Aapo Lettinen

student films and freebie indie films: build up your knowledge base, try new techniques and equipment, develop you style further, possibly make some contacts if the project is right. paid jobs, small or big: build up your resume, find new client contacts and enhance the existing ones. collect great stuff for your reel and other marketing material. get money for living or at least for using it for further education.

these are tough decisions and there is not one simple answer to them... a cinematographer needs both a enormous knowledge base, lots of practical experience in filmmaking and the right contacts and resume. The cinematographer is basically the leader of the technical crew on set so great team working skills and fast problem solving abilities are absolutely needed... these need to be learnt with bigger crew. ultra low budget indie does not work for it . the film school can help with contacts and internships and beginning building the knowledge base but for practical experience it is not enough for HOD positions and you will need lots and lots of real work gigs to build up your practical experience and resume. For paid work the student projects and freebie indie projects don't tend to matter much as resume so you will need real paid work with great quality results to show to your customers. and you will need the real paid job contacts as well who can help you get more work in the future. I would say it could be good to advance in steps to ease it out. Finish the school, work a little bit, learn new things. Then when ready, seek further education to advance to new level to avoid getting stuck to same type of low of mid level stuff for the rest of your life. After further education you need to work again and build more experience and then repeat education to advance even further. It will be long and difficult and very expensive road no matter how you would try to proceed. And it will get exponentially harder when you have a family and mortgage to take care of. I think a good estimation for time and expenses without any tuition fees or living expenses could be something like at least 200 000 dollars and at least 10 years or more if you use all the time and energy you can possibly spare (not much time for the family or other jobs or partying or anything else. Just sleeping and cinematography related stuff. Maybe sometimes eating if you have time for it ? From personal experience I can tell you that concentrating 10 years using only half of your time and "only" 100k of money will get you nowhere yet. I probably will still need another 10 years and another 100k if wanting to get to shoot any kind of feature films (I am not even sure if I want to anymore... there is lots of nicer jobs for a person even in the film industry)

6-bath Kodak stuff? seems to differentiate a lot from the 3-bath stuff. how challenging is the quality control compared to ecn2?

I tested developing the Ektachrome 100D at home many years ago with the Tetenal 3-bath E6 kit and it was not difficult to do as long as you can control the temperature precisely. The developers are pretty expensive and will age quickly so it did not make any sense financially compared to shooting colour negative and lab processing it...but interesting test anyway and the results were nice looking on projector. what type of developers the labs are using for it, I suspect not the off-the-shelf Tetenal kit but something relatively similar? hard to imagine one would get unusable results from E6 process if the same lab develops ECN2 all the time, can't be harder on E6 to control the results?

you need to know how much negative density your scanner can handle and then you can approximate you usable 'dynamic range' by checking the sensitometric curves of the emulsion. For example you know that the scanner can handle 2.5 density range so you can check on horizontal axis how many stops you can approximately get out of the neg with that scanner when processing normally https://www.kodak.com/uploadedFiles/Motion/Products/Camera_Films/5219/Resources/5219_TI2647.pdf

I once found some cheap unopened 16mm soviet b/w rolls on eBay and purchased couple just to see what it was and if it could be used for art projects. It turned out that in all the rolls the film was fused together as one solid block with the plastic core in the center. Basically they were just solid plastic disks made out of 16mm film. No way to get anything out of them, not even an inch of film could be ripped off. They were clearly stored in hot conditions and the emulsion had just melted and fused the film layers together like hot glue. The cardboard boxes were quite nice looking but that was about it. I don't know if I even have the boxes anymore. Did not get my money back because the seller did not claim the film was in usable condition, he was only selling nice looking vintage film (boxes) which were unopened so that there was "something" inside. The lesson was that never pay anything for film stock which has unknown history. OR at least not more than the empty film cans are worth...

real candlelight also creates weird contrast issues (naked flame + heavy falloff) and you may not like the flickering quality of light (if the air moves there is multiple small flickering sources which thus create multiple overlapped flickering shadows) . and the light falls off pretty quickly. most people don't like the flames being heavily overexposed which tends to happen if you don't use additional lights. if using only candlelight lighting the scene you may easily end up somewhere between 3200 and 6400 ISO with very low color temperature which may cause noise issues with some cameras. You can always add more candles or candles with heavier filaments but that adds lots of work to the art dept when trying to keep them constant. for example on a indie movie I lit a scene only with candles. I think I used around 20 or 25 regular candles all the time pretty close to the actors and the set was only couple of meters across. This was at ISO6400 and T2.3 lens fully open. It was partially a look test, normally I would add a little bit of gelled supplementary tungsten light to get more light to the actors whereas using only candles leaves the actors a bit underexposed and the flames very overexposed. so it can work but for most persons taste the lighting balance is "wrong"

the point is not to touch the area where you are actually recording the image you want to use. there is NO image recorded in the tails which you are handling when loading a film mag. there is thus no point to protect them. If you are REALLY cheap and perfectionist you can try to protect the tail end of the film when taking the exposed negative out of the magazine so that you can also use the half a second portion on the roll end. but you are generally not touching the emulsion side anyway (almost all cameras except my Cameflex wind the takeup side emulsion in so the "picture side" is facing inwards and is protected. No one cares if there is fingerprints on the backing of the film, they won't show in developed neg and even if they would, you could just wipe them off. SO, as others said. The whole point of using white cotton gloves when loading a mag is to get lint and fibers inside the mag so that you will get more gate hair and dust on the film for artistic effect. with most mags it is also considerably harder to load them with gloves on. Sometimes I do use powder-free nitrile gloves if loading in extremely hot conditions... that is to avoid the sweat going onto the film if there is a risk of getting the emulsion "wet" which will add friction in the gate and possibly generate emulsion buildup that way. It is not to avoid fingerprints or anything, you don't need to worry about them because, as said, you are not touching your actual recorded images when handling movie film... the usable shots are in the middle of the roll, not in the couple of feet of tails on both ends

with Krasnogorsks there is also the pretty common problem of the sprocket wheel jamming against the guide rollers. You can easily check by opening the upper and lower guide roller and then try to move the mechanism again. If that solved the problem then the sprocket wheel needs to be realigned and adjusted (it LOOKS like there is lots of good positions for it but there is only one where it does not jam all the time. it is easy to get it wrong when disassembling the camera) if that was not it then it may be a larger problem which needs more work.

lower contrast and additional flaring come into mind. lots of unused lens surface when only using the tiny center crop of the whole image circle of the lens. You may want to try mattebox with hard mattes or if you don't have suitable mattes for it, then mask with black tape to reduce the stray light coming to the front element. Impossible to say whether you will get infinity focus. you SHOULD but depends on if the adapters maintain correct ffd and if the lens is properly calibrated. If you already have a Nikon to Aaton adapter then you could try Nikon telephoto lenses. All the ones which have a correct aperture ring should work

I would try to find adapted FF lenses for shorter focal lengths and the longest ones could be done with large format lenses if you like. I would probably do everything under 80mm with adapted FF lenses and try to match the 80, 120, 180 with large format if going this route. For example black versions of the P6 Zeiss Jena lenses ( 80/2.8, 120/2.8, 180/2.8) on longer and then do short ones with something like rollei hft lenses adapted to PL if you can get them to match (haven't tried that but I believe they could be ok for this) . there is a 20/4 Zeiss Jena which can be found PL adapted (maybe there was also the 2.8 version of it, I don't remember) which would do on low budget though I have understood it is not particularly high quality contrast and mft wise

pentacon six lenses can be used with an intermediate locking adapter on PL, no need to modify the lenses themselves at all. By my experience they tend to not be very high quality on small formats compared to other options. Don't bother with the cheapest ones if you go with Pentacon6 mount lenses. the MIR and Kaleinar are not very good by my tests and don't have any interesting look to them. Zeiss Jena ones are OK but the ones I have tried did not perform very well on full aperture and should be stopped down approx. 3 stops to be viable option on smaller than FF formats. Additionally the Zeiss Jena ones have a bit counterintuitive iris mechanics and the iris adjustment can stop working correctly if you store them for long or if they are in bad shape in general or if they just don't like your face or the movie project in general (there is couple of springs inside which transfer the iris adjustment forward and the spring balance can easily go wrong which makes them stick to fully open or fully closed aperture or somewhere in between)

Why one would not attach a screw to the outside of the 1" core so that it would grab the slot on the 2" core the film is on? Then one WOULD HAVE the friction adjustment magically enabled and it took one minute to do ? I personally use the Arri core adapters on both axles so the cores fit to them and can use the friction adjustment.

I use a rewinder which has friction adjustments. I can just tune the friction when the feed roll starts to get smaller so that the film is wound relatively tight but does not slip on either rolls during the process. I don't need to touch the film to control friction so will get less static as well

Luckily no one handles film rolls like that so it should not happen in real life. In the case of a total newbie one would learn from single try that that's not gonna work very well :D the palm technique is much better anyway. In the case of the outermost film layer falling off to the side when winding it, yes it of course can happen but you will usually hear it and can always try and feel if there is any extra mess where it shouldn't be. out of curiosity, were they factory new rolls or clearance stock? Did you track the batches? Older vs totally fresh?

What do you mean by it being "loosely winded"? I have seen that only once with factory roll and that was an Ilford bulk roll, not Kodak. Movie film should be rolled tight from the factory, otherwise it may scratch itself on the feed side when the film layers are slipping against each other. Kodak doing loose rolls regularly would be unbelievable. But for lab rewound stuff it could be possible (that is not factory film though)

in the past they tortured animals to make the art better but current laws don't enable that so torturing people must do. Everyone knows that there is no art without suffering.... otherwise it would just be a good movie. no survival story to market it to the audience

hungry and frustrated crew makes better art, just watch all the great shoestring indie productions out there :P

Master Primes are crappy lenses, don't buy them ? they flare even when every youtuber claims that they should be "flare free" !

I have those cotton gloves somewhere but never use them when handling unexposed negative. they have couple of disadvantages, the first being that they make it more difficult to handle the film ends by feel and the second is that they create some lint and fibres which may go to the film and cause lots of dust and hair problems in camera (at least the gloves I have here) . If using rubber gloves you risk static electricity and/or spreading the talcum powder on you films if the gloves are the type which uses the powder. One is never touching the actual picture side of the emulsion when spooling down. At least not the area where you actually record the image. The tails may be touched extensively but that does not matter in the end if there is some fingerprints on the tail of the film which is not used for actual image anyway. Depending on how you spool them down (straight-straight OR cross-cross) you will not cause any problems even if testing with bare fingers how much film you have left on a roll because you are then touching the backing of the film, NOT the emulsion side where the fingerprints would show. The disadvantage of using bare cores and platters is that the film layers may accidentally drop from the side more easily creating a mess. Small pieces of tape will help with this so that you can secure the film whenever needed (like when cutting it in the dark in the middle of the roll, that is one situation where it will accidentally unspool very easily)

is "gimble" even a real word? ("Kimble" is a popular board game sold here but I don't know what a heck the "gimble" is ? ) It goes to the same category than "Cannon" lenses and "Arryflex" cameras and so on

the Arri rental still has it listed on the page BTW. Seems to be around 32kg / 70lbs with the smallest magazine. It is just like someone superglued two or three fully equipped 535's together to a big solid chunk and then trying to shoot something with it. It is more handy than a blimped Mitchell but you get the idea. See why they tend to like Panavision's 65mm stuff more? anyone like to try that 32kg beast on a steadicam? https://www.arrirental.de/camera/65-mm-film/arriflex-765/

I don't understand this whole whining about cameras being picky about the loop size. I am regularly shooting with Konvas cameras and they jam if the loop size is wrong by ONE perforation. Still rarely having any problems. Not a single jam in the past 2 or 3 years

As I have understood, the main reason why 765 is and was rarely used is because it is heavy as hell and big and thus challenging to use for modern cinematography. That is why Panavision has been more popular for 65mm work. It is not that the Arri would not be a good camera, it is just impractical for most 65mm work

our local rental house seems to have the cn-e prime in PL (haven't asked if they were custom modified) and the Sumires can be purchased in PL as well