Phil Rhodes

A brief point of order; VistaVision, at least the 1954 original, wasn't quite the same size and shape as a 135 stills frame. Stills frames are supposed to be 36 by 24mm (though digital cameras vary slightly, just as "super-35mm" digital cinema cameras do) which yields a 1.5:1 image; VistaVision was specified for ratios between 1.66 and 2, so it would have had to have been a different active frame area. In practice much of this was probably eaten up in screen and projector masking, but theoretically it's not precisely the same format.

My instinct is that it's pretty likely to flicker. One trick you can use, if you're able to get near it even without your actual camera, is to stick your cellphone into it, up really close, an inch away, so that the phone just sees a wash of bright light. That will make the phone close down its shutter timing to a very short exposure. You may see dark bands on the display if the LEDs are being pulse-width modulated, which they probably are in an application like that if it can fade them. If it doesn't show dark bands, it's not certain that it won't flicker, but if you do see dark bands it's a pretty strong indication that it might.

As Frank says, a million things to consider, but generally things like back and edge lighting will be crucial to create depth when you don't have colour to separate things (think about how the standard teal and orange action movie thing works when you only have grey and grey...) If you're going to shoot colour and desaturate it, consider what happens if you use just the red channel, just the green channel, just the blue channel... look at what was done for The Lighthouse. The director of photography posted on this forum discussing it. P

As an inverterate tinkerer, I have often pondered this one, but it's tricky. It's an awful lot of 90-degree intersections and even the far-eastern imports are alarmingly expensive. Really it's a bunch of wide black ribbon stitched together at intervals but I'm not sure how you'd do it without spending hours on a sewing machine. I can imagine ways to build a machine to do it, but that's basically what the commercial manufacturers have done, so... It's actually easier to build some LED lighting using arrays of emitters with individual collimating optics, then there's less need for a grid in the first place.

"Enables Hollywood Dolly Effects." Oh, of course it does!

Ah, we're talking about test targets for scanners, my mistake. Yes, buy those.

Well that punctures some of the more esoteric reasoning! If someone asked you to do that cross-process, what would you tell them to expect?

I just print 'em. Not so much of an issue with colour accuracy with a resolution target, and the dimensions are reasonably accurate.

Post a photo, so we know exactly what we're dealing with?

Accept no substitute.

Fantastic, glad you've solved it. Still, I'm going to claim some sense of fulfilment for it being an alignment issue! P

Could this be an issue of lamp placement? I have barely used real jolekos, but any lamp of that sort is subject to that sort of issue if the lamp isn't lined up correctly against the reflector and lens assembly.

I'd happily say sure, but it's not going to be a very typical shoot and might not be a very useful experience as regards how the mainstream works. P

You can do very acceptable work with the GH5 and Pocket 4K; it is not necessary to spend large amounts of money on camera gear anymore. I'd say that getting a dolly is a much better idea and a long-term purchase. As to crew, for less-expensive people look on mandy.com and put out a job ad; it's all I'd do. For more-expensive people with TV and film experience, go to the diary services. Right now those people will be very busy, but if it's just a short project it's easier. Eventually you'll start to get to know people you like. The process of managing a crew is not always straightforward, as in any situation where you have a disparate bunch of people dragged together for a job. The general standard of management technique in the film industry is very poor because most of the people who become managers of others have had literally no training to do it beyond observing other people. When a first assistant steps up to being a director of photography, he or she likely has no experience of managing more than one or two other people, and will suddenly become a head of department with authority over two other departments. Even on a smaller project, as a direct-entry DoP you will find yourself managing probably at least two, possibly four other people and if it's a shoot-direct project of your own invention then you're responsible for the whole thing. Even with the best, most experienced people, which you likely will not have, this is not easy. The biggest problem I see is frankly people not being managerial enough. Being in charge without making yourself unpopular is not easy, but the sad reality is you cannot be friends with people and manage them effectively. Sometimes a degree of sternness is required because time on set is very expensive, and that is not easy if you are not confident of your own position. Ideally you will have a first assistant director, a large part of whose job is to provide the required sternness, but if it's just you, well, it's up to you. This leads on to the second issue, which is crew's attitude to you. It is likely that at some point you will end up managing someone who is much more experienced than you. Film crew who consider themselves to be slumming it for the day can be either an absolute dream, or an absolute pain in the backside. What they should do is sidle up to you and mutter suggestions discreetly in your ear. What they should not do is gripe about you behind your back. What they will do is likely a combination of both and you need to have the strength of character to tell them what you want. If you're paying the bills, you're in charge. Even if you screw it up badly, it's still cheaper than film school, and if that's your approach to learning the ropes, so be it. The phrase I've heard used is "friendly, but not friends." It's not easy. As I say, it's often done horribly badly in film and TV, leading to significant and unnecessary friction, which is one reason once a crew is established as working well together, it tends to stick together. For what it's worth I'm in Essex and crewing up for a very simple one-day short soon, so if you find anyone who's looking for work... well, you're lucky, but please refer that person to me! Phil

I found that in spades. On small stuff, often there's this sort of nervous energy and suppressed excitement because you're often surrounded by enthusiastic young people who are often very new and getting to do something they don't get to do very often. Sometimes, rarely, that can overflow into self-doubt and unhappiness, but rarely, so long as you don't overstretch people to the point where they conspicuously fail. But the bigger things get, the more is at stake. I don't know what it's like right now - I've barely been near a big set since pandemic - but certainly in the UK there was always a threatening undercurrent of looming unemployment that made people taciturn and hard to engage with. As a very occasional cameraman I (deliberately) never worked with what I would call a real grip or electrician because I don't think I ever met one I liked, or felt like having around all day, scowling balefully at everything and telling everyone that they didn't do it like this on insert-huge-job. Based on significantly less experience my observation is that this is much less the case in the USA where employment is more regular and people are in general more externally cheerful. Not to say people don't work very hard or aren't under an enormous amount of pressure to perform as standards are very high; I think Americans work some crazy hours sometimes, and not just in the film industry, but somehow it seems to come off as good pressure promoting esprit de corps and common purpose as opposed to just a miserable grind with constant uncomfortable awareness of one's own replaceability. The sad reality, though, is that working on film sets is nothing like what people see in the behind-the-scenes material and a lot of new entrants are really woken up to that rather rudely.

Sometimes they quieten down a bit after they've run a few hours.

I would suspect the way to do this would be to find a converter that'll give you dual link to 3-gigabit. You may need to be careful that the converter will handle RGB properly, and not helpfully subsample it for you. It may even be hard to tell, until your chromakeys start looking bad later on, or something. Then go from 3G to Thunderbolt using whatever off the shelf device you have.

I find you almost have to have someone permanently assigned to it.

I don't see any reason why not. Obviously the aluminium-coated reflectors will have much higher gain and directionality (which I suspect may be almost the same thing) than the white bounce in your photo, but sure. I've seen a few setups like that, with the light at the bottom of a stand, looking up, and the reflector at the top. Sometimes you need a black flag behind the reflector to catch any overspill so it doesn't become an unintended bounce off a ceiling, or something. And of course it works with sunlight, too, which is very powerful, although you do end up moving things around as the world turns.

I have a set here about which I did write a review. In the end it's a reflector which operates, in the broadest possible sense, like any other reflector - albeit with vastly better beam quality control. I think the idea is that they're pretty accurately flat and with consistent surface finishes (which are aluminium coatings, so they're quite easy to scratch or abrade). The advantages of it are a little oblique, but nonetheless real. The most straightforward one is that you can put a light on the floor and skip it off a reflector on a comparatively lightweight stand, give or take windage. The more complicated, but pretty valid one is that you can effectively extend the optical path length and reduce falloff without requiring huge amounts of space. Also as you may have noticed the diffused spot created by the more diffuse reflective surfaces has a really nice beam quality somewhat like a photographic beauty dish but a little more controllable. So I think it has some upsides.

Wow. That's... contrasty. I normalised the colour a little based on the assumption that the buildings are probably grey, and de-contrasted it a bit. Much as this is obviously pretty extreme, I think there's something to be said for a film stock that leans in this direction. I just wrote a piece about how modern film is so smooth and low-contrast that it actually doesn't have some of the characteristics that people want when they shoot film.

Something I notice about this era is that everything is very lit. The interiors would have been pretty shadowy in reality, lit only by window light, and these days I suspect all this would probably look a lot more contrasty and backlit, and likely be more realistic for it. This all feels very studio bound and formal to me and I'm not a big fan of the shiny, hard-lit skin. It certainly creates some very pretty frames but it doesn't look like it's taking place in the past. I notice also the use of mixed colour temperature in the night interior. Was there a specific period people started doing that to suggest moonlight?

Honestly, you can buy a 4-pin XLR connector and a little voltmeter for the cost of a cheeseburger on aliexpress.

The problem is that just reading voltage is unlikely to give a very reliable indication under most circumstances, and for any chemistry other than lithium ion it may be close to useless. Battery fuel gauging is a complex subject, sadly.

What chemistry are the batteries?