Robert Edge

In case others are interested, I spoke with a US audio shop today that says that the Tascam recorder will not actually be on the market for another few weeks. The answer they gave to my question is that the Tascam recorder will work if an Aaton Origin C+ remains connected to it.

David, you're on a roll. This made me smile, and no doubt others got a kick out of it too.

Mr. Siverstein, I think that David Mullen's first post is the finest brief explanation of artificial lighting for film (as distinct from theatre) that I have ever read. That said, I think that subsequent posts are missing a couple of things. Some of the greatest still photographs and documentary films ever made have been made with natural light. Indeed, a good deal of artificial lighting in film, again as distinct from theatre, is about emulating natural light. There have also been great films made with artificial light that deliberately distort natural light. I think that David Mullen has given you lots to think about. When I said that his first post was a truly wonderful short treatise on the use of artificial light, I meant it. That said, if you are happy with the lighting you are getting, use it. In particular, if you like what you are getting, look at some great still photographs by people like Paul Strand, Cartier Bresson, etc. etc, some documentary films, and fiction films that started to be made when cameras got small enough to take outside, in particular films made by the French and Italians in the 1950s and early 60s. The other day, I watched a film by Jean Luc Godard called Bande a Part, much of it shot outside under natural light. Rest assured that most fiction filmmakers would have been quite happy to have made that film, or for that matter other street films made by people like Pasolini. Or look at recent films such as Michael Winterbottom's In This World or John Nossiter's Mondovino, both shot with fairly inexpensive video cameras and largely natural light.

John, I understand your point that baggage scanners will fog film and that carry-on scanners can fog film after multiple scans (the number I usually hear is five). With Kodak still film (colour reversal, colour negative and black and white), I have put film through carry-on scanners as many as three times without any problem whatsoever. On this trip to the UK, I would expect one or at most two scans. My experience with Kodak film is in accordance with the following statement from your website: "Carry-on baggage inspection conveyors using low intensity x-rays, used at security checkpoints in US airports, usually do not affect film. However, these machines may now be supplemented in some cases by high intensity machines that will fog all unprocessed film. Travelers should be wary of all scanners at foreign airports." I've allowed security people at British, Irish, French, Israeli, Canadian, New Zealand and US airports to scan film at ASA 400 or lower without incident. Is there a reason to believe that Kodak Vision 2 film is more sensitive to fogging from carry-on scanners than your still film? If so, I'll ask for a hand-inspection, but I'd rather not unless it is necessary, because it is a hassle.

Does anyone know if I can use an Aaton camera with internal timecode to record timecode on the Tascam HD-P2, which apparently records but does not generate timecode. If so, is there any downside to this recorder in comparison to the Fostex FR-2? Thanks.

Stuart, thanks. I don't suppose you've had any experience with Ice Film as a rental house? I don't doubt that they're good, but I'm wondering whether they are a good choice if you aren't going to be a big client. Dirk, I've gone through an awful lot of airport screenings with unprocessed film and I haven't had a single problem with fogging. At the film speeds I have in mind, I'm not worried about screening, just whether motion picture film is trickier than still film if processing is delayed two or three weeks.

I'm going to be in England (London, Cambridge, Cowes) from about December 15 through New Years. Could someone recommend a lab for super 16 Kodak Vision 2 processing in London? Are there recommendable labs in Cambridge or Southampton? One other question. It might be somewhat cheaper and more convenient to wait and have the film processed in New York the first week of January. If I do that, am I risking anything in terms of image quality? Thanks.

If you go to a music store, you will find compact battery-operated metronomes. You can set them at whatever speed you want and the beat can be set as a sound or a flashing light. They are not expensive.

If you haven't already seen the current Coldplay video Fix You, you may find it useful to do so.

Judging from the web site, the magazine looks like it is mostly of interest to people interested in super 8 and the history of that format. If I'm going to consider subscribing, I need to be convinced that someone who uses super 16 would get something from the magazine. Got a reason, maybe even two :)?

Thanks, I just had a look at Cooke's site and I see their comment that the attachment for the 65mm is based on the PS945. I've seen several prints (not .jpegs on the net, but actual prints) made from negatives shot with the PS945, and they have a very distinctive look to them. The 65mm with the attachment might be an interesting combination - not something that that would be appropriate for an entire film, but perhaps effective if used selectively. If anyone is interested, Cooke talks about what it considers the difference to be between a soft focus lens and filter diffusion on its product page for the PS945.

A couple of questions... What will diffusion do for you that an older, soft lens won't? Did anyone ever make a cine lens that was the equivalent of a still camera soft focus portrait lens, such as the current Cooke PS945 (http://www.cookeoptics.com/cooke.nsf/secondary/ps945) or the older 1950s lenses, such as the Wollensak Veritar? Recently, I shot a 4x5 portrait of a friend, using the latest Schneider and a 50's Veritar. One lens wasn't better than the other, they just gave different looks. I liked the the results from the Veritar a lot, and I'd love to try Cooke's reissue of its old lens.

Mark, I have the DVD. As you may know, it includes, in addition to recent material, a number of early short films that say plenty about Gondry's filmmaking roots. Then there is La Lettre, which is deceptive. It has the look of an early film that might have been shot by Gondry and a few friends, but it was actually made in 1998 with a good sized crew and funding from Canal+. It is a very nice short, quite different from his commercial material. Unfortunately, Gondry doesn't talk much in the autobiographical part of the DVD about technical issues. There are a number of internet sites that say that the Minogue video was done with a motion control camera and some very careful choreography. I'd like to learn more, especially what he (or his brother, if some internet sites are correct) is doing in post. His use of multiple images on a single background is something that jumps out at you in the Minogue video, but he also does it, a little less obviously, in some of his other work, such as Star Guitar.

Does anyone know what Gondry did in post production for Come Into My World to get multiple images of Kylie Minogue and what he did in the Chemical Brothers video to get multiple images of structures? Are there any articles out there, in English or French, on the techniques that Gondry uses in his videos and television spots? It's clear to me that he has studied some old National Film Board of Canada shorts, especially Norman McLaren's work, but there are other things in his videos that have me stumped. Thanks.

Roger Deakins, in the Nov. '05 issue of American Cinematographer, p. 47, says that some of the sequences in Jarhead were shot with Arriflex 3-C's, held in front of the body rather than on the shoulder, while running both over flat land and up and down sand dunes, without looking through the viewfinder. It appears that when Deakins was the operator on these shots, he framed by visual guesstimate. However, he says that when Scott Sakamoto, his second camera operator, was doing this, he used "an old-fashioned parallex-type sight with a couple of sticks, so he could tell where the top of the frame was when he was running." I assume that they must have been using fairly wide lenses and fairly healthy apparent depth of field. I'd appreciate any tips on shooting blind, apart from the injunction "practice, practice, practice". As an aside, if you shoot regularly with a video camera, do you get to the point where guesstmating the frame is pretty easy? The article does not elaborate on Sakamoto's parallax-type sight. I suppose that one could be made by taping a dowel vertically on either side of the camera body, rather like goal posts, with a mark on each dowel, or perhaps a piece of string between the dowls, representing the top of the frame. This would have to be done for a specific focal length and for a specific eye distance and orientation in relation to the dowels. Or is there is some other, more precise or sophisticated, way to create such a sight? Thanks.

Have a look at this thread: http://www.cinematography.com/forum2004/in...6253&hl=zyskind

Andres, It looks like I was editing my post at the same time you were making your response. If you look at the changes I made, you'll see how an English speaker would normally express what you meant. Cheers

Andres, Your English is fine. Personally, I managed to figure out what you were saying in a few seconds, given the smilie at the end. You just happened to use an English expression that is always used in a negative way and never in a positive way. When I'm in France, I manage to do something similar at least once a week, much to the amusement of my French friends. If your first language was English, you would have said something like "good luck, you deserve it". From a literal point of view, "good luck, it serves you right" is very close to the same thing, but a native English speaker just wouldn't express himself that way, except to be critical. This is one of those "errors" that makes native English speakers think about how their own language works. Personally, I enjoyed your originality.

Milos Forman says in the commentary track to the DVD version of Amadeus that the candles were made to order and had three wicks in them so that they would give off more light. Quite a clever little trick. The most important candlelight scenes in the film were shot in a theatre in Prague. If I understood Forman correctly, they did not use any artificial light, but they did use a lot of these three wick candles. It is perhaps worth noting that the theatre they were using is quite small by modern standards (I've been to a performance there - it is the same theatre in which Mozart premiered Don Giovanni) and therefore would have been a lot easier to light with candles than, say, the main theatre at Lincoln Center :)

I think that David Mullen had it right in his Sept. 11 post, and that he introduced an important word into the discussion, specifically the word plot. For the purpose of this discussion, I'd like to define a story as the completed elaboration of a plot. In a short story or a long story (aka a novella or novel) the elaboration is done solely with words (and occasionally, as in Tristram Shandy and some considerably more recent novels, with graphics). In a dramatic play, the elaboration is done with sets, costumes, lighting, acting and words. In a musical play, it is also done with music. A motion picture film can elaborate on a plot using the tools of theater (e.g. My Dinner with Andre, Swimming to Cambodia) but it can also use additional visual tools that the theatre cannot duplicate. Like the short story or novel, but unlike theatre with its (usually, but not always) confined space, it can also draw on action. Unlike the short story, novel or dramatic theatre, it can also effectively draw, for reasons which I have never quite understood, on music. One day, someone will have to explain to me why music, in a dramatic play, would be ridiculous, but can so effectively add to a film. Perhaps it is just a question of conditioning. In other words, a story, whether embodied in a novel or a play or a motion picture, is the flesh built on a plot. The plot is a skeleton. As far as I know, nobody has come up with a new plot in centuries. Instead, the task of an artist is to take a well-worn plot and elaborate on it in a new, or at least contemporary, way. Homer's plot in The Oddysey and Joyce's plot in Ulysees are essentially the same plot, but each writer elaborates on it using a different form (epic poetry vs. the novel), a different social context (Homer's Greece vs. Joyce's Dublin) and a different approach to language. This means that plot, which is what I think some people in this thread mean when they use the word story, is in fact the least important element in a novel, play or motion picture. The important thing is whether the artist (or artists in the case of theatre and film) uses the tools at his disposal to elaborate on the plot in an effective, and hopefully artistically satisfying, manner. Given my own taste, I would point to Bergman's Fanny and Alexander as a work in which the filmmaker has used his available tools to great effect, and I would say that Days of Heaven, while visually stunning, is a pretty pedestrian film. That isn't because I discount the importance of cinematography - far from it - but because I don't believe that cinematography, or any other single tool, can carry the whole weight of a movie. For me, Days of Heaven is ultimately a thin film because, while Almendros was at the top of his game, some of the other people who contributed to the film were not. For Fanny and Alexander, everybody was working on all cylinders, and they wound up making a film of wonderful scope and depth. Of course, I realize that others, having different taste, might find my assessment of Days of Heaven shocking. An aside about The Great Gatsby... Boone noted that this is a great novella that has yet to be made, despite two attempts, into a successful film. He blames it on the scripts and casting. My personal view is that the people who have tried to make this book into a film made a more fundamental error. Fitzgerald did not use the plot of The Great Gatsby to write a story about Gatsby and Daisy. If he had, it could be made into a film, but it would also be a completely different book. For example, I don't think that it is stretching things too far to suggest that Fitzgerald, had he chosen to focus on Gatsby, might have wound up with a book that was a precursor to The Godfather. Perhaps because Fitzgerald was a far better and more subtle writer than Mario Puzo, that is not what he did. The Great Gatsby is about the narrator, Nick, and Gatsby and Daisy are just supporting characters. It is one thing to write a novel in which the narrator is the central character, and in which everything that happens of importance happens in his head - it is done all the time - but it is another matter to translate such a book onto the screen. What you wind up with is a film in which the central character becomes a secondary character and the secondary characters become primary. That is exactly what happened in the two film versions of The Great Gatsby, and it is the fundamental reason why they failed. I think that there are other reasons - it has always struck me as downright stupid, except as a way to make a buck, to take a masterpiece of a novel, expressed solely in words, and try to turn it into a 90 minute film - but pursuing that thought would result in an even longer digression.

Your wife is definitely not alone in her reaction. I didn't find the camera work particularly distracting, in fact found the visual style interesting, but I wonder whether that is because I saw the film in my living room on a TV screen rather than in a theater on a big screen. The film is certainly worth seeing, if only because there is something to learn - positive or negative or perhaps a bit of both - about how it is shot. One question that is worth asking while watching the film is whether it could have been made with a larger camera on a tripod plus lighting kit and a crew, etc. Personally, I don't think that he could have gotten the material he did - his subjects are extremely candid, despite the fact that in many cases they are powerful people used to the media and were accompanied by public relations people - had he not been shooting with a small camera hand held and with only one or two other people working with him.

Thanks. Far be it for me to question Martha Stewart and her producers, who undoubtedly know what "look" will sell to her audience, but to me the show's pastel colour palette combined with the distinctly soft visuals gives the show a mushy look that I do not find in the least appealing. Maybe I've been conditioned to expect a harder look in programming shot on video.

This two hour documentary on the wine business has recently been released on DVD and will apparently become the subject of a 10 part television series. The film, made by Jonathan Nossiter, has been attacked by some people for its visual style. Specifically, a lot of people have complained that there is far too much camera movement and that the overall visual effect is amateurish. On the commentary track to the DVD, Nossiter says that the visual style is largely deliberate. He regrets certain zooms into the eyes of the subject during interviews, which he says were the result of difficulties maintaining focus with the compact Sony video camera that he was using. But apart from that, he defends the camera work and editing (or rather lack of editing) on the ground that it gives the film an immediacy that it would otherwise lack. In interview footage, the subjects are shown whenever they are speaking. Cutaways are not used to avoid showing rough movements of the camera. In fact, I don't recall a single cutaway in the entire film. It seems to me that the impact of seeing the subject's face whenever the subject is speaking is bolstered by the fact that Mondovino does not contain a single line of narration explaining or commenting on what is seen and heard on the screen. Coincidentally, I happened to read Andre Bazin's essay on Montage a few days after seeing the DVD, and my sense is that Nossiter either deliberately or accidentally took on board what Bazin had to say about the relationship between editing and a viewer's willingness to buy into the "tructh" or "believability" of what he is shown on the screen. I suppose the question is whether Nossiter went to far, i.e. whether the overall impact is that of a home movie. There may be a secondary reason why Nossiter retained images of rough camera work duirng interviews. Some of the subjects say some extraordinarily stupid things. I think that the absence of cutaways makes it much more difficult for subjects to claim that the sound track was manipulated. If that sounds fanciful, one of the subjects, who his one of the world's most influential wine consultants and who is pretty much apoplectic about his portrayal in the film, has alleged, among other things, that the sound of his laugh was manipulated. Pesonally, I think that Mondovino's visual style is refreshing, and also that some of the camera work is quite sophisticated. Given that Nossiter shot 500 hours of footage, which he could have afforded only by shooting video, I also think that Mondovino is something of a poster film for the potential of relatively inexpensive, compact video cameras and small crews. I'm curious to kow what others think about this film. For info on the film, as well as a NY Times article on the controversy that the film has caused in the wine world, see www.mondovinofilm.com

I just saw Martha Stewart's new daily programme (as distinct from the Apprentice series). The image appears to be rather soft. Is this just the television I was watching or are they using something on the lens to soften the image and, if so, does anyone know what they are using?

Nathan, I asked my question because Cesar Charlone, who as far as I can figure out knows one or two things about cinematography, has used these goggles in at least two films, including one for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. Apparently, he does not consider them to be a "novelty" that "wears off". So given that he uses these goggles with the cameras that your company represents, does this mean that he knows something that you don't, that he is eccentric or that he is a bit thick? As an owner of an Aaton camera, I would have thought that you and your company would be interested in talking about how this technology works with your product, about what the upsides and downsides are and where this technology is going, rather than dismissing it out of hand as a novelty. P.S. I assume you have actually read the American Cinematographer article and know that Charlone owns and uses an A-Minima (a camera that, as you know, I own myself), and replaced two Arris SRIIIs with two Aaton XTR Prods on The Constant Gardener, because he found the latter more suitable for what he wanted to do.