KH Martin

Jon Alcott, who shot DAWNOFMAN and the whiteroom stuff under the credit of additional photography, used his own Nikon still lenses when it came time to do model photography on DISCOVERY and other ship miniatures. And the photocutouts that were animated for many space scenes were shot using Hassleblads, so the resolution of the photo cutouts would be equal to or superior to the taking-65 cameras. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the RP stuff played back on live-action sets was shot in 35, then reduced to 16 for projectors. RP stuff for the model shots I'm guessing would have been 65, otherwise you'd be undercutting your own credibility.

It's actually on the guy's blog or twitter account or something, not that actual page. Here you go: http://i.imgur.com/bV0xPxT.jpg EDIT ADDON: she has apparently denied that it is her, now that I look at it on other sites. Sorry.

I've NEVER seen that shot of Carrie Fisher in costume on the set, or even heard anything about that. In fact, even half the model shots are new to me, and I've been all about BR from the beginning, having inhaled the CINEFEX and later the FUTURE NOIR book, and getting into laserdisc mainly just to have BR and 2001 at decent rez and in OAR. One of the building models used in BR and GHOSTBUSTERS is at the awesome video store MovieMadness in Portland now. They have lots of great stuff on display, including a Foo Dog from CITIZEN KANE, Quinlan's sport coat from TOUCH OF EVIL and guns from THE WILD BUNCH. Geez, this website is run from maybe 2 miles away from me! Up until recently I must have been within walking distance of the office, can't believe I don't know this guy.

I grew up and lived in San Jose for nearly 40 years. Did Cinemark buy up the Century dome theaters, or are those new builds? Out of all those Century domes (which I think were first built with TODD-AO in mind), I think only the standalong Century 21, had the full curved screen, which was actually problematic for a lot of flat movies. I remember seeing BLACK SUNDAY there first run and only two slivers of the screen being in focus (mid-left and mid-right), with the center and corners both just headache-inducingly soft. The two theaters that I recall as being superb in the area are long long gone: the Santa Clara Cinema 150, where I saw debut of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and reissues of 2001, and Palo Alto Square, which always got the aspect ratio right and used really bright projectors so you could see what was actually filmed. I remember taste-testing, seeing the same TREK movie at a SJ Century and then at the Square, and it was literally like night & day.

Box office PLUS quality haven't been the Bond equation since middle of the Connery era. The last Bond movies I unabashedly loved were the Dalton ones, which were disappointments box office wise and suffered under the hardship of a lame director who was too budy directing traffic to take advantage of what he had. All the Moore films had going for them were Ken Adam and Derek Meddings and John Barry, and poor Brosnan got awful material (if he'd gotten to play Bond like he played in TAILOR OF PANAMA, nobody would have been thinking he was just Roger Mooreing his way through.) Folks can wax poetic about the Craig films, but I just don't see how you can rave over films that now act like they are serious, but then default back to 'it is escapism' every time a movie revolves around the idiot plot point, like CASINO ROYALE, in which nearly every clue comes from Bond killing somebody to get their cell phone info. As if a 'pro' (and these guys were supposed to be GOOOOOD) wouldn't keep sensitive info in his head! Plus Bond behaving like a punk, like Bond at age 17 maybe. Honestly, except for a few scenes in QUANTUM in the middle and then at the very end of it, there has been NOTHING in the Craig era that makes me think this is Bond at all - my recent go-to on this has been to say that Craig is actually playing a guessied up version of Edward Woodward's CALLAN from around 1970.

Perhaps the digital end of this is a lot less than first thought. While i was trying to do a cinematography/vfx article on SPECTRE, the PR folk said Hoyte needed to know my 'angle' for the show. An odd question, given that the 'angle' usually arises out of the interviewee's responses, since that's the person in the know. Anyway, I mentioned that getting these various digital captures to 'live' with the mostly shot-on-film stuff would be one area I would probably be asking about, and I got a response a week later that Hoyte declined the interview on the grounds that he considered this a film project. At that point I was three weeks into pursuing this (on my third or fourth PR person, and then another week passed before Sony PR decided they didn't want me to even do a VFX-only piece either, with no explanation whatsoever (this is after I've already done well-received features on QUANTUM for ICG and SKYFALL for HD VIDEO PR.) Very strange stuff. I loved his work on TINKER TAILOR and HER, but couldn't get him on the phone for proposed HER and INTERSTELLAR pieces either, so I guess this is strike three. Then there was the one from a couple months ago, a DP I was interviewing about a film that comes out this month hung up on me (first time that has happened to me in 25 years of writing about film) when I mentioned I hadn't seen the film yet. The number of times I have seen a film before doing interviews is so small I can count them on both hands, and the PR folk who set up the interview knew they hadn't made the film available to me too, and yet he was surprised and apparently offended that this was the case.

I was just reading someplace about a 'crew work light' being used so folks could negotiate behind the scenes without tripping over their feet due to the available-light approach employed on digitally originated night exterior shoots. Am wondering if crew will have to wear nightvision goggles if captures take place at ISO 3000 ...

Assuming you could rotate the table AND the lighting setup ... just tip everything and let gravity do the work.

Just saw s3 of RIPPER STREET, a series I dearly love which looks good too. Liked TRANSPARENT but the pilot looked really mushy. Rewatched CARNIVALE and DEADWOOD earlier in the year, awesome as always, but always bummed since they ended WAY before their time. 15 years late, but finally started CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM last week and am already up to season 5. My wife loves HANNIBAL, but I don't seem to be able to stay awake most of the time. Now I guess I know how all those people who don't like David Lynch or Tarkovsky feel.

I really dislike the look of filmstocks from the last couple decades, as they seem more about delivering a digital look than a film one, with respect to what I guess I'd call image snap. Then again, I think most exteriors should look like Kodachrome unless you're doing a stylization with a PURPOSE behind it (postnuclear or SIN CITY.) I'm sure the new SW will still bear more of a resemblance to the OT than, say, the BARNEY MILLER IN SPACE look of PHANTOM MENACE, but that's still not exactly ideal. But I'm not their target audience, to be sure.

If there is serious sprocket damage, do any of these facilities have a way to correct when the film starts 'skipping'? I've got a few films where the sprocket holes are completely gone for as much as a couple feet, and the faux sprocket hole areas are basically guilotine splicing tape, which don't always hold during projection (as I recall anyway - haven't had a working projector in five years.) One of these projects is an 80% finished film from 1980, and since the main character is supposed to age towards the end, I'm thinking if I can get it transferred, I may just go back in and reshoot the last part with myself at my current age ... would look a lot more credible than the 'spray gray in hair & squint a lot while rasping' approach I essayed at age 19. Of course that would mean coming up with a look in digital that duplicates Kodachrome 40 (I gave up on E160 as useless when I was 16 and only used 7244 for special projects, like when portraying Heaven and Hell), and I don't know that I've seen anything that really delivers that distinctive Kodachrome look/feel yet.

That's amazing! I remember not being able to do a MAN OF STEEL article because of his non-participation, and even though PIXELS was discussed for coverage, it was shot down because of his known reticence. It isn't like he's talking f stops and balloon lights here, but it is a start, anyway.

I like stupid action movies that KNOW they are stupid, like ACTION JACKSON, which is practically laughing along with the audience at times. I also like smart action movies -- like THE FINAL OPTION, THE WILD GEESE -- that don't rely on idiot plot turns. But stupid movies that somehow skate by convicing the masses they are smart -- I have no truck with those at all. CASINO ROYALE is a perfect example. The guy picks up nearly all his leads from killing people to get their cell phone info ... these are supposed to be professionals and they can't keep secret info IN THEIR HEAD?! Take the idiot plot turns away and there isn't even a movie.

Roberto would absolutely have shot QUANTUM in scope but they knew the post deadline was going to be beyond tight, so the week or so they'd save not having to deal with that for Haug is what decided against it. Hoyte is the ONLY thing that interests me about this phase of Bond, which has nothing to do with Bond at all in my opinion. It is more like an overblown badly done copy of the old and wonderful CALLAN series, but with a tuxedo added in. But at least SPECTRE is on film, so that's one good thing.

Well, you can create some animated haze by playing lights with dimmers over a piece of screen door material (usually bent over double) that is in front of the camera as a scrim. I remember having to do some pickups to match to a smoke environment on a live set, but for the retake we couldn't put any atmosphere into the room. With this method it actually looked more interesting visually than the shots with the real smoke, as the highlight edges of the screen mesh, even out of focus, gave the fauxsmoke some punch, though obviously there are limitations, like you can't have anything come through on the Z-axis. One other thought ... if it is a static shot, you could also take a piece of glass at right angles to your setup, and reflect in a large smoke source set up at 90 degrees from your scene. I used to do that to put laser beams into a model setup, just by illuminating chalk or lines of blacklight paint that I had lined up on this adjacent right-angle setup. (yeah, I am a seriously old-oldschool guy for this stuff, backwinding in the camera for double exposures, shooting models in daylight against a huge backlit starfield and I've never shot a traveling matte in my life.)

I haven't been able to watch more than a few minutes of any eps with the redone fx. The ship stuff seems closer to imagery from the old cartoon series than the live-action show. I did see a couple of nice matte paintings, but it all seems like a lot of change for no gain (or actually a net loss.) Personally, I really like the original shots, even the ones with bad matte lines, because you can tell it is a physical object up there, and there's a real nice sense of that big model overflowing the taking camera's perspective during flybys. The CG stuff doesn't seem to be able to deal with that 'feel' either. Same people (CBS Digital) did about half of the Next Generation blu-ray redo VFX (they did every second season I think), but I haven't seen any of those yet, though there is a lot more positive feedback on that work. Most of that is just recompositing original film elements digitally, they only had to recreate anew for animation type effects like forcefields and phasers.

They fixed that for the DVD director's cut released back in 2001, but that version adds plenty of other problems, like a lame new sound mix, a fireball in space (well, in a wormhole in space) and some uninspired new ship shots. Even though it had a really important scene not in the theatrical (the Spock tear scene), I gave my copy away when I bought the theatrical blu-ray. Y'know, I never noticed it in the looking-down shot ... probably because I'm in heaven over that snorkel lens view of the nacelle, which is among my faves in any space movie.

Well, ICG did run my review of the book, but it isn't online, just in the print edition of the March issue. I've reread the book a couple of times now, while watching the blu-ray and reading a few other sources, and there are some fx parts that still seem very unclear to me.

I wish we could meld this thread and the one you did way back when http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=39257 together so we could discuss the issues from there in context with the new info. I mean, now we know why so many of the matte paintings look so lousy, plus we have TONS more info on just about every other aspect of the production. My review was supposed to be like 750 words, but my rough cut was 2500! Taking forever to cut a lot of the 'trek devotee' aspects out and focus on the filmmaker-related stuff. Has also re-sparked my interest in PLANET OF THE TITANS, which was the TREK feature that Phil Kaufman intended to make in 1977. Paramount cancelled it the same month STAR WARS came out, even though they had Ken Adam as production desginer, Ralph McQuarrie as concept artist, Derek Meddings for miniatures and Jordan Belson (!!!!) for opticals. Mcquarrie's art is actually kinda feeble compared with the Adam sketches of their Enterprise, but it would have been something very different from what we got -- Kaufman intended to have Toshiro Mifune as a Klingon captain!

Kline was interviewed on the director's cut DVD edition of the movie and seemed to be pretty clear on things, even 20+ years on. His lack of prep time on the show had to have really hurt, and I think a lot of the problems on the bridge set might have been circumvented or dealt with more adroitly had he been able to do a regular round of tests. I know that the lights behind the buttons kept causing the buttons to melt, so they lowered them by like 75%, and therefore had to lower set lighting so the buttons would show up. Then you've got dim super8 projectors (why didn't they have Elmo Xenon units if they had to use rp film?) for the little screens, which means flagging a lot of light and keeping set lighting down to keep them from washing out, too. Then you've got the EXTREME use of diopters to carry focus, and while that works an awful lot of the time, when it doesn't work, it really creates eye-ache (I think maybe it works best with hard light, HINDENBURG and even ANDROMEDA STRAIN seem to use it more successfully by far.) And his letting the production designer build in so much light that came from below creates a questionable aesthetic when dealing with aging actors. After getting through this monster volume, I looked at about half the movie last night and it was almost with fresh eyes and ears -- which is a pretty heavy trip given I've seen this a LOT of times (glutton for punishment I guess.)

Not specifically focused on cinematography, this book RETURN TO TOMORROW (not available from Amazon, you have to go direct to creaturefeatures.com) covers STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE about as completely as you could possibly imagine. There are several sections where DP Richard Kline weighs in on things (all interviews are from 1979 and 1980), as well as VFX guy/dp Sam Nicholson. Tons of stuff from Robert Wise, John Dykstra ... there are sixty folks interviewed in the 670+ page book. Not going to give any details away (have to write up a review first), but they only printed a 1000 copies, so I have a feeling it is going to turn scarce pretty soon. Almost TOO detailed in terms of vfx tech, if you can believe that, but man, one of the best 'tale of a train wreck production' books I have ever read. And they did some really good factchecking too -- I only found one or two errors, and those are really just people remembering the wrong names.

I didn't view the link but I remember reading an article about the wave in STARLOG (issue 27, an FX-heavy issue I probably bought and rebought about 10 times in the last 35 years), and you're right, the wave never crested as intended. I think it was Warren's guy, with Mike MInor, working on it. They cut little STARLOG back issue covers out of the magazine and used them to dress the newsstands for the shot. Now that I wrote this, I think I'm going to look for the STARLOG online resource, they're supposed to have a lot of articles up, and up through 1982 or so they actually had good information some of the time (before it turned into a total PR thing.)

The X-wings looked good, but that Falcon shot was just something out of videogame lunacy. Design-wise, it might have paid for them to look at the 'wow' shots in the original trilogy (most of which feature the FALCON), which STILL work for me, even though I am not exactly a SW fan (still haven't enjoyed one that came out after 1980.) The 'following the Falcon blasting everyting in jedi' shot has lots of gymnastics, but has a lot more cred than this thing. Maybe there is something to constraining the moves that makes them work better (like putting a virtual model mount on the thing that you have to keep framing out of shot?)

I'll dig around. There is a little bit about it in the Pakula bio, I think, and probably in one or two books on cinematographers I have someplace. Might take a couple days though. Along with Kaufman's BODY SNATCHERS remake, PARALLAX is my favorite 70s political paranoia flick, and the compositional elements, especially in the last reel, are just awesome, in terms of monolithic structures dwarfing the lead. The one '?' aspect is that the music is exactly what is used in MARATHON MAN when Scheider gets killed ... goes to show that James Horner isn't the only composer who recycles like mad (though nobody gets away with delivering the same thing over & over again like he does, even when he is delivering another composer's stuff.)

Something to keep in mind is that when you bounce light through a high-quality piece of glass, it has less imperfections, and you get less interesting results. At least that is what Dykstra and Apogee found out on LIFEFORCE. They bought a really nice pricey piece of crystal and the laser just went through it without much of anything visual, so that's why they went with the pressed-glass ashtrays! I know they did put a laser through a crystal fairly successfully years earlier for the photon torpedoes in the first TREK movie, but the results look kinda cartoony because they went so many generations that the soft edged flares got all hard-looking. But I guess before they got busy going generations in making the comp that it was supposed to be too cool for school. I absolutely love low-tech fx. Sometimes I'll dig out the old CINEFEX on THE RIGHT STUFF just to get re-inspired, as they spent months trying to program motion control moves on aircraft models, only to find out they were better off throwing foam models out of upper-floors down at a camera underneath! That, and putting somebody's personal vibrator on the camera to get a bit of turbulent shake, really made the shots live a little.