Gregg MacPherson

Wannabe what? Wannabe living in a world more full of art and more allowing of artists. I don't see you as helping with that at the moment. And I don't see you as having any useful contribution here. You haven't shown any commitment of intellect or perceptivity in this thread at all. No sense of inquiry. Oh, but hey, that's because you know it all already, you having been called an artist and a genius an' all. So please start behaving like one, rather than an unimaginative "know it all". I think Nicholas was extremely patient with you. I'm sure that if you suddenly saw this your vanity (should I write that in upper case?) would be...challenged?...damaged?...perhaps it might be diminished and the world would feel a better place. It is an utterly bizare, inverted, ass backwards thing for you, you preener, to call me pretentious..

There are some drawings you can download from O'Connor. If you can't find them I can send them. In that case PM me with your email. If for some odd reason you can't get your part from O'Connor you could try Transylvania Films, they overhaul a lot of old O'Connor and have parts. Cheers.

Lucky for you, unlike for an artist, you are allowed to point out your own great work. Perhaps, if you extend your own idea, the one you imposed on the artists, you should wait for someone else to say those things. Anyway, I'm glad you are done. With the careless, negative idea you offered someone of a similat nature might have droped in and told you to (expletive) off.

Someone is going to stand up at the back of the courtroom and call out..."objection your honor, argumentative!" The idea that an artist is not an artist until someone else tells them so. What kind of odd insecure artist are we talking about? A real artist is that thing, first by virtue of their nature, then second by some evidence of productivity. To add to the confusion, some artists are by nature uncertain and others undergo long periods of no apparent productivity. But as a general principal, artists know innately that they are. The notion that some one else is better qualified to call them that would be laughable, if it wasn't also cruel and potentially damaging. So, JSB, named and shamed on that one. Please don't offer another word about it, at least not near me. The way that Nicholas is using the word artist is different to the way that I am. His usage is legitimate. All the major creative contributors on a film are artist in that sense. But then we need a way to discriminate (discern) between them and this other thing that I might call an artist. To me an artist infuses art more directly into a film. Ridley Scott is an artist. By his nature, potency of vision and shear force of will he infused a massive dose of art directly into Bladerunner. Not to take anything away from the other key creative people, but this wouldn't have been this great thing without him. Remind ourselves that as well as being the primary creative visionary for the film, he collaborated with the writers through a very long, intensive script and concept development. He is naturally gifted at creating environments (set design), has a great understanding of the camera, the lenses, the shot geometry (often operated camera himself). So Ridley Scott was the visionay, the unifying creative power for this film. It's a film made by a great artist. Enki Bilal is an artist. He created, developed, drew his own graphic novels. I don't think he had made a film before, but somehow he was suddenly concepting, developing and making Imortal (may be called Imortal...Ad Vitam or something in other parts of the world). He had good people working for him, but what is on screen is his concept, his formal development, his original designs. Imortal is another film with an extraordinarily potent creative core. The artists vision feels undiluted. Maybe a lot of people didn't see it or didn't get it. But it's a film made by a great artist. Peter Greenaway is an artist. He made Prospero's Books. An overwhelmingly rich infusion of personified idea, character, texture and, seems like it will get lost at the end of a sentence...originality of form. I almost crossed him off my list when I saw The Baby of Macon, and again when I saw The Draughtsman's Contract. But no, the man who made Prospero was a great artist. Joe Wright is an artist. He made Pride and Prejudice, an utterly delghtful sensual exploration of character and circumstance. A formal masterpiece. Endlessly re-watchable. Later, Anna Karenina, a deluge of sensual intensity, original ideas and form. After AK something made me remember Prospero's Books. So Joe Wright is a great artist. I guess if I call them all great the word could become less meaningful. But I don't know how to rank them or diminish them. Running out of steam now. Chris Marker is an artist. Back in the day the French Embassy loaned a print to our small group of artists/film makers. We were all profoundly moved. I left the meeting chatting to an Eastern European designer who was inventing a one wheeled car that was more in tune with the "loe". Read as laws of nature. Those were the days. Anyway, years later I saw Sans Soliel and felt moved and very respectful of Marker as an artist. A great artist? Measured by his influence? Ask Terry Gilliam (Twelve Monkeys) about that. So one could go on. Perhaps there are a lot of significant artists that worked in film. But I'm sure they are a minority. I'm naming Artists works that were in or on the edge of the mainstream, or were influential to that. Sorry Freya, I don't think of Prospero's Books as an experimental film. PS: The documentative piece(s) on Bladerunner called Dangerous Days that I mentioned before have amazing stuff on the script and concept development. But that may be in the part 1/3 that I couldn't find on Youtube.

I didn't understand that. Is it assumed one has read something by John Carpenter to get this joke? I read half a novel of his once.

Hey Heiki, I have quite a bit of spare ACLII stuff at the moment and may sell some. This magazine I bought from a guy in Germany. Was a "French" magazine supposedly. Turned out to be an English mag with some French components, including the 400' platters. All the other English 400' mags seem to have the small platters. It was quite a good looking mag, looked like it had not had much use, but missing the door seals and I think one of the tangs on the pressure plate spring may have been brocken. The guy didn't want to take it back. Money lost, 145Euros. So maybe it could be parts. Send me a PM or direct to me Gregg MacPherson <viz(at)xtra.co.nz>

Heiki, I may have some parts. Your magazine is French? Cheers, Gregg.

James, Are you responding to anyone in particular. There are a range of opinions on this thread. Is there someone here saying lets do without "story"? I missed that. I was having too much fun to notice, wondering what "story" really meant, or what people really meant when they used that word in simple, unguarded moments. And thinking about prosaic narrative vs what I called poetic narrative. (oh, ok, Tarkovsky gets the credit for bringing that up). Maybe the deepest or most ancient root of the cinema is in the practice of oral history. The film or the film maker is like a shaman with the tribe around the camp fire. He's making magic, perhaps internally, but externally observable as sounds, words, gesture, costume and light. The audience undergoes a transformation, beginning in one condition and becoming something else. Ok, so he's a "story teller", in a simple (or over simplified) sense. So does the notion of "story" just refer to the means or tools for this transformation, or does it need to include the transformation itself. And then, do we need to discriminate (discern) between transformations of a crude, pragmatic (prosaic) nature vs those of a more refined, poetic nature? So, pausing for effect while writing my own VO like Carrie in Sex in the City....."is story really story, or is it the transformation...?

Hey Erik, Some of these type questions come up repeatedly. You'll find usefull ideas in the archives. One of the reasons that ACL are good cameras is that that they are so simple, and they can sit unused for a few years and still be OK. On proviso that they are in good shape and have been serviced. Knowing the service history is key. And having a tech available who knows the cameras. If a tech starts from scratch with a camera the first service will cost more. He wants to check everything. Some people do lie by omission on eBay. Not many will give a complete lie to an honest question The NPR I don't know well. I think it has a variable shutter, which may be usefull. The mount system is definately not as stiff or usefull as an ACL. The small ACL motor had a (English) 400' mag designed for it. I used that configuration a lot and can say that it was without any problems, as long as properly serviced. The pre ACL II mags can fall off. If the spring tension on the mag retainer is too light it happens easier. I remember adjusting that with shims on the magazine. I jumped off a truck holding my camera by the top handle and off it came. Landed on the rear part, no damage. I was lucky. You need to cradle the whole camera with the magazine when jumping off trucks. The ACLII has a better system, at least for the mag retainer lock. An ACL 1 can be quite light, especially with no on board battery, and really nice hand held. An ACL II with its' bigger base, HD motor, the big Kinoptiktik viewfinder, anatomic handgrip, battery, video tap, is getting heavier. I may have a spare ACL II for sale. PM me.

Make sure its a CP-16R (reflex). Before you decide on a camera you could visit someone who owns one and just try handling it, get some explanations, see what your instincts tell you. Are there any film co-operatives in your city so you can join and rent an older camera really cheap. I don't know CP-16 very well. The following advice is general for any of the old film cameras you might buy. Find one with a known service history and make sure it is not due for imediate major service. A full clean, lube and adjust, first time that the technician sees the camera, may cost more than it costs to buy some cameras. Properly maintained cameras are very reliable. Good luck.

Hey Boris, Thanks for that. I might need some parts or a liitle advice, and/or have a small job for you. I'll use the last email address I had from you. Cheers, Gregg.

In an effort to be less formal and just join in ...... Having only watched one maybe two films by Cocteau way back then ....I was a student sculptor morphing towards film, thought the program that year was crap and bailed out. So I started watching Blood of a Poet today and honestly felt it was clunky and over constructed. In my memory, Cocteau was very lyrical, poetic. This could just be me today. I then started watching The Hotel Room by Lynch etc, and found this also clunky and constructed. My antidote is my memory of this. Quay Bros - The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2LA2i0sjZ8 Nicholas, Freya, have you seen it?

Thanks for the ineteresting read and links. For S16 frame/sensor, checking the FFD using just a calibrated lens and the camera eye piece or monitor, what focal length and distance do you use? What's ideal? Cheers, Gregg

This humorous anecdote to throw some confusion into the topic. I once worked second unit ist AC for a couple days on a film by New Zealland's only great film artist (IMHO). We were close to the main unit in this big warehouse. You couldn't hear the director. You heard the 1st AD relay or extend direction. I heard the crew mutter "what was that..." The imported American male lead actor was having to do his own stunt, falling down a ladder as the wooden dowels snapped. He was really pissed and loud about it. I looked over as I was inching the Arri II and he flashed me an angry look. Shortly after the director came over and helped us execute our shot. Cool guy, I thought. Later, I heard that he would break down and wail when they ran out of their film stock allowance before days end. Even more cool. So what's a people person? The film was really great actually, art. Well regarded. But for some reason, some people are grossly missunderstood or misperceived. Sometimes all the crew care about is whether it makes their job easier or not, and whether they have crayfish (big lobsters) for lunch or not. I had french fries (vegetarian).

Maybe Dom is still monitoring this thread. I am really curious how they measure FFD on a digital camera. Can't exactly roll your dial guage around on the sensor surface. Can't put a refective surface behind the gate and use an autocollimator. Any simple description of how it is done? Dom, if the focus scales are out by 1m doesn't that mean a big error on the FFD? Cheers, Gregg.

You act as though you feel entittled to this. There are many of us who would be interested in anecdotes from Richard's history developing and producing his films. The argumentative atmosphere makes this less likely to happen. Take most of the blame for that Phil. You are too focused on trying to win an argument. It may be a costly argument. Cheers from the colonies, Gregg.

(Part 3) More thoughts on the prosaic vs the poetic In terms of the more profound aspects of sense experience, I believe that film is founded on the photographic image. The instantaneous impression that is made on a piece of film. The palpable connection between the thing being photographed and those that get to see the image. I riffed on these intimate connections in another thread on this forum: http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=58446&hl= In terms of the foundation of film in narrative or story telling terms, we obviously have literature and the theatre. So we have words. Words can be crudely expository, prosaic, or they can be profoundly evocative of sublime states of awareness. Words can evoke images and sounds within the mind. So words or literature is one of the parents of narrative in the cinema, and the more profoundly evocative titterature is the parent of the same thing in film. And films can contain words themselves, words that are not expository, prosaic. There are those that have used words as evocative code rather than prosaic code in the development of their films. I have a wonderful book with some images of Eisenstein's working pages while developing his films. For some artists, there is no real boundary between words and pictures. The pages normally contain quite potent sketches that evoke critical ideas and forms. Did Eisenstein have a part in the development of the pragmatic film language that the modern prosaic cinema is founded on? Regardless, the contrary value, the ability to recognize and express the instantaneous, whole value of ideas was there in his working process. Sorry, out of time to properly expand and illustrate these ideas, again. Gregg

So only 44 years old then. The stuff I processed in the 80s may have been only 24 years old? When I got this film recently I assumed that the TriX would be no good. The old chap selling it said that if I process as reversal the base fog issue goes away. I had to think about that. I only have processed as neg before. I think it makes sense, the base fog will dissapear with all the other exposed emulsion. Thinking again, does it mran that our highlights are ok, but our blacks are now lifted by the fogg, so no longer black? Cheers, Gregg

I second Adrien on that. Get a meter. Those Seconic studio delux analogues are great. I used one. Cheap as french fries now on ebay. For a while, don't leave home without it, measure the light and the basic ratios. Good luck.

Freya: "......in the experimental film world........it's all about the primacy of the image over everything else. This is why there is such an outroar at any threat to film in that sector......" This struck a chord with me. If poetic narrative, or film pregnant with art, is in fact a reminder of more subtle states of experience or selfhood, then the fact of the photograhic image on film has a logical part within that. Direct cognition of objects. Direct impression apon the medium (film) vs a virtual representation or simulation of objects. So thanks for making that connection. Cheers, Gregg.

I can't really explain why but Det. Holder (streetwise ex meth head) is such a cool listen on this show. Not just the sound quality, but the writing/delivery also. I tried to transcribe this from the last episode. Det Holder: Soowhaaatup wid yooand d bossman...? Det Linden: (said something) Det Holder: Aah c'moon Linden...I dun gotta be ma sleuth par excellence ta see that the cat's got the hand in the jella jar...An it ain the firstime neitha

Abdulla, I don't mean to be disrespectfull or discouraging. This amount of money is very small. If this was all that you needed to go ahead and make the film, why not just earn it yourself. Take a night job and save the money. Maybe Kickstarter here is giving some experience of how films may be funded in the future, but in practical terms, with this small amount of money, I just feel you are creating a fantasy obstacle. Fasbinder used to start shooting his films before he secured finance. With a $1500 budget, why not you. Good luck.

(Part 2) So what is "story"? There is a strong influence in human experience towards greater objectivity, having our awareness more identified with the particular, the discrete, the world of objects and object-ness. Ideas and elements of experience, character or human action become like a vast sea of discrete little blocks that may shift endlessly, re-align or recombine. Contrary to this, there is an influence in human awareness that hungers for less bounded modes of experience, depth, perceptivity. It's looking for poetry or magic, and may go look for it in the gaps between the blocks. The tendency to over-objectivity is almost overwhelming at this point in history. There is an ongoing tension between that over-objectivity and the subjective perceptivity that it overshadows. Lets jokingly call it objectivity vs perceptivity in human awareness and culture. Thinking of "story". We have the overtly constructed prosaic narrative vs the discovered, as if already whole, poetic narrative. Let's call that the prosaic vs the poetic (1). If prosaic narrative manipulates component elements to attempt wholeness or a coherent unitary value in the film, we could say that poetic narrative already has it's whole value intact, contained within it's conception. By it's nature the poetic contains or expresses wholeness, the elusive or transcendent unitary value that we all gravitate towards. That is, when we aren't eating popcorn and snogging. So those making proclamations about the value of story in film will need to qualify "story" in order to be meaningful. The notion of story contains the described contradiction or conflict. Far from being a problem, this to me opens the way to a more generalized, more truthful and useful idea. So what is a "poetic narrative"? A story or narrative of any kind transports us from one condition to the next. At the start we are one thing and at the end we are something else. Instinct tells me to say that poetic narrative transforms us towards more subtle, perceptive states of being. Is the prosaic vs poetic just a graded scale, explicit values of intellect and feeling at one end and more refined values of notion and feeling at the other? It's a subject worth a lifetime of thought. (1) I think it was Tarkovsky's writing that pointed me to this necessary descrimination between prosaic and poetic narrative Cheers, Gregg. PS. Hey Freya, did you like my snogging joke? Doing my best to include L'Anglais.

(Part 1) Hey Nicolas, You are a brave guy. To challenge or enquire into the notion of story is brave. Working writers and cinematographers find the consensual notion of story very useful. Taken for granted as fact normally. With good reason. But I am fully in support of exploration into what "story" really is, which impacts directly on your concern over the relative value of story within film and the working process of film makers.. I think the word story is ubiquitous, means many things. My pet thought is that the whole experience of a film has been loaded into the story word. Which, in your terms, means that all the critical aesthetic and technical contributions, have become, to some degree, embedded or included into the "story" notion. So when someone enjoyed or took something nourishing from a film, commenting that they really enjoyed the story, they are sometimes really commenting on all the aesthetic and technical aspects that enabled that story. One could continue on in this fashion refining or opining on what "story" is or has become. But there are some other directions that are more interesting. One could go directly to concepts that may yield a more useful and universal idea. Internal conditions govern the external conditions. I propose that the internal conditions of the mind govern or organize those more external or formal. Some energized, often momentary or flickering thing exists in the mind, evolves and at some point commonly becomes what may be called a story. And then on to become a film (containing a developed form of that story). For some reason, some film makers or writers have their objective awareness locked into this "story" layer. If you read James Steven Beverly (a contrary example) on this thread, he is very observant of the value of story in his process, but he makes pointed reference to the internal, notional values in his experience that prefigure it (story). So I think the world is progressing. Some working story tellers might previously have dismissed this line of enquiry out of hand. So I think some enquiry is due on what is "story". It is possible that some linguist or neuro-linguist, someone, has already had the critical thoughts on this and film makers have just not caught up. But I don't think we should be afraid of examining this ourselves. My entry into giving order to this potentially confusing zone of ideas is to observe that when we watch a film the only absolute is that when it ends we feel in some sense satisfied. Desire drives the phenomenal universe and a film must transport us from one condition to the next. But what do human beings really want? A young man takes his girlfriend to the cinema, superficially to be entertained, eat popcorn, flirt or snog (English version of French kissing), but underneath, hungry for something deeper. Insights into life. Hunger for art. Hunger for extreme values of sensual experience. Commonly experienced things are relatively easy to describe, discuss or give a relative value to. But the less obvious things that one may seek in the cinema are more difficult. Small wonder that they are more difficult for artists, writers, story tellers, film makers to consider or discuss. Leaping ahead. Story has sometimes been proposed as something close to an absolute. But if experience itself is the reference point then it's easier to come up with a more general or universal idea of what a film is or can usefully be. I butted heads with a cadre of obdurate folk here in New Zealand . One proclaimed "Story is King" as advice to new film makers. I tried offering the "red pill" as in the Matrix and was banned not long after. For some entertainment relevant to your idea see... http://www.48hours.co.nz/forum/general-discussion/story-is-king-how-to-win-v48hours/?i=0#forum-replies Keep brave, Gregg. PS: I thought I had only seen Drive by NWR, an interesting, really sensualized film with, OK the story displaced a little or minimized. But I not long ago stumbled on Vallhala Rising on the Web and was deeply impressed.

I have a problem with edit function. It always times out. I wanted to add. PS. I'm refering to the second quote, challenging it. The first quote I much enjoy, just didn't get time to say much about it today