it around to simulate the car passing. After you pan it off the set, turn it off, bring it back to 1 and repeat. Simple, but it works....
Even simpler would be to have a couple of electric's do it by hand....
Have them pan the lights through. Use different lamps even. You can either walk it or pan it. That way you get it to be a bit more random, and you don't end up with the god damm annoying 100 meters of electrical cable wound up on your stand as you helicopter your lights around.
jb
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Has anyone used FRAMEFORGE ?
Is it easy to use? I like the idea but don't have the time/ energy to learn an entire new program....
Any insights will be most appreciated!
I have it and have been using it for the last 2 or so years.
It's great at what you want it to do...
I often use it for VFX shoots, MoCo etc and anytime a set has to be built. I can punch in the exact dimensions and get very accurate rendering of what will and won't be seen. I had to shoot a mattress TVC a few weeks ago, and had to work out if the studio we were using would be big enough to accommodate the shot we wanted. We had to have a shot looking down on the mattress from overhead of a guy falling backwards onto the mattress. I was able to work out exactly how high the camera needed to be on an 18mm lens. Shooting RED so when the director wanted 50 frames, i again was able to work out the extra height required to make it work for RED @ 3K as well.
BUT it's far from being intuitive. In fact it can be a bit frustrating to use. the thing is, you're basically doing 3D modelling and if you've ever tried to do anything in MAYA then you'll know just how *simple* frameforge is to use. For example, i had to *make* my mattress for the above example because the stock mattress in the 3 D library wasn't the right size.....
SO yeah big thumbs up, but don't expect it to be super easy, especially if you want to do something that doesn't exit amongst the stock preset poses for the actors or items in the library.
Everytime I use it though, everyone gets impressed...
jb
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And then there's the whole shutter speed dilema (1/48th is great for motion, but generally lousy for stills) But that's just me (and I've been wrong plenty of times).
Anyone else have an opinion about this?
That's gotta be the deal breaker. I can't see motion work being acceptable as anything else, but it's just not a fast enough speed for shooting stills because it's not sharp enough...
jb
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Hi all,
I have bought two rolls of the new Vision 3 250D 16mm stock, I'm getting it processed at warner roadshow studios on the gold coast, I'm not sure whether they do affordable telecine work, but I was wondering if any of you know of places that would do the telecine and the approximate cost?
They don't but you can go to "The Post Lounge" and "Cutting Edge" in Brisbane.
jb
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Breaking News.
Celestial Avenue has won the grand prize for best short at the 2009 Rhode Island Film Festival. This was the 1st screening of the film so it's great to have it so wel received.
jb
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The Red chip is 4520 x 2540 Bayer photosites with equal horizontal and vertical pitch -- "square" pixels. That makes it about 16:9, or with a scope lens, 32:9. The electronics wouldn't know or care whether the lens was flat or anamorphic -- just like with film. If the lens covers the chip, there's no reason you couldn't use all the data.
-- J.S.
Why do charts like this indicate otherwise ??
Why do Hawk make 1.3x anamorphic for RED and the 2/3" mount cameras ?
jb
EDIT*. I get it. you're talking about a non standard screen size so all bets off...
jb
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But you got this one right.
Using the Red with flat lenses, a 6:1 crop would use 4520 photosites across the picture by 753 vertically. Anamorphic would be the same 4520 across by 1507 high. Anamorphic does use a larger part of the chip, not smaller.
But the human visual system sees a resolution mismatch between horizontal and vertical as being the lower of the two, so it shouldn't matter.
-- J.S.
John...
Isn't anamorphic windowed on RED to correct for the 2:1 ? Therefore the pixel dimensions are something like 2764 x 2304 ???
jb
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Hmmm! Seems like it could work out to shoot in 4k mode with Anamorphics!
I seem to remember someone on here saying they had LOMO anamorphics is PL mount for hire cheaply.
That would get you closer and you wouldn't need as big a crop.
love
Freya
I actually don't think Anamorphic on a RED is the right way to go here, because you need to CROP out from the RED sensor, thereby reducing the resolution. Remember, RED is NOT full height anamorphic, so to get the correct desqueeze you're using LESS of the sensor...
A better way to go would be a straight crop, although for that kind of ratio I think you'd still struggle to have it hold up.
Far better would be to explore a full size sensor with anamorphic or a larger than 4 perf 35mm format...
jb
EDIT.
Actually recently i was faced with this problem. Had to shoot a short digitally, but the directors wanted anamorphic. F35 was priced and too expensive as was the D21. Instead we went with a SI-2k and used a cheap Panasonic PLASTIC anamorphic adaptor on 16mm superspeeds. Shootin 2/3 inch sensor witha 1.3x anamorphic squeeze gave us close to 2.46:1. Ad it looked surprisingly good, considering we were using a very cheap $200 video adaptor in front of the lens.
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Beautiful work, John. It's refreshing to see cinematography that looks natural and not overly graded! Lovely natural skin tones for 3200K. Kinda had that old school Ridley Scott look in the beginning. Love the Spike Lee shot at the end, how much did you overcrank that?
Hi satsuki..Thanks for the words...
we did a pair bit of overcranking, but not at a very high rate..it was 36 FPS only....
There was a lot of warmth built into the image, especially with the lighting. The tungsten stuff was keyed with dimmed lamps, and often with 1/2 CTS on it as well....doesn't so up much on the RED though !
jb
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#1 your website looks good but the text is a little hard to read, white (or is it very light grey?) on a black background is difficult. #2 and this is probably nit picking but I felt the two lights coming from behind her through the window in the night lounge room scene were too bright. They are exposing almost white on the window and I think they would have looked nicer & suited the mood better a bit dimmer and bluer.
Can't d much about #1. It's been setup that way by my web guy, but thanks for the feedback.
Yes#2 is the biggest disappointment for me. Im nearly 100% on the day it wasn't overexposed this way. The warmer stuff later on is fine. Even the CU's in the blue look seem fine. I may have just screwed up, but I also something went amiss elsewhere in the pipe, because it wasn't the intention to go that far on the day. I usually monitor in REC 709 and have a shortcut switch to flip over to raw. I often meter in RAW and use false colour in RAW to see where everything is sitting. Might have got stitched putting something outside of REC 709....
thanks for the notes.
jb
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Just thought I'd post a review I wrote for another forum....
Helios V2.1
It’s funny that we think of iphone apps as being expensive once you go past $10 and yet we’d happily pay a lot more for applications for desktops that do the same thing. Maybe it’s because people still think of the iPhone as just a phone.
Well after your initial revulsion at the buy price of this app maybe you WILL want this beguiling little app...
The sun comes up and the sun goes down. Clearly for cinematographers, light is one of main tools of choice in image making and the biggest light source around is the sun. When shooting outdoors be it stills or motion, you’re usually in a constant battle with the sun to try and get thing looking the way you want. When will it rise, where will it be in the sky and when will it clear tall obstructions like mountains or even buildings ?
The reason it’s a battle, is because the damn thing is always moving ! At different times of the day it’s in a different part of the sky.
And that’s where Helios comes into play. It plots and predicts the sun’s path through the day for a given location. It also tells you the sunrise and set too, (although that’s readily available from other sources). Written for cinematographers specifically, it’s designed to be used for doing location rece’s and want to accurately predict the sun’s behaviour in that location, days or weeks or even years in advance.
It will also tell you the exact bearing on the horizon for where the sun will rise and set for a given day. Very useful if you want to set up a lock-off shot of sunrise where you want the sun to appear from below the horizon into frame. How else would you know where exactly to point the camera with a very long lens so that you capture the very first beams of light as they flare down your lens ?
By default it opens in what they call Heliometer view and shows you the sun’s highest position in the sky and the time it will be at that position. You can drag the sun with your finger though the hours of the day and the Heliometer will tell you where on the compass the suns direction will be coming from. It also dynamically updates the shadow length ratio, which you can use to predict the length and movement of shadows cast by the sun.
The little orange wedges either side of sunset and sunrise indicate when magic hour is, that magical time that us cinematographer's and photographer's love, which is that small window of time just before sunrise and just after sunrise, when there’s enough light to take a photo, but the sun is actually below the horizon. The funny thing is, that depending on where you are on the planet, magic hour is rarely an hour long. Now you can get a prediction of exactly how long it is.
Tapping on the Skyview to the far right plots another version of the suns path. If you imagine lying on your back and staring straight up into the air the centre is right above you and the outer circle represents the horizon. This shows the sun height or elevation as it moves through the day and again you can dynamically drag the sun along the timeline at the bottom to check it’s position at different times of the day.
It all really comes together when you tap the compass on the bottom left to activate the iPhone internal compass. In both Helioview and Skyview, the indicators will now “float” as you pan the iPhone around. Super cool.
Actually though, for my money the best feature of this app is its integration with the iPhone inclinometer to very accurately predict when the sun will be at a certain elevation in the sky. Imagine you want to organise a fashion shoot down one of Melbourne's famous little alleys amongst all the tall buildings. Now you can visit the location and using the clinometer function, find out exactly when (or even if) the lane will have sunlight, for how long and how high the sun will be in the sky at that time.
You might also want a shot of a tall building with the sun just starting to peek around from behind it, with a lovely glint of the windows. Once again, you can predict exactly when (or even if) this is going to happen on a given day from a given location.
You may even be shooting somewhere like the Snowy Mountains and want to know exactly when the sun would break from behind a mountain and light up your valley location.
After activating the inclinometer, you simply sight along the iphone from the location you’re wanting to test for, tap the screen to lock it in and you’ll get a very accurate time prediction for when the sun (if at all) will shine through said window.
You can also use the inclinometer to predict the fall of shadows and even their length on the ground, assuming you know the object’s height.
Any of these predictions can be calculated for days weeks or even years in advance if you want, by just tapping through the date function. You don’t have to even use your GPS location, you can easily recall one of the the 30 000 pre-set locations around the world, or just enter a lat and long. You can also create a set of favourite locations and store them.
If you want to appear really geeky Helios can produce a table of raw data for a given location so you can work out for yourself. Um..but I’d rather just use Helios thanks !
It’s accurate too, apparently more so than many other similar apps as Helios takes into account “Precession”, which is a slight wobbling of the earth’s rotation cycle that takes place over every 26000 years as well as “Nutation”, another wobble introduced every 18.6 years by the moon. If only the iPhone battery was good for that long.
It’s clearly been specifically designed for cinematographers, but anyone who wanted to predict the suns movements would find it useful. Stills photographers seem obvious and will also find is as useful as their motion picture brethren.
I imagine anyone renovating or building a home may want to know exactly when the sun will shine through their new doors or windows at certain times of the years as well. Gardeners too would love to be able to predict when shadow’s would fall on a certain area from other objects like fences, trees etc. And something I feel we all will be doing at some point soon, trying to work out where the best place to site your new solar array ! Maybe AU$36 is cheap for that kind of knowledge.
The interface is beautifully elegant and at first incomprehensible, but that’s only cause I wasn’t smart enough to read the manual first to work out what everything meant. Helios does a great job of doing what it sets out to do, enabling the user to accurately predict and visualise the sun’s movements and it’s light and shadow affect on a given location. The graphic layout is pleasing and the interface makes sense once you know what everything does.
Built into this app is a comprehensive manual which is aimed at dopes like me who don’t know their azimuth from their longitude. Well actually it’s not built in, but a web linked HTML manual, but you don’t have to leave the app to use it. It’s well written and has a fantastic light sense of humour about it, something rarely achieved in instruction manuals. You do of course need a data connection to access it.
For extra fun, it’s worth checking out their saucy lounge-themed demo video as well and you’ll get a great sense of how the interface works.
The price ? Well AU $36 might seem rich, but the nearest equivalent in handhelds for cinematographers and photographers is the wheeler sunpredictor software which is only available for windows mobile devices and is US $145. I feel a bit unpatriotic because this software is used by a lot of cinematographers and was designed by fellow Australian cinematographer John Weeler
I figure my “get out of jail” on this is that it’s not available for iPhone and it doesn’t have an inclinometer function built into it, one of the best features of this app.
If you were doing it old school, you’d be printing out tables from the admittedly free sources and then using a $100 Suunto inclinometer and compass on location to work out the shadow info. Now you can do it all in one device.
It seems like a bit of a bargain to me compared to the work and gear you’d have to carry otherwise and you can take on a near Mayan soothsaying status amongst your friends when you pronounce with certainty where the sun will be travelling throughout the day.
One extra feature I should note here to is that it will also produce an emailable summation of the sun’s activity for sending onto others in your production office. Daily call sheet’s for example usually list the sunrise and sun set time.
The software was designed by a couple of poms living in LA at Chemical Wedding. There’s some additional info and screen shots on their site along with the aforementioned saucy demo video. ( It’s worth a look for this reason alone). Stay tuned because they have a number of great film and production related apps still to come.
All in all, I found it a delight to use and especially loved the inclinometer function. Helios delivers an accurate and useful tool for any cinematographer or serious photographer and would also be of great use to any gardener, architect, town planner or builder / home renovator. This unit is still cheaper than any comparable mobile application and is the only one that actually uses the built in inclinometer. If you’re serious about cinematography and own an iPhone then it’s a must have.
*I'm not affiliated with this product and I paid full price for my copy.
jb
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Hi all.
Lake Mungo is beginning its limited release in Australia. We've already sold in over 40 countries and will even be getting a limited theatric release in the US next year. I can neither confirm nor deny reports that Paramount will be remaking Lake Mungo.
We're self distributing in Australia and don't have the budget to ensure people get to know about it. We only have reviews and word of mouth to reply upon. Luckily, all the reviews so far have been great.
So to make sure we get as many people along to talk it up, send me a PM with your state and I'll make sure you get a pass to go and see it.
From a cinematography POV, it was shot on over 40 different cameras, from a mobile phone all the way up to 35mm.
We're also doing a q&a in Melbourne at the George Cinema, on the 30th, so PM me specifically for that session if you want to go. Those of you in Perth can do the same for a screening at the Palace Luna on the 22nd.
If you need more convincing check out the following reviews...
You can see the trailer and get some more info here.
Be warned before you read these. This is a scary film (think sixth sense) and it's works better the less you know about it. Reviews, by their nature tend to reveal some of the things that usually go down better when you don't know they're coming..
jb
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Director of Photography: Someone who is in charge of multiple cameras and the crews/departments that manage the camera, grip, and electric necessities of a particular production. This can be on film or electronic acquisition. It can apply to narrative or non-narrative equally.
Cinematographer: A bit of a pretentious title, typically self-referring when someone is "anti-video" and wants to let other people think that they are "above" the hacks who make a living. Someone who sees himself as an "artist" and wouldn't demean himself to ever shoot video or "sell out" by "shooting" anything commercial (ie, Transformers).
So what's a DOP that only uses one camera ?
I feel the opposite. I find DOP the far more pretentious and grandiose title. I've always been wary of bestowing that title on myself. Cameraman or camera person has ENG / TV studio or news crew connotations for me (i do more drama). Cameraman for me also implies that they do not light, nor do they design coverage, something that a DP or Cinematographer would do. Hence then the other permutation.... Uk expression i guess... lighting cameraman.
jb
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I am a Film Reviewer based in Ireland. I would lilke to gather some opinions on the 'Magic Hour' - this aesthetic cinephiles speak of called 'The Magic Hour'...This is a cinematic term used to refer to the optimum time for filming romantic or magical scenes due to the soft or warm light in the sky, often characterized by a golden/orange hue. Examples of ‘The Magic Hour’ in the movies are Nestor Almendros' cinematography in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) and Phil Alden Robinson’s Field of Dreams (1989) and Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris brilliantly captured that amber Autumnal sunshine. The term 'Magic Hour' has been used to refer to the hour when the shoplights go on in Paris. I would love to hear some contributions on this.....
It's very general to call it magic hour. In my part of the world it's usually less that an hour. More like magic 20 mins.
I also take magic hour to actually be the time JUST AFTER sunset or JUST BEFORE sunrise. The sky itself is your light source, rather than sunlight. It's basically the sun BOUNCING off (or defracting really) through the atmosphere. Instead of a point source of light, you have a larger and softer source.
jb
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Anyway, if there's any Aussies out there that got some film supply connections Id like to hear from you :)
try steadisystems.
jb
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TV gets us the news faster.
-- J.S.
Yes but it's distilled down to a 90 second (at most) news bite.
What I like about newspapers, is that it allows the reader to graze and spend as much time as they wish, on the stories that interest them most, reading in usually far more depth that what is covered on TV. You skip the stuff you're not interested in, including the ads.
I think the WEB reading experience is much closer to a newspaper than TV news....
jb
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Hi
Can someone please help me out.
When you use a spot meter or take a reflective reading, where should you position yourself? Should you be where the camera is or it doesn't matter?
thanks
The idea is to be as close to the lens taking position as possible, and along the same axis. the meter is measuring the *reflection* of light so where you stand matters because the reflection angles change.
jb
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. The majority of engineers don't want to make trouble, they want to avoid it.
-- J.S.
Yes but aren't they making trouble by designing broadcast systems that can't cope with THE MAJORITY origination format for the last 100 years of cinema and television ?
My recollection too, is that Super 35mm 3 perf for 16x9 is in fact LARGER than 16x9 from 1:85 4 perf so there rule about 250 ASA seems dumb to me.....
jb
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Hey Guys,
I just bought a LanternLock from the internet. I was just wondering if it will work in Australia. It cost $200aud so it'd be a big waste if it didn't work.
Any information will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Tom
I have two of them :-)
yes they work. You MAY need to change the plug over to an AU style one if you didn't order one with the right plug. Then just use regular 240v gloves and you'll be fine.
jb
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Arguably, once you have a relatively solid foundation in how to expose film/video, you'll learn a lot more by just going out and doing it. The alternative to formal cinematography schooling is to take the money you were going to spend and use it to sustain yourself (food, shelter) while you work for little or no money on small independent projects learning "on the job."
Hi Brian.
I think you make a good argument, but I think you've left off one big advantage of film school; Establishing life long relationships with peers that will provide you with a working life far beyond film school.
At film school you can expect to forge close relationships with other filmmakers. Of course this can still be achieved outside of that environment, but the process is accelerated somewhat...
I think it's up to the individual. I would also argue that it's the other way around. Your suggestions could apply to undergraduate studies and you're right to say one can learn exposure theory and technical stuff from on the job training. I think if you're doing an MA though, you should be way beyond the basics and exploring other aspects of the job, developing your visual language skills etc.
When I applied to AFTRS for one of their 4 slots for DP's, they wouldn't even interview someone that said they wanted to learn more of the *tech* stuff of exposure theory etc.
I think it depends on what stage you're at in terms of your career.
jb
Whether or not to use Angenieux zoom for S-16mm
in Lenses & Lens Accessories
Posted
I always think the lens is the most critical part of the equation. The angenieux was designed for std 16 so you're really going to struggle to get the lens to perform in Super 16, even at longer focal Lengths. It's pretty easy to get a Nikon mount for an LTR, giving you access to a wider ranger of more modern and cheaper glass. There are downsides there as well. The lens focuses the other way and will have a very short amount of *throw* making in shot focus pulling hard to do accurately.
Maybe what you could do is bite the bullet and test the Ang against a more modern Super 16 lens and see how it stacks up. It's worth the money to find out.
jb