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KH Martin

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Everything posted by KH Martin

  1. Ashamed to admit I've only seen 40 of these (though out of those, there are a dozen that I've seen at least ten times.) Still can't get over some of the oversights (Jordan Cronenweth, Gordon Willis quadruple-COUGH!!), looking at the list makes me realize it isn't just VFX that goes for commercial choices over better work in better films
  2. Domestic video was an unvarying 30fps, so I always figured that is what we were seeing, though as I recall there was a lot of jitter like frames were missing. And they were certainly as fallible as any other camera - on Apollo 12, they had a color camera, but one of the guys accidentally pointed it at the sign and destroyed its ability to create viewable images.
  3. Except for most of the Saturn and Gemini launches, I didn't think there was supposed to be any archival stuff used for the spaceflights, that it was all done with the mockups and the miniatures. None of the folks I interviewed mentioned any archival space stuff with the LEM and CSM. There was an early push from the studio to minimize mention of VFX, which may explain why miniature effects supervisor Ian Hunter's name was never even mentioned to me during pre-release interviews -- in fact, it didn't turn up anywhere that I recall until it showed up on IMDB in early October as the film released -- but I never got the impression that anybody was pretending that the space stuff was stock footage, though they did try very hard to emulate the 'real' look by not putting starfields into most backgrounds. As for the other aspect you cite about Armstrong ... the real guy never struck me as being very interesting, and I was a prime space nut growing up -- the drawers of my desk at age 9 were filled with NASA FACTS pamphlets and my walls were covered with posters of astronauts and the VAB (okay, there was a Pete Rose one up there too, but nearly all space stuff.) Yet with me inhaling everything about the space program, literally the only thing I remember about Armstrong was his admission he treated himself to a cigar once per month ... and I can't think of any era where that would qualify as interesting, unless perhaps he had also turned out to be a marathon runner. I still haven't seen the movie yet (a part of me thinks a parody trailer about Buzz Aldrin called SECOND GUY needs to be made), but I do think Gosling is probably a very adequate choice. You could have gone with a character actor to duplicate Armstrong's goofy nerd-smile, but at the potential cost of what little box office the film did generate, and with very little gain.
  4. On a lot of the bigger films I write about, the 'leapfrog' approach seems prevalent, so you've got one of the operators and and AC setting up the next shot while the first one is getting worked on. Also, having 2nd unit working adjacent to the main unit, so it can pick up stuff that would otherwise put production behind schedule, though I realize most shows can't afford a second unit at all, let alone running one alongside the main shoot.
  5. Watching what I think was ep 7 (the one that Rufus Sewell is going to win an Emmy for is what we're already calling it) last night, we were laughing so hard and long that I think we missed a third of the jokes. It made me think of ANNIE HALL, where they had to keep adding more dead space after previews to keep the cocaine-sneezing laughter from wiping out the next scene!
  6. It's worth it. We're nursing it along one episode a night and 2nd season is even better than the first IMO. The stylization of the performances is on the verge of being too much, but isnt. It's something else!
  7. I remember preferring the MGM laserdisc release to the Criterion one. The MGM was from a 65mm source, but not Kubrick approved -- I thought it showed a lot more detail, especially in scenes like the red moonbase interior.
  8. Except for one background plate of the moon during liftoff that was digital, pretty sure nearly all of the moon stuff is Film IMAX, not digital acquisition. (and I talked to the DP, an operator, the vfx supe, prod des and guy who shot the miniatures, so that's not just idle speculation.) All the talk on blu-ray.com about the heavy shakicam throughout has made me reconsider seeing it in the theater, so I am kinda bummed right now (don't think I've seen a live-action movie in the theater since GRAVITY x3, except for a horrible press screening of BEGUILED on a dig projector that made the thing look abominable.)
  9. I was still working at Cinefex and after spending forever downloading the thing, watched it a lot of times and wanted to cover it in the magazine, but was too 'small' for them to want to bother. I was really blown away by the quality of the execution, especially compared to a lot of the CG work in high end features at the time. I'd say in terms of vfx-oriented folk, it was probably bigger than that PANIC ATTACK! short from about a decade back (the guy who made that parlayed it into a real career, doing the EVIL DEAD remake and ROBOCOP reboot, but I don't know if the 405 folks went on to anything. )
  10. It's a real shame that the E-E miniature from FC never saw any further duty, except for being scanned. Outside of the Phoenix and the old Klingon Bird of Prey, the E-E is the only Trek miniature I've seen in person, on stage actually, when they were shooting the reveal of it coming out of a nebula. They had set photographs mounted on slides inside the windows, and it all really looked gorgeous. There are a few shots of a CG E-E in FC, when the ship goes to warp (which looks pretty nice as I recall) and a less successful shot of it coming out of the time warp, but FC is the last time the filmmakers remained predominantly miniature-oriented (though several Starfleet vessels in the early Borg battle are CG.) DD did a few good CG shots of the E-E in NEMESIS, but most of that stuff only looked marginally better than the INS digital work to my eye. But DD was smart enough to go physical for the ramming scene.
  11. Not to be persnickety, but ILM didn't do TMP, though future ILMer Scott Farrar did shoot some of it (for Trumbull's team under Dave Stewart), as did former ILMer Doug Smith (the latter working for Dykstra at Apogee.) And yeah, they were all geniuses! Again, if you want to drown in TMP VFX tech, just read the last half of the monstrously thick RETURN TO TOMORROW book on the making of TMP ... put that together with Cinefex and AmCin coverage and you're probably about as close to knowing most of what and how they did things as you're going to get.
  12. That's ideal, but also, depending on how hard the shadows look, you might want to use a scrim or piece of screen door material to cut the shadow a bit. A shadow would be slightly more diffuse on a full-sized object than on a scale object. If you can find any youtube vids about how the Skotaks shot some of the creature work in TREMORS, that might be useful, too.
  13. You need a ton of light, especially if you're high-speed. Shallow DoF kills modelwork dead. If you're between 11 and 16, you're probably gonna be okay.
  14. It may be heresy in these parts, but I genuinely hate this look for the windows. LOST WORLD has something like this early on and it just seemed headache inducing. Then again, I also despise how pretty much all of MINORITY REPORT looks too. I think MUNICH looked okay though.
  15. Actually, we already have a thread on this one: http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=76265&hl=maisel
  16. Feeling a little conflicted now ... originally thought the whole trailer was graded WAY off, but this comparison made me reconsider a little bit, because the corridor leading to the pod bay really always was a little warmer as I recall. And I've seen this movie projected nearly two dozen times, at least ten of those times in 70mm, going all the way back to summer 68 in L.A. when I was 7-1/2. The rest of the trailer still looks too dark, and softer too.
  17. I waited till I could watch the series for free on a one-week trial via Amazon and found the series looked a lot (a LOT!) sharper than the part of the premiere I saw on regular CBS months back. It was like DVD to laserdisc different, at least. Having said that ... I still don't like it, though once they got onto the DSC ship things improved for a little while. There were a few moments in ep3 with Isaacs that hinted at some real potential, but they squandered all that, going off in all sorts of directions and then at the end just going into lunacy. ep 13 or 14 seemed like a bad CONAN knockoff in space, and all the 'darkness' of Capt. Lorca is band-aided over with how they explained things, which doesn't explore the human condition and complexity/contradictions of 'our guys' at all, like the way section 31 would have. Not even going to think about the show continuity-wise with the original, as this size war a decade before Kirk & co just doesn't fit at all for me. On a tech level, I was flabbergasted at how terrible nearly all the spaceship exterior stuff looked; the Emperor's ship just seemed like seaQuest without the blue, it was an utter cartoon. Designwise I don't think I liked a single ship, and I found the way the live-action was shot to be a distraction. While they rarely pause to actually discuss anything at length (instead just bringing an important issue up, just to have somebody else say that there isn't time to debate that, go do your job), the camera never seems to rest or allow you to focus on what is being said. I also think the streaming model of doing all the shows before any air worked against their tailoring the show based on audience response. On original TREK, once NBC realized the fans loved Spock, they stopped asking production to keep the ear guy in the background and started demanding more Spock shows by mid-season, and the writing staff also took advantage of emerging actor alchemy to bring the Spock/McCoy feuding to the fore. If DSC had actually gotten some good feedback on this as the season progressed, they'd've probably featured Tilly a lot more (probably the only character I like in this whole show.) Perhaps they'd've also done better work on the lead character, who, while potentially the most interesting lead since Sisko, was a complete disconnect/misfire for me. I had a 'disgraced officer as lead'premise for an Enterprise-B show that I actually spent some time writing up after GENERATIONS came out, so I'm extremely attracted to the notion of LORD JIM in space (With the E-B, you'd have a Captain who is forever thought of first as TheGuyWhoGotKirkKilled, which is a pretty heavy cross to bear, even in the weightlessness of space.) Also the post-STAR TREK VI era is perfect to work political paranoia angles, as ST III and VI both seem almost X-FILES-ish at times with the hints of conspiracy and maybe even disappearing people (In the third movie, a Federation security guy tells McCoy he shouldn't be discussing a subject in public, which sounded so sinister to me that I kept thinking they should be playing the CAPRICORN ONE evil helicopter music when he says it.) DSC, for me, is a huge missed opportunity overall, and it will take a huge reversal of style and content to ever get me to pay to watch any more of this.
  18. That weird blade reminded me of how awful the out of focus points of light would look with my old Sankyo Super-8 camera. When depth of field issues raised their heads, starfields, instead of just looking soft, bloomed into geometric nightmares that looked more like something out of THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN. Got to the point real fast that anytime I shot a space scene, I'd do it on a borrowed Cannon, or even a GAF (they at least had Chinon lenses, though the near-focus was something like 7'.)
  19. I pitched covering this to every place I write for last fall, and again in January, and was amazed there was zero interest. Am glad to hear it is as good as its premise, just wish I had a business-expense-for-taxes reason to justify adding Starz in order to watch it! I got to see the first three episodes of THE LOOMING TOWER for an upcoming article, and that show is absolutely sensational. Very solid performances that don't get undercut by overcutting or DI excesses, and for subject matter I already know a lot about (build to 9/11), I found a lot of surprises and a genuinely engaging emotional throughline. And that was 3/10 eps! Multiple DPs on the series, sometimes with two dp/director teams shooting different eps at the same location and on same day, yet things look very integrated. Am thinking this may be a first-day bluray buy for me, which almost never happens with me anymore.
  20. will take many paragraphs just to break it down, will try to do something tomorrow a.m.
  21. It's discussed in that RETURN TO TOMORROW book on the making of that first Trek film, probably 400 pages in or so. It might be DP Dave Stewart talking about it, saying that everybody was laughing when they first saw it (I guess from the text that snorkels were normally made for 55mm lenses, not 65mm.)
  22. Not just a fisheye, but actually a handmade snorkel lens built by Howard Preston and brought to Trumbull, who was still waiting for the one commissioned from another source by Abel the previous year. Apparently it was pretty much made out of cardboard and was a bitch to work with, but the snorkel shots of the E in dock are pretty fantastic, especially the one referenced above. There was a snorkel used on THE BLACK HOLE as well, but I think that kind of blew the scale by getting too close.
  23. I thought Jerry Lewis is the one who got that started? I remember a very basic book I got as a 13 year old on filmmaking that mentioned Lewis and specifically cited this technique for finding out if takes worked right away. I know that Kubrick's vfx people on 2001 used a video monitor to aid forced perspective modelbuilding, but that wasn't directly related to shooting a scene, just a technique to facilitate the construction. EDIT ADDON: Right after I posted, I remembered about the centrifuge stuff being viewed by him on closed-circuit TV, so yeah, you're right.
  24. I still haven't seen it due to life issues, but I think you've got the stuff about the script backwards. Fancher did the original pass, and the other guy rewrote him. Same thing happened first time around in 1982, where the rewriter, who also did 12 MONKEYS, did a spectacularly wonderful job of building on AND fixing Fancher's stuff. If you've ever seen comparisons between O'Bannon's original ALIEN script vs the Hill/Giler rewrite, that's probably similar, though I have a hard time believing Fancher could have been quite as hokey as O'Bannon. The Hill fix is very exciting, and in many ways of more interest than the finished film of ALIEN for me, though in the last 10-12 years, my opinion of ALIEN has risen a LOT beyond the original 'nice art direction' takeaway. Still can't get through EITHER version of Scott's LEGEND though (picked them up for 50Cents apiece on DVD so it wasn't a great loss.)
  25. Only just noticed this thread. Here's a piece I did about his work on OKJA. http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/news/shoot/human-compassion-vs-corporate-greed-creating-complex-layers-netflixs-okja/618668
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