Phil Rhodes

I like to think Blackmagic are doing pretty well these days.

Try exporting a feature-length DCP. The mouse will have spiders' webs on it.

Lightstar Luxed-12? 2160W apiece.

Big union meeting today - the annual general meeting of the London Production Division of BECTU. It is busy and everyone is running around on big shows. Runners' and new entrants' branch breakout session included reports from two youngsters on being asked to drive for three hours on top of a twelve-hour day, repeatedly, and being asked to make two consecutive trans-London pickups from Heathrow after three days in a row involving five hours total sleep. Both reports are horrifically unsafe, involved uninsured driving, and are illegal under both health and safety and employment law. Conclusions: - Not everyone is working on big lovely productions with diligent, efficient senior crew - Even on those big shows, people still sometimes get badly screwed. P

When the R9 and R12 numbers get down into the 70s, you're talking about something that's certainly not at the absolute best levels currently available. I'm slightly surprised that they're measuring such high TLCIs with those spot colour deficiencies. P

Sharpness, steadiness, quiescence, sensitivity. Because it's vastly cheaper. None, though I'm not really sure of the relevance of the question. All images from all cameras are tweaked in post. There's also a bit of a concern that modern, low-contrast film stocks often lack the look that people are actually looking for in film. I have seen this disappointment in people's faces; they shoot film and they get something that looks, before tweaking, like log video. A lot of modern stocks are very, very low in contrast, at least when they're scanned for maximum dynamic range, and will need as much tweaking as anything else. I think this is a mistake on Kodak's part; where is the punch and contrast behaviour of Kodachrome in the modern stock selection? But I digress. Look, I'm not blind to the differences, but even quite low cost digital cameras (I'm thinking Ursa Mini) are now sufficiently good that they should not present a serious impediment to anyone getting results they like, results that stand up to more or less anything that has ever been shot by anyone. If a very well-funded production wants to shoot film for any reason at all fine, no objection. But too often, smaller shows sacrifice far too much to feed a film camera that simply isn't going to make that much difference, and that's a terrible idea. P

I bet you could make a super-16 blowup look like some kind of 35, but you'd have to posit some fairly extreme circumstances. I once spent a lot of time working with super-35 scans from 500-speed stock, and it was neither quiet nor high in resolution. Shoot 50-speed 16 on very good lenses, scan that, and I suspect you could easily exceed it. So if you want to shoot the same stock in the same light with the same lenses at the same stock and somehow magically have it match, no. Otherwise, maybe. But frankly, digital cameras significantly exceeding the performance of 16mm are now trivially available.

I wouldn't necessarily shoot that much wider a shot than you're looking for. You only need to give it enough room to slide around slightly. It depends how much instability you're looking to remove. When I'm stabilising shots, I tend to do it in After Effects using the inbuilt tracker (or Mocha if the track is tougher, but that's rarely necessary.) Then, you can stabilise the whole shot to a single point, and essentially re-design the camera move to your whim by sliding that point around, within the limits of how much extra frame you've got. There's no mathematical precision involved but the results can be quite nice. You can pull off those Fincher-style super-precise framing tricks - I'm not sure if perhaps he's actually doing it that way. Bear in mind that if your instability is very fast-moving, you may end up with motion blur in the frames which cannot be stabilised-out.

I used to worry about this stuff a lot, but frankly, on the odd occasion I get to work with proper crew, I take the position, without wanting to seem arrogant or unilateral, that it's their job to support me and we'll do it the way I want to do it. I'll absolutely take suggestions, this is not a dictatorship, but if the results aren't right, I'll be the one who'll be unpopular, so I'm not going to be told how to do it by someone who won't be held responsible later. This may slow you down, because other people may not be completely familiar with your working practices, and you just have to live with it. But frankly, there's a lot less uniformity of approach than most people seem to think there is. If you were walking onto a TV show that's been shooting for years and intending to take an unusual approach, that might be a bit of a problem, since you'd be throwing a stick into the works of a possibly well-oiled machine and risking inconsistency with the stuff that had already been produced. Much more likely, though, what you'll be doing will be mostly within the normal spectrum - there are only so many ways to direct a crew to create a shot. Many people think that there's only one way to run a crew. There isn't. There's lots, and anyone who's convinced that a one-true-technique exists is operating from a position of inexperience themselves. As I say, don't come off as arrogant. Aim, perhaps, for politely assertive. Filmmaking is a team sport and it's important to build that team, but at the end of the day if someone else thinks they know how to do it better, they're free to apply for your job. Personally, I made the mistake of being far too nice about this sort of thing early on, and it cost me dearly. Whatever you do, do not go to this with an insecure mindset. Someone asked you to do it because they like your style, whatever that means. They don't want you to subvert that to the whim of other crewmembers.

I want to build myself a cart for more general purpose use, possibly with room to hang a few stands on the end. I rather like the Inovativ carts but for the money you'd expect them to be made out of something a bit more advanced than welded steel, but they are, and they're really much heavier than I think they really need to be. Carbon fibre, honeycomb cored aluminium, perhaps? Not for a grip cart, of course, but I want something I can pack up small and throw in a car.

Very pretty - though I must admit that I have started to chuckle ruefully whenever someone talks about something that's clearly very high end and then goes "oh, it was very low budget." One of the things I've discovered having spoken to people about all kinds of productions is that everyone thinks everything is low budget the second they're aware of how much they're spending. I've had that from some of the biggest names in the business.

It's great. I'd raise my hat to it, but the hat is protecting me from radiation.

I'm not sure what you mean by auto play DVDs. Naturally DVD player will play them when they're inserted. If you want something that'll auto play when put into a PC, that's doable but it's slightly complicated; most people will happily play a DVD on a PC. Also, is that even a very viable distribution method anymore? P

Are you just seeing the grain more in the log because it's so much lower in contrast?

If you're outside in a forest during the day with that equipment, you're not likely to have much ability to affect the light that much. Make sure one side of your bounce boards is black, so you can use it as negative fill and get some sort of shape in faces for closeups, perhaps. The FS7 is a very capable camera and it's possible to create very presentable results with it. I think in your situation it'll be about blocking and framing and camera movement. Got any photos of the location, examples of what you want it to look like, and an idea of the action?