KH Martin

The 'running away along the axis of the crashing/rolling ship' thing is just in keeping with how wrong everything in this movie plays out. Before it came out I was afraid it might be another EVENT HORIZON, but after seeing it, I only WISH it had been EVENT HORIZON. At least that aimed low and missed while displaying great miniature effects and art direction, whereas this aimed ... someplace way in the air I guess? ... and barely managed a couple or three adequate moments. Elba should have had his own movie, as should Fassbender. The rest ... blechh! If this is the way LOST was plotted, I'm sure glad I skipped that series and stuck with TWIN PEAKS and THE PRISONER on reruns instead.

Yeah, you're right, I was seeing TRANSPORTER 2 and going dyslexic.

IMDB says Panavision anamorphic. Given that the DP is Mitch Amundsen (WANTED, GI JOE, first two TRANSFORMERS) and the director is Dan Bradley, the other answer would be they shot it on steroids, given their penchant for action.

I've owned Fleming's entire Bond series in hardcover since I was a teen, along with John Pearson's 'biography' of 007 (which is practically an extension of Fleming it reads so well) and have reread them religiously over the last 36 years. Craig matches the craggy-faced thug working for LeChiffre in the original novel, and ain't nothing like Bond. DALTON is the near-perfect match for Fleming's Bond, the Bond of CR's 'nature of evil' chapter and especially of the later books when he is more world weary and cynical. Connery's Bond is wonderful but its own thing, apart from Fleming (probably as it should be.) Brosnan gets a bad rap, but a lot of that is crap direction and abominations for scripts ... see him in TAILOR OF PANAMA and you will see a brutal side that would have made Bond seem real, assuming Boorman ever got to direct PB in a 007 flick. And yeah, the reason I'm skipping mentioning Roger Moore (who would be fine if he were playing Bond's gay uncle, if he only had one) is that I spent his entire tenure waiting for the day when somebody would take this seriously again. I can't blame Craig for CR's writing of the character, and I won't give him credit for QUANTUM's more mature outlook, which to my eyes benefited him enormously. But he has no more business playing Bond than Taylor Negron. Even Craig's much-vaunted sexuality doesn't ring true - take a look at the scene in CR when he picks up Solange, the asst baddie's girlfriend. He is practically swallowing nervously waiting for her to say yes - it is more like Don Knotts with a girl than the James Bond of either film or Fleming.

I thought they've been promising to lighten up with this third one, so this is like Connery and Moore's third (GOLDFINGER and SPY WHO LOVED ME) ... I do NOT get that impression at all from the trailer. Despite the ADD cutting, I thought QUANTUM did wonders making up for all the plotting silliness in CASINO and I was almost able to stand Craig in QUANTUM, though he should be second henchman from the left with that face, not Bond at all. The Mendes/Deakins/Gassner combo is a good one (I have a hard time reconciling Bond & Digital, but if it had to be, then Deakins is the right guy to do it), but I find Logan to be a very weak link in the writing dept. No witty dialog to speak of in the trailer, but it's early days yet.

I'd imagine there is a pretty good market for it, just like scenic backings. There was this huge backing painted for TOWERING INFERNO that circled most of the stage for the upper floor party, and nearly a decade later Paramount rented a sliver of it for the view outside of Admiral Kirk's SF apartment in WRATH OF KHAN. They just threw a couple of small made-out-of-leftover-pieces-from-StarTrek1 constructs up between the apartment set and the backing to give the impression of a couple of nearby futuristic buildings (look kind of like gussied up sunglass racks, but hey, that's the future for you!), and voila, instant 23rd century on the cheap.

The pentagonal out of focus reminds me of how stuff used to look on the Sanyo S8 cameras (have no idea who made their lenses.) Is that what you shot it on? I don't remember the out of focus stuff taking on that geometry when shooting with cameras that had Chinon lenses, but don't know if it happened on Canon and Nikon S8, since all of my stuff shot on those is long long gone. And yeah, it is lovely, though I was a total Kodachrome guy, except for one short where I used an Ektachrome that was softer than the standard e160. It was either 7242 or 7244, and it was practically Pastel, just lovely and subtle, a really nice contrast to K40. I shot Earth scenes on K40 and heaven and hell scenes on the Ektachrome (think this was around when SOMEWHERE IN TIME did the 'past on Fuji' trick.) Do you have a ballpark on that place's transfer rates for S8? I'm seriously interested in saving the bits and pieces that I've kept in cool closets over the decades.

I've always been struck by the textures and skin tones on Connery in the early Bond films shot by Ted Moore. To be honest, I figure it is just those slow stocks (ASA 50 for everything in color, I think) producing gorgeous results when there is enough light (and that means enough light for the lenses, which weren't as fast.) If you look at the TV shows of the era on disk now, you just see a wealth of makeup on everybody instead of skin textures. Then when you get the fast stocks in the 70s, you start not getting this amount of detail in many films, so I'd guess there is a correlation. Not to say there aren't beautiful films from later on (I think Owen Roizman's work on TRUE CONFESSIONS was almost like Willis' GODFATHER, just minus the golden in the glow), but for me few have the richness of texture and detail that you see (or seem to see) in the 60s stuff. That's going as much on my own memories of seeing stuff in the theater as re-viewing on DVD, but I'm sure when I start BluRaying I'll probably have to reassess again, at least on the films that haven't been ruined by that DNR make-faces-into-wax treatment.

I'm very picky about spaceship stuff, always preferring physical modelwork, but the CG stuff of the ships colliding closeup in the trailer is pretty damned good. I couldn't tell it was digital, and my eye usually has an allergy to whole-cloth CG origination on objects. Finally supposed to get to talk with Dariusz today; first time since the original PIRATES for me.

I've been working on a PROMETHEUS article and have talked to the VFX supe and previs supe so far (apparently this was Scott's bigtime indoctrination into previs, and he really took to it.) My last interview -- the main one -- is supposed to be with the DP any day now. I'm pretty sure the stereographer used to be the DP's 1st AC, and transitioned over during PIRATES 3D. But as far as who handles stereo video village, don't know about that yet. I'll be asking about the parts of the process you mention and I imagine whoever is writing about this for AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER, which usually covers Wolski's stuff and I imagine will be all over this, will be just as interested in 3D workflow issues (they probably have twice the wordspace I do, too, the rats!)

Saw the first 2hrs of season 2 on iTunes and it looks like you guys really went daring with such a dark look. It almost reminded me of LOST HIGHWAY. AMC doesn't give you hassles about bringing it up? Your show and MAD MEN are the only domestic programs I buy up as soon as they become available online. Have you talked to any mags about the show yet? I freelance for ICG and HD Video Pro (which still does film coverage now and then; I just did AMERICAN HORROR STORY for them), and used to write for AC and Cinefex. I don't think I've seen anything on THE KILLING in terms of BTS stuff yet.

Piers Bizony's book on 2001 is very good and has a ton of great info on the making of the film, including VFX. The CINEFEX retrospective is not as good as it should have been and omitted a number of existing interviews nobody has seen in print and has errors in it (even got the YEAR that the Dawn of Man sequence was shot wrong!), but it also has stuff not found elsewhere. Agel's book on 2001 has a lot of stills illustrating how Trumbull made Jupiter and other aspects. Doug Trumbull's site has some great images as well (and should be looked at just because it is so gorgeous IMO.) Trumbull is still very big on using miniatures, preferring them to most CG solutions. I did an interview with him recently that just went up at ICG's website.

Tarantino doing Muppets would be GREAT! Kermit would be singing, it isn't easy being reamed, though.

Why is this reminding me of that STAR TREK where Kirk is going to be replaced by a computer as starship captain?

I remember on the old LOST IN SPACE series there was a shot of the saucer sailing down over a mountain before it crashed out of frame, and it was daylight and gorgeous. Back in the Super-8 days, I actually shot some spaceship stuff in daylight. Had to angle a big foamcore starfield so that it tilted forward from straight up, and so it was with the sun behind it to illuminate the pinholes. Had a pole going through it horizontally to the ship, so the ship itself masked the support (most of the time!) Underexposing a couple stops kept the starfield looking good and made the shadows really black, and it really looked very right in terms of superhigh key with almost no fill (I had a bunch of dyed black sheets on the ground and taped around the shooting area to eat up the bounce light, so the light seemed to only come from a single direction.) Took forever to set up each shot, and had to have guys pulling the support pole and it was a huge hassle, but the results looked great, and all in-camera! I was seriously inspired by RIGHT STUFF and RUNNING MAN in terms of miniatueres (all done by the same outfit, USFX/Colossal Pictures) ... there were some shots of sleds in a tunnel in RUNNING MAN that looked a billion times better than any of the similar CG stuff in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH's tube sequence.

I was disappointed with the look, but that's true of most shot on digital stuff for me. Between that and DIs that only leave a monochromatic-like final product, the look of a high percentage of flicks is just really off-putting. The movie is probably awesome, just wish they'd shot on film and left out the 3D.

Except VFX vendors are going out of business left and right because there is no profit margin. Except for a couple major major longtime companies and some boutiques, most of them have folded.

I kept asking about that when I was doing a lot of vfx oriented articles in the late 90s. The vague answers all revolved around how much it cost to use the VFX house's motion control stage ... which never made any sense to me, since if they weren't using their stages, it would be more of a problem, right? There are a handful of CG solutions that have succeeded like gangbusters (the SOLARIS remake had very credible space vessels), but I'd take a well built and properly shot miniature over it just about any time, assuming they didn't screw up the look by doing a scan that clipped the qualities that made the model look so good in the first place.

Already a thread on this: http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=52562

My article on the pic is up on the site now. http://www.hdvideopro.com/display/features/depot-of-lost-dreams.html I thought there were going to be lots of train crash pics, but oh well ...

I knew Kerner went under, but didn't know that all that stuff went away already. Geez. I've been messing with a script about the origins of ILM for over a decade now (did 26,000 words of copy on the subject for an article back in the 90s, only half of which wound up being published, so there is plenty of good source material, with a few bits very much at odds with the 'official' accounts.) Maybe I should knuckle down and finish it before there's another generation that thinks everything VFXwise was done with 1s and 0s.

I'd like to believe that. All this selling off of film camera equipment at fire sale prices reminds me of how Edlund and co picked up, what, half a mil worth of vistavision stuff for fifty or sixty grand while setting up ILM. Could be a new era of own-your-own equipment, on a small scale anyway.

It's not a sequel to SR at all, and Nolan who loves film is producing. I don't see the shot-on-film aspect as being anything odd at all. Now the next Bond being shot on digital, THAT seems seriously weird to me, even with Deakins aboard.

It's not a sequel to SR at all, and Nolan who loves film is producing. I don't see the shot-on-film aspect as being anything odd at all. Now the next Bond being shot on digital, THAT seems seriously weird to me, even with Deakins aboard.

With the way they've already altered the stocks to make them more midrange-looking (like vid/dig to my eye), it is looking like less and less of a loss, even though I'm the biggest film guy I know. Bright vibrant colors and super contrast with deep blacks -- the richness of film image -- was what you got shooting Kodachrome, and that is already gone. If I'd still been shooting Super8 when when Kodachrome went away, I'd probably have needed to be medicated.