Vivian Zetetick

There's a fun comedy-horror movie from Montreal called Graveyard Alive: a Zombie Nurse in Love that was shot on two-perf 35mm. It screened at a horror fest here in RI a few years ago. The B&W cinematography is top notch. The whole thing was shot MOS and post-dubbed, which adds to it's tongue-in-cheek "drive in movie" feel. http://www.graveyardalive.com/

I agree with this: "I don't think it's relevant to apply the morality of common property law to copyright proprietorship." I find the new anti-piracy ads on DVDs morally reprehensible. Whomever is responsible for them has made a serious error in ethical judgement, for which they should be admonished. Equating breaking and entering, car theft, or other aggressive property crimes with downloading and viewing copyrighted material without permission is totally irresponsible. It may be ethically wrong or illegal to download and view copyrighted material without permission, I have no argument there, but it is clearly not the kind of criminal behavior exhibited by a person who steals an automobile off the street. Why don't they just go all the way with these ads and show someone killing babies, pushing old ladies into traffic, or otherwise engaging in illegal behavior, and then equate that with violating copyright law? The producers of these ads are posturing as authorities on ethical judgement, but ironically these ads are not about ethics at all, they are simply meant to stop behaviour which is reducing someone's profit margin. Again, the producers of these ads may have a legitimate legal/ethical argument, but how they are expressing it is very bad.

Boy, you fellows are listing some pretty good movies as "bad" movies. Ridley Scott's "Legend" has always been on my list of real-deal "good" movies...so I guess making bad movies isn't such a bad thing after all! All of those Italian gothic horror and "giallo horror" movies from the 1960s and 1970s are my "good bad" movies. I can watch those movies over and over -- and I really think most of them actually deserve to be called bad. "The Bloodstained Shadow" is a good example, and in my opinion Dario Argento and Mario Bava's films are all delightfully bad. Bava's "Black Sunday" and "Whip and the Body" are, for me, the filmic equivalent to reading monster mags like CREEPY and EERIE, which I still thumb through for inspiration. Those movies look marvelous, but everyone is as stiff as a board, and the dialogue is so lamely expository and melodramatic that the actors could just as well have big comic-book style dialogue-bubbles floating over their heads! Marvelous.

As a student of cinematography myself, I have to recommend Blain Brown's Cinematography: Image Making for Cinematographers, Directors, and Videographers. It covers a wide range of common technical and aesthetic challenges, and it's up to date. You are sure to experience Deja Vu while reading the book if you have been reading these message boards for a while, and it's no surprise that the author thanks at least one frequent cinematography.com contributor -- David Mullen -- in the afterward. I especially liked the chapter on experimental lab processes (skip-bleach, ENR, etc) and also the chapter devoted to color control, which has always been a daunting subject for me. My only criticism of this book is the quality of the photo illustations. Though well chosen, they are unworthy of the book, and many of them are exceedingly low-resolution. Also, the primitive 3D diagrams, though they get the author's point across loud and clear, could be a bit more inspiring. Still, it's nice to see someone using Peter Greenway's film "The Draughtman's Contract" as an example of intelligently designed cinema instead of some mainstream Hollywood film.

I don't believe anyone has mentioned: The Institute Benjamenta (1995) Gaslight (1944) They Were Expendable (1945) The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

Personally I do not think that allowing people to purchase and download a movie is a dignified choice for self-distribution, particularly for a short movie. If you have a short movie you are proud of, that has screened at a few festivals, that has perhaps won a few awards, you would better serve your material by manufacturing a handsome DVD/HDV/Blu-Ray package and selling it through your own site or online through a company like Canyon Cinema or BuyIndies. Since you are not likely to earn a lot from the sale of your short film anyway, you might at least feel good about the fact that your DVD will travel through time for a few years, and experience what magazine editors call pass-through -- your work will reach more people as a physical object sold to a single person, since they will one day give to other people, let friends borrow it, screen it for their students, etc. This is less likely, I believe, if you give people the choice to download the work, as it will most certainly live the rest of its days as a sad obscure file on someone's hard drive.

There were some manuals here: http://filmshooting.com/manuals/canon.php ...but they don't seem to be downloadable anymore. The 1014 is supposed to have a higher maximum frame rate setting (72fps) that the 1014 XLS when using the "slow motion" feature, making it desirable for that alone. I own an 814 Autozoom E and couldn't be happier. They are built like tanks and the image is very steady (unlike my old Sanyo). However, the lens thread on these cameras is 62mm or 72mm...I forget which...so if you're going to want an anamorphic adapter, you're doomed to looking for the large expensive kind. I love my Canon but I covet smaller cameras which can be outfitted with smaller, less expensive anamorphic adapters.

This question comes up in the world of music composition also, and it is important to take into account the total time spent producing. Though J.S. Bach certainly wrote a lot of music, he did so over a long life. There are other composers who, though they did not produce as much work in total, were more prolific if you divide total output by years spent composing. Franz Shubert is an example. In film I don't know, but the Russian silent filmmaker Evgenii Bauer has got to be up there. Bauer began making films in 1913 at age 48. He died in 1917. Within 4 years he had directed 82 films! http://www.gildasattic.com/bauer.html The DVD "Mad Love: Three Films by Evgenii Bauer" contains a selection of only three of Bauer's films. Each film is roughly 45 minutes long.

Just out of curiosity, how is the grey card information useful if your camera negatives are A-B rolled and an interpositive struck? I would assume that after the A-B rolls are assembled, there is no longer a way for the timer to reference the grey card shots. Is the grey card only useful for dailies and digital intermediates?

The DVD edition of Adrian Lyne's film "9 & 1/2 Weeks" has both the "widescreen" and "full screen" versions of the film. However, unlike a pan & scan, the full-screen version is actually the widescreen version with the 1.85:1 theatrical mask lifted away. As in the DVD release of "The Shining", the home audience sees more than the theatrical audience if they view the film full-screen. As has probably been covered here before, the "Super 35" format allows some filmmakers the freedom to abstract a different version of the film for both 4:3 and 16:9 presentation, as this film frame demonstrates:

I ordered 12 rolls from the very same place 2 years ago, and the images turned out fine. By "fine" I mean like film from the 1920s...which is what we wanted. We had PacLab in NYC do the processing. Best of luck.

Good points, I think. Our challenge in post was that the green screen wasn't lit evenly, so that some areas were a slightly darker green than others, and therefore resisted keying. It's a challenging process, especially when, like us, you are flying on a wing and a prayer.

See the following interview with the Quay brothers regarding Nic Knowland and how he photographed the film: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/19/quay.html The Quay brothers offer that it was filmed with "the lowest grained Kodak black & white". For the quality of its black & white photography, I would put The Institute Benjamenta right up there alongside They Were Expendable, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, and Out of the Past. I can't wait to see the Quay brothers new live action film The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, which looks like its going to be even more of the same: http://www.hoehnepresse.de/german/pianotun...ianotuner.shtml

The brighter the green the better! Also, don't forget: during the green screen shoot, make sure you turn off the "cine-gamma" settings. Go back to the original "standard" factory settings on the camera so the image has the most "punch". this will help separate the green from the non-green. I recently worked on a short movie using the DVX100a, and we did some green screen work which came out pretty well, but we regretted not having brighter lights on the green screen itself. Since we were using moving still photos for background plates, I cannot comment on what the image might look like if the plates were shot live in a different format. Also, our image was so highly processed in post (like the "sky captain" example above) that many artifacts disappeared in the mix. Here's a sample: http://pentaworks.org/blackballoon/blackballoon72dpi.jpg That image was actually shot on a perfectly clear day -- not a cloud in the sky. We used the blue of the sky as a poor man's blue screen. The clouds were added in post, as was the "film damage" effect and the circular blur which gave the image a narrower depth of field & disguised some obvious DV stair-stepping on the narrow bamboo rods holding up the balloon. I think a heavily processed look helps hide things a bit. To see it all in motion looks even better.

Out of curiosity, Phil, do you have a personal method or recipe you have used to pull a black & white DV image from a color DV image in order to preserve quality? I just shot a short movie in B & W using the DVX100a & simply applied the "desaturate" effect to every clip on the Final Cut Pro HD timeline. FCP did not need to re-render anything when I did this, and it was all just as sharp as the original.

It's odd to me that the "film look" is so often equated with narrow depth of field. I watch great films all the time which have near-infinite focus and they look just fine. Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands", Ingmar Bergman's "The Magician", Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange"...the list of films which use very wide depth of field and favor wide angle lenses is extensive.

I just shot a short film outdoors using a DVX100a outfitted with the Chrosziel Matte Box system. I didn't use side wings, and had the .7x wide angle adapter on most of the time. I've been logging the 6+ hours of footage and have yet to see a lens flare. I'm glad I didn't spend the extra $600 for them. Be careful of cheaper matte box systems if you plan on using the wide angle or anamorphic adapters -- they may vignette the frame. The Chrosziel system does not vignette.

Did the Director's Cut precede the Studio Release, or did Ridley Scott create the "Director's Cut" after the Studio Release, as a kind of variation? I was under the impression he restored his original ending for the Director's Cut, but then added/subtracted additional footage, and then removed Deckard's voice-over narration, which was always supposed to be in the film? The Studio release does not include the brief shot of the unicorn running through the trees, purportedly taken from Scott's film "Legend". However, the Studio Release sequence in which Roy murders Tyrell is actually more violent than the Director's Cut.... I've seen "Blade Runner" so many times I could replay the film in my head from beginning to end, and I love Jorden Cronenweth's golden opium-den photography. I must admit, however, that Blade Runner is one of the films which I prefer in the Studio Release. I like the hard-boiled voice-over narration. I think it adds to feeling & tone of the film. I believe the LaserDisc release of the film is the only format where the Studio Release can be found in letterboxed widescreen....

My understanding of "squeezed" mode shooting vs shooting with the anamorphic adapter is that the difference between the two is only *really* apparent when the footage is blown up to 35mm for theatrical screening. At that point the anamorphic footage is slightly better looking -- perhaps much better looking. It is often said that the two cannot be told apart when the footage is encoded to 24p DVD and displayed on a monitor. If that is true, and DVD is your target format, you are better off with the additional lens options than the anamorphic adapter. I use the DVX100a in "squeeze" mode with the additional wide angle lens, and would love to see a side-by-side comparison of my footage vs anamorphic footage on a TV monitor. It looks pretty good as it is. I too was worried about the motion cadence (or staggering effect) I saw on 24p footage shot with the DVX100a, and thought this was going to be a real problem. However, following some advice on this forum, I shot tests using different shutter speeds, and encoded a 24p test DVD. I then watched this DVD with friends and asked them to choose the sequence on the DVD which looked "the best" to them. All unanimously chose the footage shot with a 1/48 shutter speed setting. To all of our eyes the footage looked no different -- motion-wise -- than any movie we had seen on DVD. It was also mercifully free of those dispiriting video artifacts like stair-stepping on diagonal lines and chunky pixels boiling in the shadows.

Was it really? All of the screenshots I've seen have been black & white -- including those posted on the director's own Web site for the film: http://www.armcinema25.com/corpes429.html Best of luck with your own film, which sounds terrific to me, after reading this review: http://www.filmthreat.com/Reviews.asp?Id=1809 Oh heavens -- I forgot: The Flew - dir. Clifton Childree - Odd and whimsical turn-of-the-century feature made by a one-man-band. Childree photographed the film by himself -- literally by himself on sets he built by himslef -- and is largely the film's only subject, which means most of the time he had to start the camera rolling & walk onto frame to start acting. A bit long but fun and remarkable.

What about Cremaster 3? That was in HD.

A Chronicle of Corpses - dir. Andrew Repasky McElhinney - Haven't seen but heard mixed reviews. Subject of NY Times article. Victorian thriller made on an ultra-shoestring budget by a young filmmaker. Begotten - dir. E. Elias Merhige - Outre, 1960s style "symbolic cinema" reminiscent of James Broughton's Dreamwood. Difficult to watch but very interesting. Inspired many people. Praised by Susan Sontag. Merhige went on to make Shadow of the Vampire. Archangel - dir. Guy Maddin - Slightly boring (for some) but nonetheless a marvelous and amusing fantasia on early cinema, lost memories, and unrequited love. Mixes the style of silent films and early talkies to great effect -- and who doesn't like tinted sequences! Criminal - dir. David Jacobsen & Sepideh Farsi - One of those "First Rites" movies distributed exclusively by Hollywood Video. Great movie. Man Bites Dog - Was this B&W 16mm or 35mm? Comic & disturbing French "mockumentary" about a charismatic and philosophical serial killer. Tetsuo: the Iron Man - Powerfully made, somewhat annoying Japanese comic-book style sci-fi horror film about a guy who becomes a robot monster.

The problem you may have is that the alternative DVX100 matte box you choose may show up in the image when you use wide angle lens attachments. A couple of people have posted on DV forums that the Century Optics matte box is not usable with either the .7x or .6x wide angle attachments. I use the Chrosziel system (with rods) and the .7x wide angle lens, and haven't had any problems. Also, I haven't found it to be very heavy.

From the pages of the Honolulu Weekly: The gold-standard HD camera, developed by Sony (camera) and Panavision (lenses), is the 24p, which was used for Clones and Francis Ford Coppola?s Megalopolis, currently in production. Smaller, mini-HDs, with less visual integrity, range in cost from $800 to $3,000 and are used by some film schools and filmmakers, whose work is then transferred to film (Dancing in the Dark and Time Code are examples.) The Weekly spoke to cinematographer Ron Fricke (Baraka, Megalopolis), who has worked on three HD projects. A veteran of 8 mm, l6 mm, 35 mm and 70 mm filmmaking, Fricke says flatly that HD is the future of (most) moviemaking. "It?s much faster, less cumbersome, more mobile ? and less costly," Fricke says. "I?ve just seen the prototype for the new camera due out in a year," Fricke reports. "It?s amazing ? and, no lie, it has more visual integrity than film." http://www.honoluluweekly.com/archives/cov...-02%20Film.html

Does this mean Coppolla will be shooting his film in Todd-AO, as Baraka was filmed?