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KH Martin

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Everything posted by KH Martin

  1. THE LIVES OF OTHERS CHILDREN OF MEN MULHOLLAND DRIVE ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND STRANGER THAN FICTION LOST IN TRANSLATION THE PRESTIGE UP SERENITY (this just plain works, better than it has any right to, given how much they had to cram into it, and was tons better than anything done as a trilogy or sextupology (though I do like Cuaron's POTTER film a whole lot.) That's nine ...
  2. American Cinematographer just put out what looks like a more comprehensive article on the film. I tried getting the 'digital preview' off their webpage but it cut out or expired before I could read more than a page or two.
  3. Now you've got ME stumped. I just went back to the transcript and he definitely said Codex. Don't know when it became Kodak, unless spellcheck didn't ID the word Codex and suggested Kodak as replacement ... but that still means I screwed up.
  4. Alexa doesn't look like film to me (night stuff just doesn't pop), but I guess it is close enough for most folks. Deakins seems to be an instant convert after the Andrew Niccol film, enough to make the Bond people go Alexa for the next one, and I just did a piece on the Scorsese picture, which is Alexa and 3D, so it is catching on bigtime.
  5. An interview I did with the cinematographer just went up online at the HD VIDEO PRO website. http://www.hdvideopro.com/display/features/a-boy-and-his-car.html Am very much looking forward to seeing the film.
  6. There was also 7244 and 7242, which I could get processed at the Leo Diner lab in SF,CA, one of which, while grainy, gave very subtle pastels that contrasted very nicely with the gorgeous low speed Kodachrome (I'd use one of those to show 'heaven and hell' in a film that showed earthbound stuff with K40) ... And truth to tell, K40 was good enough for damned near everything else I did 1975-1990. Though the regular 160 was a joke, nearly as offensive as the type G they made that was really for idiots who couldn't make the 85 filter work for them.
  7. He damned near destroyed mine, since he looks like second-tier villain's thug from a Bondflick. Of course the plotting in CASINO takes a lot of the blame too, but Craig's casting was just godawful. Being a good actor isn't enough for an iconic character, you gotta LOOK the part, not like you just lost an acid fight. Except for the ADD editing, QUANTUM did a lot to make up for CR's multi-misfires, but since Craig is still there, the movie is still like going into battle AFTER an arrow has already gone through your head -- there's only so much you can do. But the rest of the crew on the new Bond sounds very solid; I was hoping to interview Deakins again (talked with him about O BROTHER and the criminally underrated THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE about a decade back), this time for a recent article on DPs advising feature animation efforts, but maybe he's too busy prepping Bond. Back on topic, I talked to a couple of HUGO tech folks for a different article recently, and my impression from them is that the trailer is not wholly representative of the film, but more 'in your face' with its imagery, whereas the movie itself treats the depth with subtlety in an immersive manner. There's some large-scale miniature work that was all shot with Alexa in stereoscopic that I'm very excited to see, too.
  8. I'm waiting with baited breath to hear about the actual names rule (I go as TREVANIAN on most boards, but use my real name here), but in the meantime, I'd suggest YOU reread the books -- I've owned them all in hardcover for well over a quarter-century and reread them (except SPY WHO LOVED ME) with increasing regularity ... even wrote some damned good analysis of Fleming way back in my distant youth, and professionally I covered QoS for ICG magazine. Dalton is probably closest to bookBond, and Connery is a thing unto himself ... but Craig would probably be best cast as LeChiffre's tall henchman in the CR novel, or maybe Felix Leiter AFTER the sharks had at him (biting up his face instead of his limbs, since Craig's grotesque features mark him as more Gollum-like than 007ish.) I hate quoting from James Cameron, but with Craig's visage, you just 'have to look with better eyes' to see how wholly inappropriate he appears as Bond. And that's not even getting into the infantile film CR notion that is trying to pass this oldster who looks even older off as a rookie double-0. Would work with Henry Cavil as Bond in 2006, but not this guy, no way.
  9. Are you kidding? FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE and ON HER MAJESTY'S are VERY close adaptations, and the case can be made for THUNDERBALL and GOLDFINGER as well ... only dif on RUSSIA was the film actually ADDED complexity by introducing SPECTRE. The Craig films take some stuff from Fleming, but it is so out of context (not to mention bone-stick stupid in plotting and execution) that it seems only like lip service to me (having said that, I still enjoy QUANTUM "OF SOLACE quite alot, in spite of the ADD editing and the huge miscasting error of hiring a guy who looks like he lost an acid fight to play James Bond.) CASINO was just so moronic and audience insulting, as though pro spies would keep secret info on their cellphones! What, nobody MEMORIZES stuff anymore?
  10. http://www.hdvideopro.com/display/features/aliens-invade-tinseltown.html I talked to the VFX super and DP on this film, this might be of interest.
  11. I'm probably prejudiced because I write for them, but HD VIDEO PRO (despite its title) does cover a certain number of film-based shoots, even though most columns and reviews focus on the digital tools. They are very big covering DSLR and Red. International Cinematographers Guild does likewise, and their pieces are usually longer, though they can usually only cover stuff shot by their membership. Lately ICG has been very big on covering mocap and 3D and lots of tech issues that sometimes help drive production choices. American Cinematographer does even more complete coverage, usually with lighting diagrams and tons of tech details. Usually at least a couple articles from each of these turn up online for free, but to get all the content, you have to subscribe. I can't remember the last time any of these mags covered Super8 though ... maybe AC when Badham used some for a sequence in POINT OF NO RETURN? ... but there is a dedicated Super8 mag available, I think it started up a couple years back. I've never seen it anywhere except an ad on a webpage, and I can't imagine it could be as fun or informative as the 1970s era Super8FilMaker mag that I used to inhale as a teenager, but it would be a dedicated source.
  12. Yeah, very wide, reminded me of the mindvision sequences in BRAINSTORM they were so wide. Also, some of the universe shots look like they use the 'light refracted/reflected off a piece of metal" artwork that was employed for the background of Trumbull's heaven in BRAINSTORM. You can achieve the same thing by letting sunlight bounce off your cheese grater in the kitchen, though it probably won't look quite as good.
  13. Actually there are a few shots on film. They didn't want to risk damaging the 3D rig for some kind of bike jump (haven't seen the movie, don't know the circumstance, except I guess it is in the realworld seegment.) I've got a piece in HD VIDEO PRO magazine about the film that just went on the site at: http://www.hdvideopro.com/display/features/technologic.html I'm guessing the reason another poster further up mentioned that it looked or felt like film is because the DP did his best to introduce film-like depth of field, even though that kinda breaks the rules for 3d shooting.
  14. I wouldn't call KHAN worst in VFX by a long shot. Some of the paintings are bad, but the ship stuff doesn't have that filtered-to-blue blandness-passing-for-slickness that the next couple ILM pics have. Main fx problem is how they ruined the Trumbull paint job on the ship to make it work for bluescreen. And even though I love FINAL FRONTIER for its character stuff, it has to cop for the worst vfx (though there are a lot of turkey shots in the CGfests of INSURRECTIOIN and NEMESIS.) I think the diopter stuff in TMP is extremely intrusive and distracting, on vhs, laser, dvd and in the theater (haven't seen the blurays yet, but the screengrabs look oddly mushy in parts, presumably due to DNR.) By comparison the diopter's in HINDENBERG and ANDROMEDA STRAIN, two prior Wise pics, worked just fine. I assume the mushy lighting does little to camouflage the seam lines on TMP. It could be that the DP would have been okay on TMP if not for the 20-footcandle restriction (to keep the RP displays from washing out) on most bridge shots, but I think he was sunk just on the basis of the production designer dictating so much of the lighting coming from the floor 'to make things look futuristic.' It was very unflattering on the actors, too. I've shown bits of TMP and ANDROMEDASTRAIN to people and asked them to guess which came first, and most think TREK because it looks mushier. It is like Wise got it right in '71, then couldn't recreate the look a few years later (granted, different PD on Trek.) But the diopters wouldn't keep me out of the theater, though the lensflares ARE one of the main reasons I'm passing on the new one (others being imbicilic production design, with a bridge that looks like the Revlon aisle at Target, while engineering looks like a 20th century refinery, absolutely ZERO respect for science -- build the starship in a barn-like facility in Iowa? -- and character assassination on an epic scale. At least the trailer and ads conveyed a lot of information about the product.)
  15. No, he is supposed to be really good, just that he doesn't travel much. He shot some second unit or vfx-oriented stuff for the first X-MEN movie and the main vfx guy on it, Mike Fink, and one of the other vfx supes (maybe from Cinesite?) told me he was still just incredible and that they were really really lucky to get him. He operated for Scott before shooting ALIEN, just all on commercials (and maybe DUELLISTS?)
  16. Actually, he has given up on the Viper, in favor of the F23, because he is tired of them not fixing the issue of noise with the operation (fan noise, I think.) He had to use the 23 when shooting closeups in the hospital, because the viper just kept breaking the sound barrier.
  17. Doesn't make it any less true. Most of the filmmakers favoring digital are doing so because you don't have to scan neg or because they like having long loads or they hate having film jams; they think it minimizes tech impediments to the day's shoots. But I don't think I've talked to anybody who thinks it actually looks better, just that it makes the work easier. And the fact that filmmakers are making decisions -- decisions that should be based at least in part on aesthetics -- on ease of operation or to save a buck, doesn't sound right to me. It isn't even just like the dif between 16mm and 35mm ... well shot 16 still has more of what intrinsically makes film look like film that any digital I've seen. The worst compromise seems to be the 2K DI. Folks do everything at 2K like it is acceptable (even Doug Trumbull was quoted awhile back as saying 2k is enough, which is one of the saddest things I've ever seen coming from a large format giant like him), when it practically defeats the purpose of shooting 35mm, and makes it that much easier to buy off on lesser capture systems, by way of comparison. I think this is what compromised visual effects work as well. Once the scans and comps were happening at 2k, you started getting modelwork that was well-shot, but you couldn't even tell it was well-shot once it had been scanned and comped and re-output or tweaked endlessly. There was a shot of the X-jet in a hanger in the first XMEN that used a good miniature. By the time it was comped into the environment and had the live action added, it just looked like so-so CG. So once you get most fx dumbed down to a certain degree, stuff that you'd've laughed at 10 years ago starts looking good. It isn't ALL cgi that's bad, but how it is being ground out. If you look at the spaceship stuff in Soderberg's SOLARIS, it is probably the only totally photorealistic spaceship stuff ever done digitally, but that is probably because Cinesite output at 4K, not 2K, plus they had better standards to live up to.
  18. I talked to Fincher and Claudio for the ICG mag story. Tarsem shot Far East stuff on 35mm as a favor since he was roughly where Pitt was at during the holidays last christmas. Fincher said having Tarsem as a second unit guy was fantastic. Claudio also shot on 35mm film for a scene on the water where it would have been inconvenient to run cable and for the highspeed backwards war stuff, since Fincher doesn't like digital highspeed yet (at the time of filming, which was a ways back.) Main difference on BUTTON is that it is less previz than usual Fincher. I guess he couldn't get every detail of New Orleans worked out in advance. I joked that he should get a LIDAR scan next time during scouting, and he thought that sounded like a good idea (!!!!!) So I'm guessing he'll be back to previzzing everything next time out.
  19. I talked to him for the ICG mag article and he seemed thrilled to have gotten the opportunity to get this film. Am looking forward to seeing it myself now that the snow is finally leaving.
  20. I've done some writing for ICG and HDVIDEOPRO, and as a result covered WANTED and MOSTLY GHOSTLY. The Red shooting on WANTED was almost a kind of field test, where they shot alongside film cameras, but saw at some point that it wasn't going to be ideal for a number of factors, so NO Red went into it. MOSTLY GHOSTLY was supposed to be the first feature to release on Red, around Halloween, on DVD direct, but I'm not sure if it did come out or not. The story I did ran a couple months back at: http://icgmagazine.com/2008/aug/ghosts.html
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