Brent J. Craig

I was thinking they would line up to the frame edges (or perfs - even better) on a computer. Most image editing programs will let you blow up enough that a single perf could fill your screen. Put the new image in a layer at 50% opacity over the old image, jiggle until the perfs line up, repeat.

I don't think it would be very difficult to line up the scanned images because the edges of the film frame are always in the same place. Just scan them at the same size and line up a corner. Not too hard, but very timeconsuming.

I believe the city of Toronto actually has a bylaw that makes it illegal to 'mess with filmcrews'. This has put a big damper on the neighbourhood idiot that just absolutely needs to mow their lawn as soon as they hear the words "roll sound".

I had a good laugh when I saw the Arricam ST in your photos. Most of the time an Arri ST is an old 16mm that is nearly obsolete. The Arricam ST is the studio version of Arri's current sync sound 35mm camera.

I've worked on sets in Toronto where we either: 1. Had a big burly security guard check for our names on a call sheet before we were allowed in or 2. Wore laminated access tags like you see at rock concerts

I agree, the 10mm Switar is a sweet lens. It's a must-have for Bolexes. Century makes a nice wide angle adaptor that screws onto the 10mm Switar to make it 6mm. BTW - if anyone sees 10mm Switar serial number 1107040 it's mine. Please let me know. It was stolen a few years ago and the replacement just doesn't have the same charm.

I have experimented with Kodak high-speed infrared B+W film. It is not very sensitive to heat. Kodak (Canada) was nice enough to send me some of their out-of-print IR publications. One of them showed small scene lit by the IR radiation of a scalding hot clothes iron. I believe the exposure time to record the image was in the order of 8 hours, not minutes or tenths of seconds. Infrared film is not the same as those infrared scopes you see the police and military using! What is the nature of your scene? Could you shoot it with the fastest film stock you can find but do it in timelapse to use long exposure times? You would need to work out the desired screen time and have all the action take place relative to that. For example if your actor moved just a fraction before every timelapse frame, with careful planning and control it could theoretically look like semi-normal movement when played back at at 24fps.

If you can't afford to do it as a stunt, do it as an effects shot. 1. Shoot the backgrounds with the camera close and low to the road. It's not very expensive to rig a simple driving shot safely. 2. Record the lens info, angles, height, lighting, etc. 3. In a studio, recreate the same angle, lighting etc with an actor being 'dragged' in front of a green screen. 4. Fix it in post! :D Many, many things that look like stunts in the movies are actually carefully executed effects shots. Chances are if you can see the face of a famous actor, it's not a stunt! Do you really think the agents/handlers/insurance companies of a $20 million-per-picture star would let them be dragged behind a car?

Sometimes we will flip the camera sideways when shooting people for compositing, just to fill the negative more. Are the empty plates you mention really all that important for a properly lit green screen? I know clean plates are great to use for difference mattes when dealing with problem situations (like when you can't use a green screen at all) but do editors use them for greenscreens too?

I pulled focus for Harris Savides on some commercials a few years back. As the guy responsible for setting the stop, his underexposure really freaked me out. I would see the display on his meter as he checked the key light, then he would tell me a shooting stop that wasn't even in the same ballpark as the key! I can't tell you how many times I checked and rechecked with him to be sure I was hearing him right! I have never seen someone so confident and daring with underexposure. Most guys will take a reading, and knowing it can be fixed in telecine, will open up a bit for insurance. Harris was always pushing the envelope right there on the pinky toe of the curve. We did a night exterior where he lit a city block with the edges of the beams of six 1K par cans, then he underexposed the key by at least 3 stops! By the time we started shooting those par cans were so precisely positioned that the poor electric in the lift wasn't allowed to come down for lunch! I think he got 12 hours of meal-penalty that day :D

There's no such thing. The groundglass is what the video tap is 'shooting'.

You're joking, right? Speaking as a commercial focus puller with 13 years experience: It is usually better to know whether a shot is in focus or not on the shoot day rather than finding out in the rushes a day or so later.

The ground glass has to be VERY precisely positioned - it's how you judge focus! You can't make one out of tape. Find a sympathetic rental house and see if they will loan you one.

Thanks Wendell! I have printed out your message to use as my Christmas list for the next few years! :)

Does Mr. Goldblatt bother you at your workplace? Big shoots are amazing, inspiring, and all the rest, but they are still workplaces. I'm about 500 levels down the callsheet from Mr. Goldblatt and it is extremely rare that I would have time to stop working and speak to some schmoe "out for beers". Trying to talk to a big DP on a film set is similar to bugging the famous actors, except the DP's are actually doing something :D

There are photos of every kind of car mount your can imagine on my website.. You can see everything from big budget car commercials that can afford the the amazing Russian Arm, to idiots with a rope around their waist kneeling on the bumper of a car.

Check out Wildfire Lights - they make UV fresnels that actually have some throw to them. We have used them on a couple of projects and they work very well. Be prepared to pay, though! Whatever rental houses own them only get to rent them out a few times a year, so you'll be paying for that. Brent

I'm not sure how you're simulating depth of field, but your examples don't feel 'right' to me. Restoring or creating some select focus is a good way to lend a more filmic look to miniDV footage, so I assume that is why you are doing it. Remember that DOF isn't about selecting random objects to be soft, it's about how lenses render objects that are not at the exact point of focus less and less sharp depending on how far they are away from that point. In your examples there are things are different distances that are all sharp while other things at the same distances are soft. That doesn't read to my eye as DOF. If your system can make use of Photoshop filters, I use a great one called Varifocus. While it still does not reproduce true DOF, it allows you gradations of softness that are much more believable. With a bit of practice and a knowledge of how real DOF works you can do some nice things. One trick is to mask of the objects that will be at your point of focus and only let the filter work on the rest.

Searching all of Ebay for 'aaton', I can't find a sale that looks fishy. C'mon - give us the link so we can toy with him!

I worked with a director once who had his own set of Zeiss T2.1's with the close focus 'stoppers' removed. It kind of freaked me out in the camera prep. If you kept twisting I suspect the lenses would have come apart. It was certainly convenient though! Every lens was a macro. Sure some of them looked like crap focused too close, and compensation for lens extension was mostly voodoo. If you have a really good relation with the lens tech at your rental house, and it's a long enough rental, maybe you can have them pull the stoppers for you too.

We did that once. Bought a cheap Russian nightvision scope and mounted it on an Arri3 with a 50mm Macro to focus on the nightvision screen. You don't need any special lens mount adaptors or anything - just a macro that can fill the frame with the nightvision screen and lots of black tape. With even a basic nightvision scope, we lit a row of trees 150m away with the taillights of a car, and a hotel room with the infrared light of a TV remote! You can buy IR LEDs that are super bright on nightvision scopes as well. The video is: Rheostatics "Bad Time to be Poor" if you can find it anywhere.

Scotchlite [tm] is a very special engineered material that is made up of thouands of tiny lenses designed to reflect back the maximum amount of light possible. Shooting the same scene on film (with a light source mounted close to the optical axis, as in this case) would produce the same results. I have worked with front projection using a Scotchlite screen, and I can tell you that you can light up the Scotchlite screen as bright as daylight from across the studio by placing an LED flashlight close to your eye (your optical axis). Does digital have the same latittude as film? No. Neither does TV. Judging it by looking at a test image with Scotchlite in the frame is pretty useless.

I would use them when I'm hungry! (I wonder if Mr. Tiffen has done any research into what times of day these filters come out? Are they used more often when craft service is weak?) I know several commercial shooters who like to filter and grad in-camera, because in the commercial world the telecine process is largely out of their hands.

This type of shot is one of the most difficult for a focus puller. The depth of field is changing in strange ways throughout the shot and to do it right requires a near-perfect focus pull. The best way we have ever done it is with a Scorpio lens control system and an encoder gear on the dolly track. You go through the move and set your focus and zoom at various points, then the Scorpio plays it back as you move the dolly. It is quite time consuming to set up, and if one thing changes (like the actor's mark) you have to start from the beginning again. The method above is definitely not a low budget solution, unless you have a very understanding rental house!

Cinematography.com advertiser Walter Klassen FX makes a really nice one called the Side Step. Look for the link over there -------------->