Chris Keth

I think a lot of it is because Americans tend to think of the UK having one homogenous accent. If it's not a very gentle Hugh Grant accent, as somebody above put it, it's not acceptable on American TV. The actor or acress may be English but if they don't sound like that- they could be Welsh, from the north, Liverpool, anything- they will be asked to imitate that accent for fear of not being understood. This falls right in line with something I was discussing with my wife recently. We both like Anthony Bourdain's travel show. On that show they will subtitle nearly anybody to a point I find a little bit insulting. They will be in India talking to people that speak very good English, better than a lot of native speakers in America can muster, and it will be subtitled.

Jacob, this is probably going to piss you off, but: practice, practice, practice. Go shoot more films and quit thinking about buying your way into good work. The simple fact is that every generation of filmmakers and photographers has equipment that is many, many times better than what was used on the iconic films we all study and enjoy. By your reasoning, 100% of photographs today should be brilliant- I'm talking Edward Weston had a baby with Dorothea Lange brilliant here!- because the cameras and printing ability today is so very advanced and so easy to acquire. Guess what? There are probably MORE crappy photographs today than any other time in human history. Your next film is always going to be your best.

A 14' cube truck is really, really small. I think you are underestimating how large a functional camera truck has to be.

There's a pretty solid chance in that photo on the right that the left bottle has a piece of white card or diffusion material hidden behind it.

Clear shower curtain and gorilla tape. Make it in prep. Make sure you do it near the end of prep so you have your different builds (handheld, steadicam, studio) figured out and make a raincover for each one.

Where are you located or where will the films be shot? This sounds like it could be a lot of fun.

I think generally the way to do this would have been, in prep, to shoot a grid pattern with that lens at the focal length you wanted to use. That would of course distort that grid in a way that it could be used to create a custom filter to help flatten the footage. Since you did not do that, you will want some kind of concave applied filter. The parameters of that filter? Who knows. You will just have to experiment.

Your other identical post in the camera assistants' forum was answered. Please don't post the same thing in multiple forums. It's rude, annoying, and it makes searching the site more difficult.

Get yourself a DVX. It fits the look and is pretty good in low light.

Not expendable, per se, but do you have some pop-up tents squared away with production? I always fight hard get a 10x10 popup with sides per camera. Start early, popups can really be a battle with some line producers.

How many revolutions per minute or per second are you interested in being able to do?

It would help if you would be more specific. Do you need to hang a 10 foot wide seamless paper behind some singles or a 150' translight around a couple sides of a set? The solutions are very different.

One of those should really be "What grips think I do" with a photo of somebody sitting down drinking coffee. ;)

In my opinion, adapter plates generally aren't acceptable substitutes for the correct tools. Adapters just add slop in places where it's not acceptable.

Really? So you're never, ever going to put a zoom on your camera? You add standard stuff to a body like a cinetape, an MDR, an onboard monitor and then an angie 12:1 with a 6x mattebox and it's more than 45# and that's not even including the head yet.

You clearly haven't worked all that much if you have generally seen "half day affairs." For a TV series, which is most of my experience, a 12 hour day is the shortest you can expect with 13 or 14 being more common and more, up to 16 or 18, happening sometimes but not every day because that's not sustainable for weeks or months on end. I've only worked less than 12 doing second unit or an additional camera where you're wrapped at 8 hours whether you're still needed or not. I haven't done enough union feature work to really comment on any kind of average. I think it depends a lot more on the people involved than it does with a TV series that has a tight turnaround and even tighter schedule. For music videos, they always want to keep it to one day (even though the shotlist generally calls for more) so very, very long days are very common if not just the norm. I don't think I've done a music video of less than 14 hours and I did one that went 25 hours.

Tip number 1: Quit referring to yourself as ""Female DP." As soon as somebody points out their gender or ethnicity, I assume they are not good enough to get jobs on merit alone.

There's not a magnet strong enough to hang anything of substance, in my opinion. It also just wouldn't do anything that can't already be done with existing equipment.

Generally same slate number, new take followed by "p/u".

You could simply get into the menu and turn that option off.

I would be concerned about shooting stop. Looking at that still, you can see that her face is sharp-ish (it's a soft looking film..." and her clothes flow in and out of focus with the wind. I'd aim for wide open, which depending on your camera might not be enough still.

To be fair, I think Solo has that end of the market.

Put them on a spare hard matte for a wide lens.

Then there won't be any more film. It will be sad to lose an option in our toolboxes but it's not the end of the world. I haven't touched a piece of film for a movie camera in a year and a half and, honestly, I don't miss it. Systems like the alexa are getting so good that I don't miss it.

This is exactly what I was going to say. It's a nice meter in it's own right. You'll never need another meter unless you just want a digital one or a spot meter. Also, an analog meter shows you the relationship of all of the elements of exposure in a way that a digital "I'll do the work for you" meter won't.