Travis Cline

Paul It sounds like you shoot on primes quite a bit, especially for a TV show. How often do you shoot on primes vs. zooms? Personally, I am a prime man myself and that's great if you can get away with it on a show like this with a truncated timetable. By the way, the show does look great. Thanks for your time. Travis

If you have the time and budget I would shoot something to check your lenses. On the last feature I shot we did not shoot anything on our lenses and I am seeing problems now. In our case the resolution of one of our lenses was not sharp around the edges and it was only made worse by shooting super 35. Anyway, could have been avoided in prep. Its not the AC's fault, my AC's are very thorough, but I should have pushed more to have the budget necessary for them to shoot more tests. It is especially noticeable when shown on a print. Travis

After you changed the bulbs out and decided to shoot the scene with the overhead flousescents on, was the flicker noticeable to the eye? If not, how would one go about avoiding this problem? I ask because I finished shooting a feature a few weeks ago and we had flicker show up on the film even though we had a flicker meter telling us the lights were in phase. Any advice? Travis

This might be hard to find in Texas, but I've seen this done by a steadicam op that was a great hockey player. You need budget for it, but it gives you alot of flexibility on the ice. Travis

I don't live near there, but I wanted to tell you that I shot a feature film in Capitola last month and had a wonderful time. Capitola is quite pretty and scenic. We mostly shot at the beach near the pier and it was beautiful at anytime of the day. Good luck, you'll have a great time. Travis

Can you give more details about the shoot. I do underwater photography. Thanks Travis Cline

Dustin Let me know where to send it and I will get you a resume and reel. Thanks for posting here. I look forward to hearing from you. Travis Cline

Yesterday we finished up a fairly successful first week of shooting. We shot a lot of page count this week, but only had one location move all week. The first five days we were shooting at a large house and then we moved to a flower shop for the sixth day. Most of the week was day int or nite int. with blacked windows. We shot a couple of day ext and finished up that location with one nite ext scene which worked out well. I'll attach a photo from that scene. It took awhile to get the lighting up and running, but once the condor was up the scene went rather quickly. We had a 60' condor at the end of the street with an 18K and a 12K both gelled with 1/2 CTO and pointed toward camera. We also had a 2500 HMI in the bucket pointed toward the house behind the bucket in the far background of the shot. The foreground was lit with couple of blondes through a 12 x 12 Muslin and a 6x6 1/2 grid. We plugged the blondes into house power so we could move the geni to the end of the street and not have to cable all the way down. My crew is working out quite well. My gaffer is very helpful and excited about making things go smoothly and look good. He's always suggesting different ideas about lighting which I find to be a great quality in a gaffer. My grip crew is on the ball. They have alot of experience and are very pleasant to work with. The 1st AD, who is also the line producer, is the best friend on set you could ask for. He fights to get me time to do what I need to get things right and also is the calmest yet efficient AD I've worked with. Its quite amazing. The art crew was fired after a couple of days though. That was tough, but they were getting behind and nothing was ready when we wanted to shoot it. That was rough, we even had to go back and relight things we had already shot so we could add different important art elements. Things should go much smoother now though. The director is also the lead actor which is proving to be somewhat difficult which we all expected, but its not nearly as bad as it could be. The director/actor is quite prepared and quite the proffessional for such a young guy. Also, he trusts my opinion as well as that of the producer and the AD. We've had to cut a few shots as the day winds down to an end and he totally trusts us to make sure we've covered the scenes well. I expected that he would want to watch a lot more playback than he has which is great. There is a very light yet excited atmosphere on set which is rare. Its refreshing. This film has two leading ladies which I am finding interesting to light. One girl has extremely blonde hair while the other has a dark auburn hair color. The light one just needs the slightest amount of backlight to look great while the dark haired girl could take a 12K from ten feet away and be fine. I like lighting women and making them look great. While we were shooting our night exterior scene someone commented on how great it looked and the make-up artist told her they were talking about her. She says, no they're talking about the lighting and my first AC said, lighting is never sexy by itself. I find that more and more to be true. You need something great to light, whether it be a great looking set or an actress, they make me look good. Lighting each girl is much different as well I think the blonde girl takes a nice wrapping sidelight well while the dark girl responds better to a higher frontal light. The darker girl has a stronger bone complexion that creates more natural shape to her face while the blonde has a flatter more neutral face. Both beautiful girls, just different. Deluxe is working well for us. They did a daylight bath for us the first three days to give us a quicker turn around on dailies so we could see something early on. They are going to do some print dailies for us next week will be terriffic to watch. I have an early call tomorrow morning so I should go. Travis

Hello lads I thought I would share a little bit about a feature film I am currently prepping. I am shooting an independent feature film currently titled Two Brothers, but I am sure that will change before it is released. We are scheduled to shoot for 18 days with an additional day for second unit/pick-up shots. The schedule is not too grueling considering such a short schedule. We will hardly ever change location during a day and we have a few locations we will be at for 5 days in a row. Also, the director is quite good about being lean with his coverage, so hopefully we will move quickly. One thing that could be a challenge is that the director is also the lead in this film. Fortunately, I have had ample prep-time and we have gone to the locations multiple times to discuss coverage and things of that nature. Plus, the director trusts me and the 1st AD quite a bit and that's good, but I'll let you know how that works out. This will be the fourth feature film I have shot on 35mm and it gets easier each time. Its never easy, but I can see potential problems coming from much further away and they are much simpler to solve now rather than during production. I learn so much every time I shoot. Its terriffic. Our first day of principle photography will be July 30. We are shooting Kodak fortunately. There was talk today of going with Fuji, which also makes a fine stock, but the director was really into the idea of Kodak, so who am I to complain? About 60 percent of the script is day interior, another 20 percent is day exterior and the other 20 percent is night work. Luckily, there is only one night exterior, which helps us keep the budget down. The rest of the night work is interior and we are going to black the windows. I decided on 5212 for most of the day exterior scenes, 5205 for day interiors, and 5218 for night scenes. The film is an high school comedy about two brothers fighting over a girl. I want to go for a fine grained look, but I am not planning on be to glossy or flat with the lighting. I want to get as fine grained an image as possible, but I also need to work with our budget for lighting and be able to move quickly. The larger lights in our elec. package our an 18K Fresnel, 12K Par, and a 6K Par. We have some smaller HMI's as well and then some Kinos and a few small tungsten lights. Our lab work is being done by Deluxe and this will be the first time I have done dailies through Deluxe since they recently aquired their digital post facility. Has anyone done dailies through them before? Seems like a quality way to go. Also, since we are shooting out of town I am excited to be able to hopefully get a quick turn around. We are laying our dailies down to HDCam SR to most likely come back and do a tape to tape for a video finish. We are getting our camera package through Panavision. We are using a Gold II package with a set of Ultra Speeds. I tend not to use a zoom too much, but any suggetstions for a panavision zoom that matches the Ultra primes fairly well? Well, I'm excited to shoot this film and I'll let you know how it goes. Travis

In Russian it is sort of unclear as to how much of the film was shot on the Konvas. SInce it is a Konvas article I would imagine they want to make themselves look as good as possible and talk about the inovative, creative shots accomplished with their camera, but maybe they did more with it. I have tried looking for the Sinchronaya Kamera #1, but couldn't find anything. I'll let you know if I do. Glad you enjoyed that article. Travis

I found out a little bit. Apparently a Konvas was used for at least part of the film. This article talks about how they used the Konvas to achieve handheld shots and the other previously difficult shots to get. Here is a link to the article, but it is in Russian. You can see pictures of Urusevski using the Konvas while filming The Cranes are Flying. I will try and find out if they used the Konvas as their A camera as well or not. http://rus.625-net.ru/cinema/2006/06/kinoapp.htm Travis

I found out a little bit. Apparently a Konvas was used for at least part of the film. This article talks about how they used the Konvas to achieve handheld shots and the other previously difficult shots to get. Here is a link to the article, but it is in Russian. You can see pictures of Urusevski using the Konvas while filming The Cranes are Flying. I will try and find out if they used the Konvas as their A camera as well or not. http://rus.625-net.ru/cinema/2006/06/kinoapp.htm Travis

I shot some tests tonight for a film I am shooting soon and I ran into more trouble than I bargained for. There are a couple of scenes in the film where we would like to have the shadow of rain drops on a window cast onto our talent. Very Conrad Hall-esque. In Cold Blood and the such. I tried using a fairly hard light, a Source 4 ellipsoidal with a 19 degree lense, through hampshire and put the "rain" on the diffusion, but that didn't work too well. Then I tried the same light into a mirror and put the "rain" onto the mirror. What proved difficult though was to get a well defined rain drop to move across someone's face unless they were extremely close to the mirror. Obviously I want to get the light as hard as possible, but aside from that, any suggestions? How to apply the rain? What to shoot through? Has anyone tried this, because if you haven't, believe me its harder than it seems. Thanks gents. Travis

Thanks for the help. I have used the cracked oil type machine before and you're absolutely right, they are much more even. I guess I'll just have to train my eye a little better. Travis

Use the sunny sixteen rule like others have suggested here, but take into consideration what you want the moon to look like. I did this not long ago and decided I wanted a gray moon as opposed to a white moon. If you want a gray moon follow the sunny sixteen rule exactly and you'll get a fairly gray scale type moon. If you wanted it closer to white, over expose a couple of stops. Also, you didn't ask this, but I thought I'd add it, if you want a CU of the moon your lens cannot be too long. I shot the moon with a 1000mm lens and it was still not full frame. Travis

Sorry if this thread has been done before, but I couldn't find any. I am shooting a film soon in which the director wants to use a bit of atmosphere on set. I have not used atmosphere all that often, but this project justifies its use since the main character is constantly smoking a pipe. We are shooting on 35mm and i'm not sure yet what kind of machine we'll be using to smoke up the sets. My question is, is there a good way to judge when the atmosphere is the same level that is was in previous shots? I am worried about matching the amount of atmosphere from shot to shot. In the past I have just done it by eye, but it was never very exact. Is this just a draw back to shooting with smoke? Do I just need to get better at judging this by eye? Any tips would be helpful. Thank you. Travis

Thanks thats good to know about the computer screen being closer to 5600. We will be shooting with HMI's and daylight, but does anyone know how close to 5600 a computer screen is, or does it depend on the model? Also, any recommendations about a particular brand that has a nicer image than others? Thanks Travis

I am shooting a series of ads this coming week on 35mm for an online trading company. We're going to be shooting quite a bit with computer screens in shot and the company does not want to do it with green screen. We will be using an LCD screen so I'm not worried about roll bars or anything like that, but I am wondering if anyone has any pointers or tips to make the image look its best. i.e., contrast settings or a particular stock that may work better than another? Any comments or advice are much appreciated. Thank you. Travis

John Toll has a pretty nice commentary on Legends of the Fall and Roger Deakins does one for Fargo. Nothing to shake a stick at. Darius Khondji has a good one on Seven and Jeff Cronenweth does a good one on Fight Club. Some of these are in conjunction with other people like production designers or others, but still many good and insightful comments on the cinematography. Travis

Thanks for the replies, and that is what I had heard too that liquid can seep into the elements, but I wasn't sure if it was folklore or not. But, as you say, I try to be safe rather than sorry and spray it on the lense tissue first. Thanks all. Travis

Does anyone know if there is a problem spraying panchro or a similar product directly on the lens? I find it easier and better to spray panchro directly to the front element and then wipe it clean, as opposed to spraying a lens tissue and cleaning the lense with that. I've heard people say it is bad for the lense to spray directly on the lense as the liquid may leak inside of the elements, but is that true or just good old fashioned talk? Travis

Last summer I went to the kino studija there in Vilnius. My wife is from Lithuania and while we were there we called up and a very nice man named Ramunas Skikas, the managing director, gave us a tour of the studios and we went on a couple of sets that were shooting. They have fairly nice studios, they were built during the soviet era. Also, the Lithuanian countryside is amazingly beautiful. I recommend shooting there to anyone who has the means. Travis

I read your book years ago Doug when I first started in camera and it was great. I always tell people who want to get into camera they have to read your book. Its really is a great book. Travis

I second that notion. Panavision always works with you, they even give you cameras for free or near free. They give you what's available or what they can, but what really impresses me about Panavision is that they care about you and your liking their equipment. I can't tell you how many times I've had a problem with a camera, something non-panavision, and the rental house tries to tell me its operator error. Without even seeing the camera they'll try and say that there's no way its a problem with their camera. That's not a shot at Arri or moviecam or any other camera because they are quite fine, but you can rely on Panavision to believe you and do whatever they can to fix the problem. That's my two cents worth anyway. Travis