dan kessler

I have considerable experience with camera building. Tell me, are you already an accomplished machinist, or tool and die maker, or mechanical engineer? If not, then step one is to acquire some meaningful experience and skill in these areas. No chance of success without it.

Hence the rationale for buying and refurbishing rugged old units like this. Best deal I ever scored was an old studio 10k fresnel for $7.00 Yep, seven dollars..

True, that's not the smaller 650 or 1k keg fixture, but it's very possibly a 2k or 5k. Bardwell made those, too. I've got them all. Works like any other fresnel, just as rugged as any Mole.

Corona Del Mar.

When the industry was booming in LA, it seemed to me that fx studios did a lot to expedite the employment of foreign workers. Demand for artists was high, and even in the US, there weren't enough back then. If they wanted someone, they usually got them, no matter where they came from. Besides the tax subsidies, the other reason often cited for the industry's decline was the inherent weakness of its business model. Bidding was intensely competitive and everyone always felt pressured to low ball. As a consequence, even with high profile, big-budget projects, vfx studios were often operating on the edge of financial disaster. They were also dependent on the repeat business from a tiny group of deep-pocketed clients, an advantage the clients often exploited to ruinous advantage. An unnamed executive was once quoted as saying that if he wasn't putting fx studios out of business, he wasn't doing his job. Also, the demographics changed. The global vfx labor pool ballooned, barriers to entry collapsed... it's economics.

The story most often told is that producers employing vfx went chasing the tax subsidies offered elsewhere. There was always a multinational workforce everywhere I worked in LA.

Hey Greg, I live in Newport Beach, too. If you need a house sitter, I'll do it for free! ;)

Used to be my industry, too. LA was the center of this universe in the '90's, but the offshoring started in earnest with the new century. Last two giants to fall were Rhythm and Hues, which went bust, and Sony Imageworks, which went to Vancouver. Only a few scraps remain.

Visual effects virtually gone

All those early DI's finished on film. That was always the final goal back then.

Back when digital vfx was the new big thing, one of the major marketing points for the process was its superior integration into the film workflow versus traditional optical effects. First-generation quality was assured all the way through to final delivery. You originated on film, scanned it, added the digital stuff, then you output to film at the gloriously high resolution of 2K! Everybody was aiming for a film finish (no such thing as DCP yet) and companies like Kodak were constantly beating the drum that the digital pipeline preserved all of film's outstanding qualities.

I agree just doing the top of the hat as CG would make tracking easier. If that and the bird are CG, it's just head motion you have to track. All the hat and bird interactions take care of themselves.

How and why would you shoot the hat separately? I think I'd just opt for a CG hat along with the bird.

This is a camera I built. My scale has newton and gram calibrations so the Arri values might just work. I'll give it a try tomorrow. Thanks again.

Do any of you camera techs know if there is a typical recommended value for take-up tension in 1000' 35mm magazines? I've got a spring scale hooked into the rim of a 2" core mounted on the take-up hub. Thanks.

Yes, I know and appreciate that this is your first cg animated movie. There are a lot of professionals on this forum, so it's a good place to post images and ask for feedback, which is what you did, and that's what you're getting. Rest assured that many here do understand exactly how you created your images. When you say you have no need to learn how to paint, you're quite mistaken. The principles of painting are EXACTLY what you need to learn. That was my point before. That's one thing that's missing in your work right now. Do that and your work will improve.

Well, compare your stuff to what you yourself have referenced in the link you provided. Before a single frame of cg ever gets rendered there is an enormous amount of planning and design that has to be done. Composition, perspective, line, depth, contrast, color, lighting, tonality, texture, are all meticulously developed for every single shot, and then the flow of these elements from one scene to the next is hammered out. They create hundreds, if not thousands, of individual drawings and paintings in the process. Do you draw? Are you a painter? Can you work in pencil, charcoal, acrylics, oils or pastels, or create a scene in photoshop? That's where a cg movie, or any kind of movie, really begins. The storyboard artists, the lookdev artists, the art directors all do their work before anything else proceeds. You have to do those things, too, even if it's just you working alone, and no cg software can do any of it for you. At the moment, your sample frames don't really show very much beyond the software default settings.

What do you have against cgi? Happens to be a good way to add set extensions. If you shoot miniatures, you have the focus, depth and lighting issues, and your models must be painstakingly well-done to look convincing.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it sounds like the adapter is slightly undersized. If you've got dial calipers, you could check the dimensions to make sure, but if that turns out to be the problem, then, yes, boring it out slightly should solve it. I'd measure it, though, because .5 mm might be more than you need to remove. You don't want to end up with it being too loose.

Related to your question, I've often wondered why foveon chips don't get used more. They have a true, layered RGB structure, similar to film itself, with absolutely no Bayer artifacts, and without the need for beam splitters. They're in Sigma Merrill DSLR's, and produce stunning images. Maybe there are good reasons why they haven't been more widely implemented, but I'd like to know what they are.

If you're not acquainted with view camera adjustments, do a little research to find out what lens swings/tilts do. Technically, you're not increasing the depth of field, but you are angling the plane of sharp focus. So, it is possible to bring more of the subject into focus if you can align it with that plane.

If you include animated films in your study, then you will find a great deal of input from art directors who work on them. I worked for a number of years at Dreamworks Feature Animation. A "beat board" was one tool common to all of the projects there, which mapped out the emotional curve of the story, and against which all color palettes were meticulously planned.

Can't tell focal length, or anything else besides this, just by looking. You could determine focal length with a simple optical bench test. Silly me, we can get the focal length by measuring the diameter of the aperture at f/8, then doing this calculation: f.l. = dia. X 8

Well, at the risk of stating the obvious, it simply appears to be a barrel lens of the type typically used on view cameras since the earliest days of photography itself. There's no shutter or focusing mechanism, because both of those functions are located elsewhere on a view camera. Well, shutters were separate in earlier cameras, anyway. Modern view camera lenses usually have leaf shutters built into them. The speed range only begins at f/8, so the lens arrangement is a simple one, probably a symmetrical doublet. Can't tell focal length, or anything else besides this, just by looking. You could determine focal length with a simple optical bench test. Manufacturer, age, collectors' value? You need a real expert for that.

The design and construction of a precision film transport of any type is a significant engineering challenge. If you have the necessary skills, tools and experience, it's possible. If you don't, then expect a very long learning curve.