Boone Hudgins

I seem to remember the series finale of Tales From the Crypt was completely through the eyes of a man that had plastic surgery to make himself look like Humphrey Bogart. It was even his POV after he was dead.

I believe that DVD's horizontal resolution is at or around 720, but the vertical is 480, no?

According to American Cinematographer, they used 5245 (EXR 50D) for exteriors, and made it look like old Kodachrome slide film in the DI. They used 5229 indoors.

All the shots I've seen of the Micro 35, from their website, look really soft. I don't know if they used old lenses wide open or what, but the orginal lenses seemed to look better every time. The price is very attractive, and I would be very interested in getting one if I knew it could look better than that.

Robert Wise aged the newsreel film on Citizen Kane by rubbing it against the concrete floor of the editing room.

It may also be that "mom-and-pop" theaters are cutting corners because they're losing business to large chain multiplexes, who end up purchasing the smaller theaters and shutting them down. And I wonder how the aforementioned quality control hierarchy works in other chain establishments like Blockbuster and McDonalds. Quality control in big businesses is only a small part of the puzzle when it comes to efficiency.

Setups are usually designated with letters. It could be the 26th shot of that scene.

The closest theater to me is in the town of Newport. It's a small, three-screen multiplex and it's really not great. The prints aren't taken care of very well, and there are plenty projection problems, not to mention horrible sound. I was watching a DVD, fed from a computer and projected on a wall the other day, it was really surprising how close it looked to the projection from this theater. I could see some subtle compression artifacts, and the projector had a pretty annoying green tint in the highlights, but the picture was just a little bit softer, with a bit lower contrast, than a theatrical projection. With a bit of tweaking, I bet I could set up a 5 foot screen (or so) in my house that looked very close to the picture at the local theater. Yes the screen is considerably smaller, but so is the audience. When I have the chance, I tend to go the Carmike in Corvallis. I like the quality there very much, and the seating is better, too.

Undertow and Hostage are two pretty current examples of interesting title sequences.

I'm on a PC right now. I've used a PC since about 7th grade. Through high school I learned how to build and repair PCs, and the ins and outs of working with Windows. Now I'm pretty much sick of it all. My reasons for wanting a change don't have a lot to do with the reasons many people bring up as issues with Windows. I've never gotten a virus, I clear out spyware regularly, I don't use Internet Explorer or Outlook Express. Windows, and PCs in general, have just been getting on my nerves lately. About the price: you can get a PC very cheap. You can get a PC for a few hundred dollars, but is it worth it? From my experience, not exactly. Computers such as the $400 HP I'm typing on now are great tools for casual computer use, but for things I'd like to use it for, it's just lacking. To get a PC I'd be happy with, I'd end up spending about as much, maybe a little less, than I would for a Mac. Alienware and IBM make great machines, but these aren't exactly bargain basement. There's a premium for quality, and a great premium for great quality. The real problem I'm having with PCs now is the unnesessary complexity in everything. If you buy an HP computer with Windows XP, you receive a computer with Windows XP, intertwined with HP software like a cancer, and laden with resource-eating plug-ins and trial shareware. The built in software that companies like HP use atop Windows attempts to make computer use easier for newer users, but is so sluggish and inoppurtune, it just wants to make one pull your hair out. And it's better to leave that software be instead of trying to remove it one-by-one, risking booting problems and bad .dll warnings aplenty. I remember a time when you bought a PC, it came with the latest version of Windows, a package of pre-installed software (full versions of games and useful programs). Now you get all of this invasive software, basically a virus that comes to your computer, more annoying than any "I see you're trying to write a letter" paperclip. The one option now is that Microsoft does not require PC companies pre install Windows any longer. Theoretically, you could buy a computer with an unformatted hard drive, and a copy of Windows to clean install, but who wants to go through that, especially when an OEM version of Windows is way cheaper than a boxed version, which is about up to $200 by now, isn't it? At this time, I'm interested in buying an iMac G5. I worked with OS9 a little in high school, to edit films for video productions class. I really liked how it was set up, and I'm interested in teaching myself OSX, it looks really nice. I was really impressed with Final Cut Pro (I used version 2...that was long ago), especially the interface. I'm less impressed with Premiere, but it's just a matter of opinion. Of course, going from a $400 computer to a $1700 computer is where it really gets lost in translation. Being a contracted worker at a high school isn't exactly rolling in the dough. About getting a laptop, though, I wouldn't necessarily go for a Mac, not just yet. I've looked at them, but I think I'd rather wait for a G5 powerbook, which would just be exciting.

Interesting. I've had an idea for a while of a story told on the backdrop of a beached whale that eventually is blown apart by dynamite; an event that actually occured in Florence, Oregon in the 1970s.

I want to make dry, witty movies combining irony and pure sentiment, tending to showcase the humor in what we see as bad situations. Ultimately studying characters and their relationships with each other, but along the way mixing genres together to come up with interesting takes on things we think we've seen before. I also would like to make intelligent films with mature subjects that don't alienate the family by including gratuitous adult content. Like David Mullen, and other influences of mine, I'd like to work with a very deliberate, controlled camera. Precise composition and camera movement and long takes are very pleasing to me, as are very wide lenses and reletively high stops. Semi-expressionistic design and lighting, visualizing internal conflicts simultaneously with the external, is something I'd hope to be able to do, in a kind of "theatrical realism." I find the ability to speak artistically both through word and picture to be very intriguing, and finding a balance between the two is quite fun.

That's a good rule to remember.

How much would a 235 rent for, would you think? Would it be closer to a IIC or a 435?

They probably wanted to.

I noticed in some shots of Raging Bull there were triangular circles of confusion in out of focus backgrounds, characteristic of the T2.1 Standard Speeds, no? It was shot in 1979. Anybody know what lenses were used?

I see what you guys mean by vignette now. It looked almost like the rounded corners of the film frame. I'm not sure what caused it, and it seemed to only be in, like, two helicopter shots. 2nd unit? The film looked pretty nice. I didn't notice overabundant face softening, but none of the shots lasted very long. It probably would have been even more of an issue if Michael Bay could pick a shot and stick with it. The movie itself was kind of dumb, though. Thankfully it didn't try to pretend to be anything else but dumb.

Hm. I wonder if it was intentional or not. I'll probably watch it on Thursday, mostly because it's Mauro Fiore and anamorphic. I like vignetting, subtle or no. I probably couldn't explain why.

A lot of cinematographers are adding vignetting in the DI nowadays. Harkening back to the silent picture days, possibly.

I must say I enjoyed the movie. I liked forward moving storyline. I liked the fact that it was told from the point of view of one group of people, even though sometimes it seemed too convenient for that particular group of people. I also was satisfied that the arc of the movie was not in the tale of the aliens, but with the family. The ending on the sci-fi angle was a bit anti-climactic (just like in the book), but it was more important that the family drama was complete. It seemed to me that Tom Cruise's character didn't realize how much his kids meant to him. He put his career, his hobbies, and himself before anybody else, but through the movie, all that fell apart and he realized that the most tangible thing in his life was his family. I thought that was unique as far as action movies go anymore. It wasn't mindless action, nor did it try to be more highbrow than it actually was. I really liked the photography. It was really loose, but not in a vomit-inducing Shakey Cam kind of way that everybody's doing. It really felt appropriate to the story. The camera movement seemed as haphazard as Tom Cruise's attempts to protect his children. It wasn't an epic tale, and it didn't warrant grandiose shots. It was almost as if it was one step away from being in the heads of the people surviving it. And although there weren't a lot of wide shots, Landon, there was a lot of use of wide angle lenses, like most Spielberg movies. A lot of the moving shots were fairly wide. Most of the long lenses were reletively still closeups. I was a bit confused with the random changing of diffusion. I liked the netted look at the beginning, then all of a sudded it was the globby, Classic Soft look from The Terminal. Both looks definitely work fine, but it was kind of distracting. I guess you could say it was a bold look from Kaminski, I would expect nothing less. I really liked the contrasty interiors, too.

Thanks for clearing that up. This is a great place to learn about detailed things such as that.

The second frame, where Jimmy Stewart gets out of his canoe, walks toward the camera as he's walking toward the family made me fall in love with wide-angle lenses.

The f-stop could affect flares in that it makes the light shining into the lens brighter, though, right? I mean, a practical at T2 would register signifcantly brighter than at T8. Or does the fact that the anamorphic element is before the iris make the flare the same no matter what?

Primo anamorphics flare, don't they? The Life Aquatic had some pretty nice flares, and it was shot on Primos at T8 most of the time, I believe. The strong flare on music videos is usually from shooting wide open or thereabouts, no?

You would imagine a lot of money would have to be put into it. But there's only so much you can do with anything.