Mei Lewis

The temperature is usually tungsten, and you can use them for video too, BUT they're not very powerful at all, and with a modifier even less powerful.

That's huge! I think the next big thing in terms of gear after the DLSR 'revolution' and digital cinematography with Red, Alexa etc. might be very large sensor digital capture. There are already medium format digital backs with sensor sizes similar to IMAX film, with more resolution (I think) and much cheaper with readily available lenses, silent operation etc. Someone just needs to add video capture to them, which is really just a data throughput efficiency thing, which gets radically better every few years. The H5D even looks a bit like at iny IMAX camera.

This one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pmvkR3NbGM

Shoot on an overcast day, vignette it, make it slightly cool, shallow DOF possibly with focus wrong, add some contrast and noise/grain.

If you're not confident you can shoot in neutral then get back to the look you want, maybe try simply shooting in the look you want. This is probably worth watching:

Was anyone this bothered when they stopped recording dialogue on magnetic tape? This debate will continue for years yet...

That's great. I've just gone and downloaded a few of the other pdfs, great stuff. Thanks.

That's an interesting form, the micro-minifilm.

Just got an email about this thread, prompting me to reply. Not sure why I didn't before. My maths for the layer opacities in the first post is wrong, don't know what I was thinking, they should go down as: 1/1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5...1/25 for the 25 layers, and that's easily doable. Here's a test with some more notes in the comments: That has an effective shutter angle of 9000degrees. If anyone's interested I can zip up and upload the entire source for that video, it's a Premiere pro edit.

I think twice in the past I've made a small donation/subscription and I'd like to do so again, but can't find the link. Where is it please?

This is EXACTLY what I thought, but wanted to do due diligence and check with people that might know better. Sadly I don't think the director does understand how reflections work :-(

Thanks Adrian. I could do a test but the director says he doesn't want the shot anymore....

Most of the ones I’ve worked with like to remove the current lens before packing the camera away. Is there some reason for that beyond force of habit and superstition? I like removing and changing lenses as little as possible, to reduce the chance of junk getting inside the camera, particularly on the sensor.

I don’t like or agree with the unwritten but seemingly universal law that story is the most important thing in a film, and everything else has to serve the story. I think how the story is told is more important than the story itself. The reason so many people _think_ story is pre-eminent is because they mis-attribute the aspects of a film they like to the story, when it’s actually the interpretation they like. Dictionary.com gives a pretty reasonable definition of ‘story’: “An account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment”. Notice that the following things are NOT the story: - dialogue - accents/voices - locations - timing - how convincing the acting is - whether the film looks good or terrible - whether the film making is seamless enough to not be distracting - if the speech is easily discernible - how convincing any special effects are - the music etc. What the story _is_ is essentially the plot summary you get on a film’s entry on wikipedia. So if the story was really what people like about a film then they’d enjoy reading it’s wikipedia summary as much as they enjoy watching the film. And all re-makes would be exactly as enjoyable as the original film because they’d have the same story.

Thanks Adrian. I hadn't thought of using vfx. I'm not sure what your example shows. You've taken a photo and overlaid onto it a reduced opacity version slightly offset? The director want to see Safiya and her reflection at the same time, so I'd have to shoot on two cameras, one through the window showing the glass and any marks on it, and another from inside, then overlay the inside version with reduced opacity on the outside version, is that what you're suggesting? I don't know how I'd make that 'real', because there is no real version of this shot? ie a version done without vfx.

I'm shooting a short film in a couple of weeks and the director has asked something I'm pretty sure is impossible. I don't think he's very good at visualising what he's asking for. A character called Safiya is inside a cafe which has a big window at the front. The director wants to shoot in through the front window of the cafe and: "MS, Slow track right - outside window, showing Safiya looking at her watch and gazing out the window, unhappy. The shot HOLDS on Safiya looking out the window and you see her reflection on the glass. " I'm pretty sure this is impossible - to see her reflection we'd need to be on the same side of the glass as she is, i.e. inside. Am I missing something?

Could you post a sketch of what you're tying to achieve?

Sort of an alpha-male philosophical survivalist too.

According to the VFX show there's a version of Skyfall up-ressed mostly from 2k Akexa footage/VFX to 4K that looks superbe. I've not seen the film yet but I'm going in a few hours to VUE in Cardiff. I hope but very much doubt that's the version I get to see. I've found several news articles that the cinema does have 4K on at least one of their screens, but they can;t think it very important because they don't give nay nformation at all about it on their own site.

Sometimes I watch movies on my laptop which has a 1080ps screen. It's a nice enough screen but probably not as suited to watching movies as a decent TV or even a desktop monitor. I also go to a few different cinemas and have seen lots of different movies. Without doing too much research into the specifics I assume they're mostly showing 2k digital projections nowadays. I've yet to see a film at the cinema which looks as sharp and detailed as the image on my laptop. Even a 720p video on my laptop seems sharper than what I get at the cinema. This isn't just one local cinema with a bad screen, it's several screens across several cinemas. What's happneing? Is it that the larger cinema screen _seems_ less detailed because it's so large I can see the lack of fine detail? Is it the projector blurring the image because of optical impoerfections or tiny vobrations?

I searched for a thread about this but couldn't find it so thought I'd start one. What do people think? I liked it. Not a Tom Cruise fan and lots of it was ridiculous/stupid but overall it was a lot fo fun if you don;t take it too seriously. Not sure how much of a joke it was making of itself. I _think_ there was even a gag about Tom Cruise being short in there. I'm going to guess it was mostly shot on film, anamorphic - and that's about the limit of my knowledge. I liked the main car chase scene and especially its end. There were some strange choices of shot in there, and I guess Cruise was VFX-ed into bits of it. Anyone know anything? Thanks

I occasionally have to design movie posters, but I've never known exaclty what to do about credits. Posters often use the same sort of font and design language for the credits, but I can't figure out what order to list people in. Looking at loads of posters there's either no standard or a standard I can't guess! It _ssems_ to go something like: Actors (without character names Lower ranking crew-> ... -> higher ranking crew ... anding up with the director and the screenwriter perhaps. There are other sentence fragments that are common, such as "... and introducing Alex Weybourne as Sparky the dog" and "A Film By Brendan Steveberg" Anyone know the rules?

Come on, it's just the end of one form of one capture medium. That's progress. You'll get over it.

What does 'double' mean there? I guess it doubles the light loss, but in terms of color what number gets multiplied by two?

I like the names of your characters, they already have obvious personality!