George Ebersole

Last I heard faces could not be shot as of a few years ago, but bodies can. Which is why in news reports all you ever see are torsos. I've never seen a producer have a problem getting a release. I was at the Conservatory in Golden Gate park shooting girls in bikinis some years back, and when the cops came to put a stop to it the producer (a woman) was just very business like in producing releases and handing them to the officers. We also shot a lot of foreign tourists, but didn't get releases from them. They wound up in the final cut too, which goes to show you that it depends on the producer and circumstances. My experience was that most people sign them as a matter of business. They don't really stop to think about what they're signing, so they just do it. I was down at Intel one time shooting an in house industrial about employees commuting. We shot all kinds of faces and Intel employees, and didn't get any releases from anybody. Ditto from all the other industrials I've worked that have been shot on company locations (private property). VMX, Del Monte, Apple, Hewlet Packard and scores of others. But in all those instances the final product was meant for employee viewership, and not meant to be aired on television.

I saw Superman Returns. I didn't like it much as a film, but I thought it was very well shot. Very crisp and good composition.

That's interesting. I really had no idea. Can you list a couple of titles?

I'm not sure if this point has been addressed or not (my apologies if it has), but IMAX cameras shoot like Vista Vission cameras. They scroll the film sideways behind the shutter. If you're hoping to shoot an IMAX release with an Arri, then you may want to rethink this. Your only choice really is to shoot with an IMAX camera if you want an IMAX image. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

Stage cloth or cheese-cloth is my best guess.

If it's okay for me to show my face that'd be great. I haven't worked in many many moons as per my initial posts, and figured your guys' picnic was for active professionals. The last time I was near a panaflex or Arri I had a full head of hair :lol: Seriously, let me know. The last time I handled a Sony BETACAM package was four or five yeras after chip cameras were being used. It's been a while :P

Heh, the way gas is going that's almost worth considering. ;)

For me the "work for food" job was the only one I turned down because of "the wages" (so to speak). All the rest were due to scheduling conflicts. Whether I was raking in $500 a day as a dolly grip or $100 as a low wage stage manager, it didn't matter. It was all work.... ... I take it back. I actually did turn down a job two or three years ago to PA on that Poker show that's shot in Vegas. For me to get PA wages after buying a plane ticket, or spending money on gas to drive all the way to Vegas from San Francisco, to me, seemed a little rediculous. I suppose I could've tacked on my gas expense, but when I was working a lot I only ever charged mileage when I was running errands for whoever hired me. I never charged for commuting. On all-night shoots I didn't charge nor expect extra either. It was all part of the job and line of work.

I worked on deferred payment as a dolly grip one time, but never saw a dime. Said trailer eventually evolved into the TV series "Tales from the City". Back in the 90s one lady producer from Oakland actually asked me to work for food one time. To answer your next question; no, I didn't.

My living room looks pretty "red" in the evening with all that smoke from San Bruno.

Are there no network events of anykind?

Amazon UK shows a runtime of 101 minutes, verse Amazon in the U.S. which has it listed as 100 minutes. I thought it might be due to the whole 24fps for North America verse 25fps European standard, but a whole minute seems awfully long. My guess is that you could be right about BFS Entertainment (the company who owns the North American distribution rights) using the old PBS PAL-to-NTSC tape transfer. Some of the episodes look okay. Others not so much. It's hard to say. I'll know once I get my hands on a Region-2 disc. All I know is that in the "Sharpe's Challenge" featurette they showed a clip from "Sharpe's Waterloo", and that footage looked pretty sharp (pun intended :)).

Oh well. Thanks.

When I did a lot of work way back when the Film and Tape council and the local rental houses used to throw networking parties for people working in the Bay Area. Does that still happen? If so does anyone in the area have a bead on one?

I definately concur on the stock. 16 gave it a rustic look. Almost like the crew actually went back in time to shoot it. I liked Sharpe's Challenge for what it was, but it seemed a little removed from the original films because it was shot on a fast 35. PBS aired them approximately the same time they were being aired on your guys' side of the Atlantic, but I think the U.S. release was delayed by several months (maybe a year... not sure) from when you saw them. The good side is that they're available on DVD, but would you believe that the U.S. VHS release is said to look better than the current DVD? :( Next paycheque I'm hoping to splurge on some Region 2 discs from you neck of the woods :) An old friend of mine (a still photographer turned videographer) invested in a bunch of Hi-8 equipment. He used to mount his Sony TR on their mini steady-cam and run across the local gym with it. :D

Thanks Michael. Yeah, I meant the entire series. When it aired here in the U.S. on PBS it was presented in letterbox format for the first two installments, and had a real sharp image. Then the later episodes seem to be shot in full screen and on a different stock. The 16mm stock seemed to add something to the series. When Sharpe's challenge came out, shot on 35mm, I almost wanted to see it in 16 again. The actors have aged some, and the stock they used really caught every detail of their faces. Sean Bean looks younger in the video footage shot for the featurette than he does in the actual movie. Thanks for the still. I'm assuming that's from one of the original films, and not the upcoming release. :)

Has anyone on this forum ever worked on any of the Sharpe films? If so, do you know whether the series was shot on 16 or super 16mm film? It looks pretty grainy, so I'm guessing regular 16. I kind of like the look of the series, and am wondering how it was done.

Wow, I had a gander at Kodak's website the other day. New Super-8 stock coming out. Incredible. PM me your contact info. This stuff's been sitting in my refrigerator for a while.

You're right of course about King Arthur. That's why I put "more", but I guess I should've said it differently. My bad :) I actually like miniature work compared to CGI and digital inserts. There's a few exceptions. In "Master and Commander" the Surprise was digitally inserted into a storm whose basic footage was shot off of Cape Horn. To me that's a good use of digital inserts. In Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" I liked how his production team were able to duplicate company sized sets of Roman soldiers in the opening battle sequence to create an entire army (though that sequence is dark... probably to cover it up some). And the CGI in "Gladiator", to me at least, looked like it was complimenting the story by creating believable visuals. Yeah, I wasn't too convinced by the sea battle in "Elizabeth". I thought the film was respectable enough, but you're right. The ships, for all the effor that went into them, seemed more like an animated matte painting. I used to work for one of the guys who helped work on the Indy train car sequence. He also did the Death Star surface and interior fighter sequence in Return of the Jedi. I've been trying to hunt him down. If I find him I'll ask him about those films.

Oh I'm sure the bike and car were real enough, but what I'm saying is pasting Ford's likeness into the scene is what throws it for me. The stunt-people you guys used in the campus chase sequence were real and looked real, but Ford sliding under tables in the library, to my eyes at least, looked like a digital insert. It wasn't Ford being dragged in a trench behind a truck, so to speak. It's that kind of stuff that bothers my eye.

It looked like a film projection, but I guess I can't be sure unless I ask the theatre.

Well, like the California educational system Hollywood has become addicted to computers. I don't blame my lack of enthusiasm for the latest flick on the Producers as such (though they clearly made the choice to shoot what they did and how they did it), I blame the whole trend in SFX films to be an increasing reliance on both CGI and digital editing. By digital editing I mean inserting characters, objects and even locations into scenes where they clearly don't belong. Two films; "King Arthur" (2004) and Boorman's "Excalibur" (1981). The 2004 film is supposed to be more historically accurate, but, even though it's not a fantasy film (and even though I actually liked the film and enjoyed it) it looked fake compared to Boorman's 1981 film which is supposed to be a pure fantasy pic. When I saw "Temple of Doom" in the theatre I got mildly annoyed with all the miniature work (even though I would become an SFX assistant), but wasn't too put off because most of the film dealt with live actors in non-digitized environments. I didn't get that sense with Indy4. And I don't get that sense with a lot of films coming out as of recent. A film I like a lot is John Milius "The Wind and the Lion". That film had one process shot to show some American battleships in the background. The rest of the film's special effects were shot in camera; i.e. they were live. The explosives and squibs weren't painted in digitally, and they look real not just in terms of story, but in terms of the film's reality. There's a scene near the end of that film where Sean Connery's character is fighting a Prussian (German) officer on horse back. Connery was replaced with a stuntman for much of the sequence, but I can't help but believe that that looks more convincing than digitally pasting an actor's face over a stuntman, of filming the actor on a mockup on a green stage and pasting him into the scene. Personally I don't think computers have been all that helpful for films other than in editing, screewriting, and motion control for miniatures. I've grown up with computers, used teletypes in the 70s, was trained on Apples and PCs in the 80s, and build my own boxes to this day. I've used CAD programs, MATLAB, programmed in basic, C, fortran, pascal and was surfing the net when it was still a university only thing. I love computers, but using them as a cruch for what should be stunts shot live, in my opinion, is really distracting when seeing the final product on screen. Just my two bits.

When I saw it on the big screen I actually thought it was a film out... though not a 4k one.

When I saw Indy4 the other week only one thing really struck me, and that is all the use of digital effects. I don't neccesarily mean the CGI, but all the green-screen work to insert Harrison Ford into stunts that his contract wouldn't let him do "live", so to speak. The Army-Ant sequence, as an example; there was a time when a film crew would have travelled down to South America to capture some footage of army ants, and then work it into the film. The idea here being to make the sequence look real as well as adventursome for the effect of the story. Instead the audience was given a lot of CGI that didn't look all that convincing. Ditto with the stunts and digital extras. As an example, the motorcycle sequence; it looked fake in a digital sense. I wasn't sold that what I was seeing was "real" in the sense of the film's reality. Seeing Harrison Ford slide under library tables and so forth all looked really phoney to my eyes. There was a time when this kind of stunt would've been shot live with a stuntman, or Ford himself in a controlled environment. I didn't mind all the comic-book story stuff. The aliens, the natives, even the ants, but like I said none of it seemed convincing in the least. I felt like I was watching a cartoon that was striving to be a good adventure film. I could go on, but I'll hold there.

Does anyone even shoot Super 8 anymore?