Phil Jackson

Jeez man, the cyans and magentas on that leader are unreal. Rich and dirty at the same time. That video of Pace going through his process on YouTube is an absolute treasure. He was such a master of his craft. Part of a generation of artisans who really knew their stuff that sadly seems to have faded away.

David Doubley's site is a treasure trove of knowledge of dye transfer as well.

Interesting. Good point about the matrix film.

Forgive my ignorance on this subject as a director not a DP. I was looking up some info on Dye-Transfer which led me down a rabbit hole on this site from 20 years ago about the resurgence of Technicolor Imbibition process in the 1990s. I thought IB had been discontinued in the 70s and realized that a number of movies like Batman and Robin, Apocalypse Now Redux, Toy Story 2 and Godzilla had an IB print and then I became sad that its unlikely the contemporary versions of those films looks anything like that and wished I had paid more attention when those movies were in theaters 25 years ago. That led me to think, assuming it could be done, how would we do this today and would there be any advantages? To me a true dye-transfer image is unparalleled in terms of color richness and contrast. I don't know that I've ever seen any digital image get close. I think in part due to the organic way dyes mix, it seems like those syrup-y colors are very hard to recreate. Dealing with pigments and dyes is just a different ballgame. The reds in Jean Curran's Vertigo Project are unbelievable. Tyler Shields made some dye-transfer stills prints in 2019, which is a more obsolete process than motion picture dye-transfer processes given the fact that with stills everything is painstakingly done by hand, but those images look absolutely incredible, even when viewed digitally. I don't know that I've ever seen, for example, a natively digital red or deep blue come close to something like an Eggleston or Ernst Haas print. It seems like digital cameras can capture, reasonably, a dye-transfer print after it's been made, if you used something like a high-end scanner or Phase One camera or something that had the capacity to capture a large color gamut, but trying to do it purely with a 3D LUT or color grade, I'm not convinced by. I've just not ever seen a digitally captured image jump off the screen on its own in terms of color richness (but maybe someone at Fotokem, or Company 3 has already done it and has an answer). However, and maybe this is a question for David Mullen or some of the guys who were shooting in the 90s, could one potentially create film matrices from a digital camera? Create the separation negatives by stripping out the RGB channels from the camera source file? Controlling contrast is much easier today with DI tools and RAW files. In some ways, nowadays it would be the motion picture equivalent of an offset printer. Dye-transfer is similarly something of a lithographic process, so I don't see why you wouldn't be able to create your matrices from a digital source the same way it's done for high-end printing. After all people do stuff like this all the time with alternative stills processes like cyanotypes by creating "digital negatives" printed onto transparencies. Any graphic designed image for high-end offset printing is done digitally as is a lot of commercial photography. Also, since everything ends up digital at some point anyway, even a show shot on film, you could probably just create color separations fairly easily these days as well as soon as the film was scanned. Stripping out color channels from a .dpx isn't difficult at all. It's literally a button click in Photoshop for stills. I do remember David Mullen saying something to the effect of there being no advantage to doing color separations with modern day film stocks but I wasn't quite sure I followed why. I guess the real question would be then, assuming you were able to do this, how do you get it back to digital? It's my understanding that dye transfer film prints are quite contrasty. I think the richness of colors could maybe be picked up just fine in something like an ACES or other wide-gamut color space with the right capture tool, but a super high-contrast answer print (essentially) is a bit tougher overcome. You might not have a lot of room to tweak things from that point on. But then I also ask myself how is this all that different from hand-painted animation cells from yesteryear, which are inks and dyes as well? If you were rebuilding, Sleeping Beauty, rephotographing the original cells, for instance, you wouldn't have a ton of room to play with contrast afterwards there either. Knowing you were going to end up with a super contrast-y rich image why wouldn't you just shoot with that in mind, especially if you're using a digital camera and have tools like RAW and a good DIT/Colorist/Lab at your disposal? That's a situation where you could use a reference LUT to kind of at least get you close to where you'd end up after the dye-transfer and shoot accordingly. I might be missing something. I recognize imbibition machines don't exist anymore this is a pure hypothetical and I know half the people say, "Who cares? Let the past stay in the past, use a 2393 LUT and be done with it." I'm just trying to wrap my head around how it could be possible (assuming someone could revive an IB machine somehow somewhere) to do with modern-day filmmaking process. I would think digital would give you so much more control than striking matrices from a color camera negative and modern-day color grading has moved us into the era of quite wild look development, and doing exotic things with color grading, dye-transfers of some of today's films, tv, commercials or music videos could be an interesting tool to play with. I guess the other way to do this would be some sort of inkjet style printing process where you'd print each frame and then re-scan those prints.

That was my understanding as well. Time itself isn't moving backwards but rather objects and people are. What Nolan (erroneously) describes as reverse entropy. (Erroneous because time and entropy aren't actually connected. If you put food in a freezer you can dramatically slow down or functionally stop entropy, but time still marches on). But how this is done is basically a giant MacGuffin. Similar to "the formula" in Interstellar. A story like this is where you miss a great techno-thriller writer like Michael Crichton, who, I think, did a better job of setting up the story world for his stories to unfold. Jurassic Park is full of just as ridiculous MacGuffins and conceits but because everything within the story world is so expertly crafted and grounded in the real world you just kind of go along with it (but in fairness Jurassic Park the novel really goes deep into the background and the movie was able to take just enough from the book to make things work. It's a different story to start with a screenplay).

I don't know if there's a lot of programs that do both well. I like Sketchup quite a bit. It's fast and easy and the Sketchup library allows you to create scenes very quickly to a high level of detail. Vectorworks is really good too and allows for pretty quick modelling of walls and sets and also has a lot of built in functionality for rigging, truss, lighting, etc. but its a bit of a learning curve and more of a serious tool for actual construction documentation. I've personally used ToonBoom and liked it for shot composition. Foundry, the company that makes Modo and Nuke, apparently has some sort of Storyboarding software called Flix but I'm not that knowledgeable about its capabilities.

There were some production stills made available several months ago, that show it looking very Kaminski-ish (which isn't a bad thing necessarily). First Look at Spielberg's West Side Story Wet pavement and hot backlight

Saw it here in Southern California. Finally a theater open (with only three people in the theater) in Orange County. Movie is definitely overwhelming. My brain was scrambled eggs when I left the theater, I had to go on YouTube and watch one of those 'ending explained' videos (and I still had a hard time following that). I was following along until the third act then I just got lost...and even a little bored. That last act reminded me of the third act of Rogue One where there was just so much going on for so long that it just became a bit much, especially when the movie has already told you what one of the characters is going to do and you're just waiting to see it play out. At times you feel like you're watching a sport you don't know the rules to and aren't really sure which team is which. When something happens you sometimes are asking yourself "wait was that a good thing?" Also yea, time running backwards and forwards isn't a new thing, I think back to good old Star Trek TNG episodes like Manheim's experiments in Season One's "We'll Always Have Paris" or literally characters going forward and backwards at the same time in Season Six's "Timescape." The show Lost got into this kind of stuff a bit too so its not uncharted territory, but it is presented in an interesting way. The fight and car chase action set pieces are something else and worth the ticket price. They reminded me of the corridor fight in Inception. That being said there seem to be a lot of big visual things going on in the movie that don't really serve a purpose like the boat race scene. That just seemed like something cool Nolan wanted to get in the movie. In lesser hands some of those sequences would become Michael Bay-ish quickly. From a production standpoint, it's basically perfection save for the sound mix, which as many have pointed out has dialogue that is oddly pushed back in the mix (as opposed to something that feels deliberate like the buried dialogue in the seduction scene at the nightclub in The Social Network). Even in 'quieter' moments the characters were hard to understand, and if they had an accent or a mask on that made it that much worse. I noticed this last year when I saw the prologue which was shown with Star Wars IX. Ludwig Goransson's score is incredible and fits the movie well, but I think pound for pound Hans Zimmer brings more warmth and heart to Nolan's movies. Interstellar and Inception, in particular really benefit from Zimmer's ability to bring emotion, where Goransson's score, while technically amazing and interesting, functions more like sound design in an already convoluted sound field. Zimmer's music also better bridges some of those quick transitions from scene to scene that Nolan likes to do by pulling two scenes into the same emotional idea whereas in Tenet those transitions seemed oddly abrupt, almost as if we'd just come back from a commercial break. The pacing of the movie feels a bit off. Maybe that's because Nolan's usual editor Lee Smith didn't work on this film. There's nothing to say about Hoyte Van Hoytema's work critically. The movie looks fantastic all the way around and he should definitely be in the running for all the accolades. Looks like there was a bit of DI work (the end credits called out a colorist at Fotokem) but the movie still retains a nice natural feel. To me this is what a 'large format' movie should look like (in contrast to so many movies shot on large format cameras that essentially could've been shot on Super 35 because of the lens choices and staging). I think they used the IMAX format very well. To my eye Interstellar is a 'prettier' movie but I think stylistically this movie hit all the right notes visually. There's a really interesting philosophical question being asked here that I think gets overlooked, both in the movie and by the critics, which is, if our future selves could judge us, would they choose justice or mercy? Without giving away too much, the 'future' in the movie (or some future antagonists at least) blame today's world for problems yet to come, but if every generation is doing the best it knows how, even if the consequences down the road aren't palatable, can people today really be blamed for acting in what they believe are their own best interests? If we knew better would we do better? And even if we do better does that necessarily result in a better future (or at very least a future that is more palatable to those living in it -- which may or may not be the same as 'better')? Unfortunately I think the movie gets too caught up in the grandfather paradox, of whether or not the future could judge the past technically, and doesn't ask the question of whether or not it should.

It's definitely an interesting discussion. I was always partial to Dynamic Symmetry and the teachings of people like Myron Barnstone, but the guy has a point that they tend to a bit on the dogmatic side and a bit reductionist in approach. Also Stan Prokopenko is a very good teacher and I really enjoy his YouTube series on drawing.

You know looking closer at that NBC image it looks like there's four or five lekos firing at that talent position. One or two on the far wall maybe at 11:00 to the talent, and probably the same around 2:00 on the right. I would think this would create a light that didn't have directional shadows or would eliminate them altogether, which basically is what you'd get with soft lighting (the quality of light isn't quite the same as using diffused light because of the difference in specularity a hard light source produces, but for all intents and purposes it works well especially on someone with fairer skin). Also I misspoke on the Oscars. They use amber no color gels to warm up the talent not CTO. Lighting the Oscars

Those studio lighting setups often have lighting that is directional but not necessarily always super hard. These days there's a lot of LEDs involved too. Traditionally you might have two or three diffused lekos cross shooting each talent position with one as a backlight/hairlight. Subject to background ratio is almost always 2:1. In this photo of the NBC Nightly News set you can clearly see the talent has two lekos focused on him and a panoply of open and fresnels and everything else. Awards shows sort of have the same look, especially those lit by Bob Dickinson. In awards shows the talent is cross lit with two followspots around 30 degrees to the talent, which is lower than a normal theater follow spot position (and usually with a little bit of CTO to warm up the talent) and a usually bluish hot backlight with a 2:1 ratio subject to background.

I'd be curious to see something rendered on a serious render engine like Vray RT (even VRAY for Unreal), Arnold or Renderman. Something with some real physically based shaders and raytraced lighting and shadows. I remember Octane, a few years back, had a product they were trying to launch called Brigade, which they seem to have pulled the plug on, but it looked very promising. UE5 seems to have taken huge strides and could be a real viable option down the road especially if people like Lucasfilm are helping with the R&D. Even in UE4, they showed the ability for a paradigm shift in film making altogether, not just backgrounds, but the ability to create entire animated films in real time. Check out Reflections which was made a few years back as a demo (I love the musak version of The Imperial March). They did a demo where the presenter actually places himself 'on set' and can move the camera around the CG characters and environment and all the lighting and reflections respond accordingly.

Here's the actual quote from the video: It sounds to me like they're cooking up something other than their current ALEV III sensor.

Anyone catch Arri's (sort of) announcement about the Alexa S35 coming out next year sometime? Supposedly a new true 4K Super 35 sensor in a Mini LF body. They seem to think (and they're right) that there's still a huge market for Super 35 for TV and movies that's not really being served in all the resolution and large format posturing. It's buried at the 34:40 mark of this Arri Tech Talk from last week. The entire talk is actually quite good.

I think they need more market saturation (and someone besides Philip Bloom to do something serious with their products) before they become viable. It's frustrating because I think their product is superior to just about anything out there in its class, and can easily compete with Red, Arri and the Venice no problem. I would argue it looks better than most of its competitors too and for a fraction of the costs. But their marketing effort is very weak and disorganized. They have little trade show presence and only recently have rental houses picked up the Mavo LF, which is a fantastic camera and should've been a gamechanger for Indie filmmakers (pretty picture, 6K large format for under $10,000!!!). I've heard some people say earlier versions of their cameras were occasionally buggy, which is no good, but again there's so few people out there using them its really hard to know. The one thing they have going for them is superior image quality and fantastic color renditioning, which is what attracted me. The dynamic range of the Mavo LF was not as robust as say an Alexa, but pound for pound, the image quality can be quite stunning and very filmic with little manipulation. Here's a comparison someone shot. Red Gemini/Alexa Mini/Mavo LF Comparison And some dynamic range tests Alexa/Monstro/RED/C700/Venice Dynamic Range Tests Spoiler alert: the Alexa destroys everyone.

And this is highly contingent upon it being a union job to begin with. A large chunk of work out here isn't. I know editors working on high end projects for as little as $300 a day. I think the NABET rate for broadcast editors is something like $40/hour. Non-union editorial is probably in the $500-$1000 a day rate if you're good and a known entity. I can't imagine too many production companies would pay much more than that for non-union editorial. The guys that make the money are Flame Artists (but this is a highly specialized trade), and some colorists depending on the house. The problem is that the business is overrun with editors, because it usually has the lowest barrier to entry of any position and its one of the few jobs you can get good at before you get into the business as a professional. I suppose motion graphics and 3D modelling fall into that category as well. Maybe some audio jobs. So you have an endless supply of young editors, most of which are halfway decent at most work (big feature work is a different ballgame altogether). It is not uncommon for me to get hired on a job that multiple editors before me, or after have worked on. I've been on several commercials that had like 5 editors over different periods of time because of costs, scheduling, personalities, etc.

I would think a Drive In with today's digital projectors and HD radio should be pretty good. Drive ins don't necessarily reproduce a theater experience though. Depending on where you park the field of view of the screen is more like watching on television -- so you might as well watch on a television. But hey, maybe those big 70s conversion vans might make a comeback -- kids gotta have something to do! Drive in and chill.

It's an interesting question. I wonder if theaters go back to more of the movie palace format where only the biggest movies are released theatrically in one or two locations in a city. I mean I guess this is the way movies worked before the era of the multiplex. While it might be a death knell for the theater business as it currently sits, it could result in an elevated movie going experience and make going to the movies an event again. Maybe the films get released in the big theaters a few weeks before streaming. It could definitely help quality control or directors like Tarantino who want to do 75mm releases, etc. Just thinking out loud. The other thing is that the streaming model is a bit dicey to me. It's a little like the pay cable TV model where the content provider is basically paid for the right to stream their content, but the problem with a movie is that you have no idea how well received its going to be. On television you have ad revenue to help gauge interest and viewership. For something like HBO you have subscribers. But with streaming it all seems like guesswork. Like "okay we'll make 6 Underground for 100 million because we guess it's worth that much..?" Maybe I'm just ignorant of the process but how do they gauge ROI without tangible metrics like tickets sold, DVDs sold, or ad dollars? Yes a million people might watch something on Amazon Prime, but those same million might've already been subscribed and are paying a blanket fee for all content. I guess in some ways streaming is less risky than a theatrical release model where no one could show up, or the movie gets killed by bad reviews (streaming basically mitigates the impact of critics) or some extenuating event like the Dark Knight shootings or a pandemic puts a damper on revenue -- these things don't happen on streaming platforms, but I wonder how sustainable it is. I suspect it might dramatically shift the way movies are financed with the platforms absorbing more risk than the studios, which is more like television.

It was interesting because it covers the new Bond movie, which of course got pushed back to November so there's some mild spoilers. Still good stuff in there. I actually watched a little bit of Tales From The Loop simply because I wanted to see what Mark Romanek and Jeff Cronenweth did on the Panavision DXL2. The article on that show was interesting.

This was exactly the point I was trying to make. With cinematography, actors routinely interact with DPs and basically understand what a DP does so the end results are often not so bad. But I really am not comfortable with actors deciding who wins Sound, Editing or Visual Effects categories. I could see opening up all categories to say Directors or Producers but having everything weight so heavily toward actors who can occasionally be the least knowledgeable people on the set in terms of the process seems bizarre. That being said it would be hard to shut actors out because many of them moonlight as producers, directors, etc. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt are fairly knowledgeable as is Tom Hanks so its a real dilemma.

I will add to the OP that I have on occasion come across a script where I've thought, "how in the world are we going to do this?" I think screenwriters not understanding the limitations of what's practical (regardless of whether its possible) can be an issue. If a screenwriter writes a scene that shows a toddler drowning, for example, that's going to very difficult to pull off. Good producers and ADs should be able to feel this out though. The writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation would famously come in writing all these action scenes and space battles only to be told they had to could only afford four phaser shots for the entire episode. It's one of the reasons that show is so talky compared to later shows like DS9, Voyager, BSG, and SeaQuest DSV.

The other thing is a lot of people, even some industry people, do not understand what is and isn't visual effects (vs makeup vs special effects vs art direction). Like you said Cats got a bad rep for what is essentially a design/art direction problem. A lot of the public thinks that visual effects are more prominent than they really are. There was a lot of joking about Rogue One, but that work is actually very well done but I think people see what they want to believe. Some of this is the result of the plastic-y way movies look these days which I think has trained people not to take VFX seriously. Over set-extensioned. Over color graded. With camera moves that break the laws of physics, etc. I don't think digital helps this either. A movie like Aquaman or some of the Marvel movies, the line is so blurred between what's practical and what's not, its forgivable for the audience to confuse the two. Movies of the mid to late 90s and into the early 2000s still had a very grounded feel in a way that today's blockbuster movies do not. The first Transformers for all its histrionics still feels like it exists in the real world, but I don't get that at all from Wonder Woman or Guardians of the Galaxy which are basically cartoons with live actors. Even the island scenes in the last Jurassic World where the volcano is erupting looked oddly fake despite being shot on location in Oahu and I've waxed poetically about how every space movie looks like concept art these days with waaay too many nebulas, unnatural lighting, etc. When I see something like Ad Astra or what Ridley did in Alien: Covenant with simple elegant space shots, its a nice change of pace.

Well that's going to be more of a budget/resources issue than anything. Obviously there are practical limitations like actually shooting inside an active volcano or whatever. Really expansive locations are still pretty tricky to do even in CG. Only the biggest films out there can create entire cities for example although software like Clarisse is closing that gap its still a monumental undertaking. But because computers can simulate real-world lighting and physics (with less and less computing power) the sky is basically the limit. I'm not convinced we've crossed the uncanny valley yet, but we are damn close and might really be there for practical purposes. I thought Rogue One was pretty impressive and all the head/body replacement stuff done in The Social Network was seamless and that was ten years ago! If no one knew that Peter Cushing had died (or not aged since A New Hope), I'm not sure how many people would've really been able to tell the difference. I'm also not convinced that de-aging is quite there yet, in the same way that aging a young actor with hair/makeup never quite looks convincing (see Guy Pearce in Prometheus). So I guess there are limitations. The UPM and AD should identify these issues way early in the process, maybe even before the film gets greenlit and into pre-production. The set is probably not the place to discover the director wants to do something insane that may not be possible (if for no other reason that it might be actually be possible with enough pre-planning and getting everyone's head in the game to figure it out). The use of Unreal Engine and other game engines to create realtime virtual environments like what was done on The Mandalorian is a real game changer to help directors not have to rely so much on green screen. Also allows DPs to extend magic hour indefinitely. I think some very interesting things will come of that.

Don't forget about Rango which Deakins consulted on.

I should point out that Cinematography is one of the few categories where the you get head scratching moments of movies that should've been nominated but weren't, however its usually hard to argue with the five films that actually get Best Cinematography nods, and sometimes hard to argue with the winner. As I went through the list I first found myself indignant (like "how did Richardson not win for The Hateful Eight?", but then realized The Revenant did and its like "oh okay, nevermind." That being said Hugo is a good movie and artfully done -- its freakin' Robert Richardson -- but it beat The Tree of Life? Really? Avatar (which is more visual effects than cinematography) beat both Inglourious Basterds (for which Richardson probably should've won) and Bruno Delbonnel's work on Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince? This kind of thing doesn't happen often with cinematography but when it does it makes you shake your head. It is much, much worse in other categories however. The Original Score category is particularly problematic. It seems almost outrageous when you think about it that John Williams hasn't won an Oscar since Schindler's List in 1994 when you consider the films he's scored since then like the Harry Potter films or six Star Wars movies, in addition to all his work with Spielberg since 94 (he literally lost to Brokeback Mountain -- a movie with almost no score!). Thomas Newman, who has never won and Hans Zimmer are similar stories (the Newman family is cursed at awards shows). It's almost like if you are a popular composer you get punished at the Oscars. Williams has 50+ nominations and five wins none of which are recent. That might be the worst win/loss ratio ever. 45 times Williams has shown up for the ceremony and gone home with nothing (I'm sure he wipes his tears with dollar bills but still). Music tends to reward up and comers and newbies. The Social Network score is good, no doubt, but I don't know that its better than Inception, which it beat back in 2011. Visual Effects is another category that gets weird winners. Somehow Babe beat Independence Day in 1996 and Apollo 13 wasn't even nominated! I never understood the Academy's tradition of letting all the members vote on the winners not just the specialists because then it becomes a popularity contest. If cinematographers nominate cinematographers, then cinematographers should be able to decide the winner. That's doubly true for a technical category like Visual Effects or Sound Effects Editing. Like what the hell does Meryl Streep know about raytracing engines? I can see opening up categories like screenplay or acting or directing to everyone. Certainly Best Picture. But you can get some weird winners otherwise.