KH Martin

Gregory, is there going to be much print coverage on the cinematography end of things? I had read that AC was going to have it in the November issue, but nothing showed, and now they have it listed for December, but ? I'd hate if this film slips through cracks like BIRDMAN might be doing (I tried to cover that for ICG, and later after that fell through, for HDVP, but got nowhere either time, even though I talked to Chivo about GRAVITY the year before.)

Possibilities are endless. Metal cheese graters put up amazing patterns when hard light goes through them, and bouncing off sheets of mylar (especially when the mylar has lots of distortions and ripples) produces wonders. If you look at the movie LIFEFORCE (or DAMNATION ALLEY if you're even more of a masochist), you can see laser-scanned stuff, and in the case of LIFEFORCE that is mostly lasers bounced off glass (pressed glass cheap-o ashtrays) and mylar. There's some stuff at the end of BRAINSTORM as the hero approaches 'heaven' that has a lot of the glass reflection stuff made into something called lissajous patterns (sp?) ... Someplace I've got about 200 feet of Super-8 macro stuff with mylar and mirrors that was all intended for space warp stuff back in the 80s .... somewhere ...

I thought 'flix mandated 4K capture on all their stuff.

I'm limping along through season 4 now and the look is part of what is hurting it so much ... it is so bright ... and there are yellows popping ... It's like they shot this season in the LAUGH-IN universe instead of the KILLING-verse. Performances are still great, but I think they're trying to cram a lot of character arc into too few shows.

Agreed and agreed - I didn't last 20min on the Mann film, but a half-hour ago I finished rewatching BARRY LYNDON (first time on bluray though) and it is just gorgeous without the painterly quality being distracting. Loved the handhled for the fight stuff too. It's a good thing for Lucas he didn't get his wish and have STAR WARS looking all diffused like LUCKY LADY ... I doubt that would have translated with any success at all, especially given that he wanted a documentary feel. Doc feel and overly soft whited out scenery seem like a match made in Hell.

One thing that would make film stand out even more from digital is if they'd go back to stocks that didn't show so much mid-range. Back in the S8 days, It seemed to me that Kodachrome was rich without necessaril being able to see EVERYTHING ... and that fit with what I read the EASY RIDER DP said when the mastering of the DVD happened. The colorist wanted to dig into the shadow to show more detail, and he said, 'no, that wasn't the intention.' Film looks like film when it has that different way of dropping off/going to shadow, rather than the graduated one I've been annoyed by in the last 15 years or so. To me it is like scanning 35mm at 2K ... you can wind up clipping off the very values that made you want to originate on 35 in the first place. So many movies I saw theatrically never had the richness on home video until Blu-ray ... I've felt in recent years that only now can I really recreate the experience of seeing HIGHLANDER in the cinema. I'm tempted to rent a mediocre movie, LADYHAWKE, on dvd or br just to see if the incredible contrast and clarity I experienced when it was projected is there again. I thought the flick sucked but saw it a few times first-run just because it looked so incredibly rich.

I really thought about applying for that (did a few stories for them round the turn of the century), but heard you're not allowed to freelance for other related mags. With that in mind, the money would have only come to what I make with my day job and my freelance work, but have to stretch to living in L.A. and driving in L.A. Far cry from 5mile round trip to work and three-figure rents.

I thought mid-run QUANTUM LEAP was the only show protecting for 16:9 with their framing, but clearly a lot of shows were doing it by then. LAW & ORDER must have done it, I saw one yesterday that looked seriously well-composed at the wider aspect ratio. The ST-TNG remastered opticals do use the original photographic elements of models (except for a couple times when they subsituted a CG E-D that is glaringly apparent, because they couldn't locate the original elements), but the animation effects are done new, since there's no way to take the cruddy look and make it work at the higher resolution. There aren't any CG ships in TNG until a couple things seventh season, so they aren't having to re-render those elements ... but if they ever do DEEP SPACE 9 there will be a problem, because they switched over to nearly all CG for the last couple of seasons, when the big space battles happen. What kills me on the trek boards is how so many people can't deal with the black bars on the side and would prefer to see distorted TNG episodes in order to get that screen filled up. Read someplace that THE X-FILES is NOT going to go the TNG route, and all the vfx are just going to be upscaled. Might work on the dark scenes, but I think that's going to be a mixed batch.

By 70s looking video, do you mean it looks like BARNEY MILLER or ALL IN THE FAMILY? Cuz that ain't what I go to see movies for. There is probably an artistic way to do that kind of look ... I mean, TOOTSIE has the scenes on the soap opera set lit in such a fashion that it 'registers' on some level as video even though it is all very nice and on film. Then again, that was Roizman, and Roizman from the 70s up through the mid-80s was pretty close to perfection for me (in the span of about one year, we got TAPS and TRUE CONFESSIONS -- which for me is THE GODFATHER minus the golden hues -- and ABSENCE OF MALICE.)

I really like his stuff too, loved TINKER TAILOR ... Pfister is thinking he will only direct features now, though still shoot commercials (probably the ones he directs.) That's what he said before the movie came out anyway. Not sure how that will really shake out though, given the tepid response to it.

He has always been that way. He looked around trying to find a commercial 'arm' for the droids in SILENT RUNNING, but when he came up empty, he designed one himself, which I think he built with his father, who dates back to WIZARD OF OZ and also was a key player on the Dykstraflex for STAR WARS.

The shutter question is interesting. If there's a ton of camera movement, maybe they didn't want stuff to strobe like on fast pans, since strobing is supposed to be godawful in 3D (haven't seen a movie in 3D in more than 30 years, so I'm just taking folks word on that.) Haven't seen DAYS yet, but this 'digital smear' thread has kinda scared me off a little. I remember seeing X2 in a really bad digital theater and thinking it looked like it was shot on homevid and projected at a drive-in, so I'm extremely allergic to poor theatrical presentations.

Wasn't there some elaborate rig that let Kubrick do the handheld 65mm work in 2001? I remember that there is a rather steep platform leading down into the excavation where the monolith is found on the moon, and that Kubrick himself shot that, but don't recall ever seeing any b-t-s showing exactly how he manhandled that sucker.

I"m not sure if it is always or not. He said that has been their style for nearly the whole run (perhaps he meant up to 90 degrees?), along with being zoom crazy (I haven't ever seen an episode of the show, but the promos certainly always bore out the zoom crazy part.) I guess it is about generating a ton of material for editorial, which was even more important on this show because UK days cost them an hour of production out of every 24. Apparently they violate the proscenium constantly as well, so coverage from a pair of 2-camera takes could actually encompass 360 degrees of view, which makes my head hurt just writing it out again.

Not to step on anybody's answer here, but until the laser projection stuff starts happening, I don't imagine any current theatrical viewings are going to have the zest that a high-lambert true academy standard 35mm projection of past years would feature. Maybe dual 4K would do it? I remember talking to some IMAX guys about this stuff a couple years ago for ICG (might be the story SIZE MATTERS on their site, not sure now... yeah, towards the end there's a bit about this at: http://www.icgmagazine.com/wordpress/2013/05/03/size-matters/ )

I remember Harrison Ford's suit from LAST CRUSADE when they were in Venice doing crazy moire when I saw it on cable. Remember a lot of that on the PATTON laserdisc as well. Maybe my eyes are going, but I don't see issues with grain on most of these. Issues with DNR, yeah (one reason I still don't have PATTON on BR.) Doug Trumbull said he screened 2001 and BLADE RUNNER via Blu-Ray in his own deluxw home theater and that they looked as good as they ever did in any theatrical venue. That statement kinda stunned me (I remember seeing 2001 in L.A. when I was 7-1/2 and I don't think ANYTHING has ever looked so awesome ever again), but I do kind of want to defer to his judgement, since he might be the only guy still around who has seen 2001 more times than me (outside of Tom Hanks, I'd guess.) I am SO pissed that 2001 screened at the Seattle Cinerama this weekend when I couldn't get away to go up there; I haven't seen it in 70mm since 1989, and haven't seen it in 35mm in over 12 years. (really needed a fix.)

I always go by my first impresson of the AOTC trailer image of the kid on his bike in the desert ... 'looks like BARNEY MILLER on another planet.'

Nearly all Alexa. The DP told me Fox loves Alexa workflow. He found a Hawke 150-450 zoom locally that worked very well for one of their cameras to augment the Angenieux zoom. He had actually shot a test for them in season 6 using the F900, but the 2nd camera being 90 degress off axis just didn't work given that camera's latitude issues.

There's good stuff out of the UK 70s era. I remember Connery's triple crown of WIND & THE LION, MAN WHO WOULD BE KING and (to a lesser degree if I remember correctly) ROBIN & MARIAN looking pretty damned good. But a lot of british stuff from that period I've only seen on tv in the early 80s, probably off of bad 16mm prints, and they all look both foggy and grainy (I remember this thing called QUEST FOR LOVE that was a sci fi love story that almost played better when I didn't look at the screen ... kind of presaged the whole Abrams/lensflare thing with me, which is LUCKY LADY level awfulness.) There's some of that in US work of the era as well, basically the bad versions of MCCABE & MRS MILLER ... Lazlo Kovacs shot something called MARRIAGE OF A YOUNG STOCKBROKER that a critic said looked like it had been shot through a dirty windshield. Going by a single late-night tv viewing, I'd have to agree (a really strange approach for a movie about voyeurism, to not be able to see clearly, but I guess that might just be irony.) I agree with you about SUPERMAN ... except for Canada/Kansas, I though it was overrated in terms of look. But I really like all of 2001, & to me Alcott did an amazing job of matching to Unsworth for the ending hotel room scene. Alcott shot that DAWN OF MAN part too, but that is a thing unto itself.

If you've read MAKING OF SW, you know that Taylor did not get along at all with Lucas, or with producer Gary Kurtz, who really wanted to fire him. Taylor followed studio orders about how to shoot the film rather than following Lucas' odd notion of a foggy looking fairytale/documentary look, which surely would have kept the movie from being the biggest grossing movie of all time (GL had wanted Unsworth based on LUCKY LADY, which, to my eye, based on clips, is the most godawful foggy whited out mess imagineable. I'm guessing they had to go to that extreme in order to make Liza Minelli acceptable to the lens?) Perhaps more significantly, Taylor WAS fired off Milius' CONAN. The quote from the director in CINEFANTASTIQUE was actually worded along the lines of "he was terminated with extreme prejudice ... his methods were unsound." So I guess the moral of the story is that if you piss off enough of what in the 70s were called The Movie Brats, the phone stops ringing. EDIT ADDON: Taylor was not exactly thrilled to have to take and pass a camera test from Kubrick before doing STRANGELOVE. I'm guessing he didn't play well with others, but geez, most of the guy's work is really awesome. I think the 'stocking behind the lens' look for the desert planet in SW was his idea.

Read this & passed this thread along to one of the editors I freelance for, the guy at ICG. They ARE looking into offering options, so to misquote MEN IN BLACK 2, "all is not lost."

It is not the cover story (that's mine, the one on TRANSCENDENCE), but it is in the April issue. Just got my comp copy in the mail, not sure when it hits newsstands, assuming anybody actually stocks ICG anymore (haven't seen it in a store since the last Tower Books in these parts went out of business a decade ago.) They don't usually put the secondary stories online, but if it does turn up, it'll probably be within the next couple of weeks. Everything is a little behind schedule because of NAB, I think.

Oh, I just saw ICG covered this in the new issue. Four Alexas for most everything, plus a bunch of red epics for crash cam and extensive handheld. doesn't mention the canons at all.

shotonwhat has got alexa and red and canon eos c500 listed, just to complicate the matter. If there are scenes set in the past, maybe those use a different format camera?

The article is finally up at: http://www.hdvideopro.com/film-and-tv/feature-films/the-man-machine.html They gave it an odd-sounding title; I liked URBAN PACIFICATION myself.