Ryan Thomas

The same folks who brought you car keys in refrigerators probably. :)

Isn't it Steve who invented them? This is a fun question though...I've become so attached to cardellini's that I usually never think to grab a mafer. Good idea with being able to stick them on stands easily though, I'll have to keep that in mind.

Yeah, it depends on what you're wrapping. At a certain point, you'll realize it's too heavy to hold in your hands. So then if you just lay it down flat, find the middle, then wrap it clockwise...once you finish one side, flip it over and do the other. This way you aren't pulling the entire length of the cable every time you wrap it. Makes life easier...

Can you not rent equipment there? That way the whole 220 thing won't even be an issue and you don't have to worry in the slightest about weight.

That's pretty much the only effect. You can see some other examples in Elf in the very beginning when Will Farrel wakes up after getting knocked out. Also in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, they use it in the end right before they're going to go into the chamber. I can't find links to these, but I know they're there in the films. I'm sure there is a way to get close in post, but since it's sort of an optical thing that's going on, I'm sure you can't duplicate it exactly.

A classic use of the mesmerizer.... Around 15 seconds it kicks in and it starts gettin' gooood.

I don't know...when they're in cloud city and the red lights from below the floor is everywhere and it's all heavily fogged from the carbon freezing chamber. There is quite a bit of style there. Ha...sorry, Happy Gilmore might be a better example of something with less style.

Rent the AJA black magic box. You've gotta get two monitors though. Then you go HDMI into the black magic box, then go SDI to your onboard, and SDI to your production monitor....Or just have those two monitors be one in the same. That's the only decent solution I've come across. The other thing you can do is get an HDMI splitter, but I just sorta hate those HDMI cables, especially with longer runs.

You can always just use paper tape too...don't use gaff tape. Rope is a pretty good solution though, if there are things to tie it off to.

That might work, but how long is the scene? If it's just a few shots you could get away with very little, but if it's a long scene, you need to keep it the same looking throughout the day. What kind of equipment do you have access to? HMI's? or just tungsten lamps? Do you want it to be nice and soft? Or do you want it to be hard? It's difficult to tell you how to light it without knowing these things...just because you could do it so many different ways.

Yeah, as do I...but I've found myself using some of the diagrams later down the line, so they're both worthwhile.

Yeah, one of those little LED lights that's meant to mount on top of the camera seems like it would be a great solution....I did a shoot a while ago where we powered two 4x4 kino's off of an 800 watt inverter that was connected straight to the terminals. So...you can definitely get those kino's to strike, but how much they'll do is another thing.

I just used a cineped bolted to a matthews doorway dolly. It has only one speed (SLOW!!!), but again, whatcha gonna do? I'm not sure the rental on the cineped though, I wouldn't be surprised if it was just as much as the fisher.

You should just light the screen yourself. I don't see anything preventing you from doing that...definitely make your key a lot better too.

It sounds like going tungsten would be the easiest way to do this one... I have to ask though, when you dim HMI's from the ballast, do they give you a color shift similar to dimming tungsten units?