Chris Keth

Bring a pen and a pocket notebook and you'll be good. Get in the habit of that notebook.

Definitely recommend some testing so you can get the hang of what some different things look like at different distances and stops. It's not always what you would expect and can really eat up time. One really neat one I found is sections of solid glass rod and drinking straws. You can fill the drinking straws with liquid, too, and they're cheap/free.

Or if you want the softness, put it through some fairly light frames. Bounce is not very efficient, it will really cut into your already small-for-the-task lamps.

Here you go. On flickr you have to view a particular size of the image and then control+click it to get the "copy image address" option.

I can only give you my answers to your questions. Generally, I don't even try to cover any of them up. I have my family arms on my left calf, a siemans star on my left forearm, the beginning of a very old family prayer on the inside of my right wrist, and a 3/4 sleeve of Picasso's Guernica on my right arm. I am able to cover them up in more formal situations, which I do appreciate. In fifty years I'll look like an old guy with tattoos. Hell maybe the Picasso will just turn into a Dali piece. ;)

That's what it looks like to me, too. A pola wouldn't remove all of the glare. If you put one on and rotated it, it would tend to darken one area (corresponding to polarized light of one particular angle of reflection) that would move as you turn the filter.

Testing would be a good idea. What do you want it to look like?

I have a few but have preserved the option to cover them up. Nobody has ever seemed to think twice about me for AC or DIT work because of them.

Why worry about such a deep stop? You really have no background to throw soft or keep sharp. In fact, faults in the seamless won't show if you stick to something like a T4.

Joining as an assistant (1st and 2nd is the same money) as of 2 years ago was $5600 and dues are about $170/quarter.

That part's easy: you would rig the camera with iris and zoom motors and assistants would control those remotely through a preston. My question is how are you going to shoot a continuous feature film with a camera that has a maximum clip length of 12 minutes?

It's also discriminatory against cyclops and eye-patched pirates.

The alexa can unsqueeze anamorphic images in viewfinder and monitor out now.

The requirements to join 600 aren't for any union work. It's union work in the classification in which you are applying. Joining a union to work as a stagehand is a bit like farming when you want to be a chef. It's tangentially related but that's about it.

During a take? Never! I'm not an AD but usually what I see is that the extras get "the talk" before coming onto set. You know the one, what to do, when to do it, don't talk while on set, etc. A few of the better 1st ADs just take a "one strike" policy and will send an extra back to holding the first time they get too loud during final rehearsals or a take. That tends to quiet everyone down since they all want to get in the movie or on TV. Without promise of that, they're just sitting around getting bored for their hundred bucks or whatever.

I don't know if he ever taught but Ansel Adams shot a lot of advertising photographs, including the dreaded mundane product shots, to fund his landscapes and portraits.

It's just a matter of lighting the set to a level that is closer to the level of exposure you need for the explosion. In daylight scenes, this isn't really a problem. You have the biggest lamp any of us have available. Night scenes and interiors become more difficult. In those cases, it's often "light to the highest level you can."

That's cool! He sure was curious and not at all in a hurry. He spent almost that entire minute filling his olfactory sense with your camera.

What kind of shows have you been working on where they skip reporting ever, let alone often? I'd get smacked up one side of the head and down the other if I suggested that. There must be good, useful camera reports with circle takes. Better yet, each setup should list the lens and stop as well. If there's a loader, they will keep film inventories and take care of daily film shipments with POs, etc. If there isn't a loader, that is all for you. Best place I've seen all that explained is in Doug Hart's camera assistant manual. Slating protocol is the same but keep it quick. A lot of digital shows get really sloppy with slates. You want to mark as soon as the camera is to speed and get out so the operator and 1st can be set.

If you want to make the rest of your life seem bright and exciting, rewind film onto a-minima daylight spools yourself. To put it simply, it's a miserable job. The eyecup doesn't have a mechanical closure. It's something akin to a lens that portholes very badly. Your eye has to be in just the right place for you to see an image. This means that if a light is in just the right place and your head isn't, it will stills fog film. I would treat it like any other viewfinder. I find it easiest to thread the camera with the aid of an orangewood stick or a chopstick. There are numerous places in the body that my fingers just won't fit and the bit of wood helps out. I still can thread any other camera faster than I can thread an a-minima.

The term for that is "stock footage." There are loads of firms that specialize in licensing stock footage.

For variety and since every assistant does it a bit different, I'll tell what I do. I put the next take on the slate immediately after I mark a take. I update the camera report during the take, usually, to reflect what I just marked. This means that my camera report always has what takes have already been shot and the slate is always ready to go again immediately.

Why? I find it massively entertaining.

I'll say! My first lighting attempts were basically of the "unpack teenie-weenie kit, point at actors" type. Keep it up. Creative solutions and a bit more time can often overcome small budgets and lack of "proper" equipment.

Undoubtedly the backstage cart. Very, very nice to work from.