Tim J Durham

Maurice Jarre scored quite a few of my favourite films: The Year of Living Dangerously The Man Who Would be King Dr. Zhivago Lawrence of Arabia Ryan's Daughter (not a "great" film but a great score) John Barry scored my favourite Bond film, "You Only Live Twice" as well as: Dances with Wolves Out of Africa (great score) Body Heat Midnight Cowboy Goldfinger From Russia with Love Gabriel Yared scored: The English Patient Cold Mountain Map of the Human Heart Michael Nyman did the great score to "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" and: The Piano Prospero's Books (and more Peter Greenaway films) Monsieur Hire Gattaca Philip Glass did the great score for "The Fog of War" as well as: The Hours Powaqqatsi Koyaanisqatsi (I actually found the music in these two films tedious but others raved at the time) Mishima

Good luck, dude. If you ARE gonna hang around, do us the courtesy of adding your actual name to your posts and you might also consider changing your handle to "student" from "Director of Photography". Like with artists, you're only an artist after someone ELSE says you're an artist. I shot for two weeks in upper Egypt under protection of a military convoy. Quite an experience. Then we went to Moqattam, or "garbage city" a city built into the biggest trash dump I've ever seen: http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_articl...236239ff1d91f2b It was like being on another planet. That night we went and shot an actual exorcism by the local Christian bishop. I won't soon forget that trip.

They were "hunting" from a car! The last time Cheney went "hunting" at a canned bird farm, he slaughtered 70 pheasants. 70! The great white hunter. He prefers to "hunt" tame, hand-fed birds on private bird-murder farms and kill them from an idling car. Then instead of shooting these birds-in-a-barrel, he shot his 78 year old "friend" in the face. I think the Daily Show had the proper reaction to it. Watch it on replay if you can.

Hi Mike, What IS the actual hit taken when you do color correcting of DVC-Pro50 material in FCP?

You've taken the crucial first step and that is... calling yourself "D.O.P." The rest just takes a couple of days.

A "one-man crew" implies that there would be no additional gaffer (or grip) so my advice was based on him having to do it all himself. The sreenshots I posted were examples of what you can do with one battery-powered light and proper positioning of your subject. In a crowded bar, it would be a benefit to have no A/C cables to run, tape down, trip over, worry about. Using the room you're in to maximum advantage, etc. Not perfect- but certainly acceptable. IIDSSM. As for LED lights being "on the blue side", they are only on the blue side if that's where you want them. I have no idea what this means. If you DO get to add an additional crew member, I would strongly suggest it be a sound person (no offense to all the gaffers/grips out there). In documentaries, audio is much more crucial than lighting.

Here are some NO-light interviews from the same doc: So that's the idea. You need to spend as little time lighting as possible because you have a TIGHT budget and a tight schedule and you need to pack in as much content as you can. In that way, you have to think of doc shooting in a way that is opposed to shooting a feature. (Obviously, these have not been color-corrected yet so...) EDIT: It occured to me that this is actually NOT the opposite of shoooting a low-budget feature, you're trying to get as much done as you can while trying to make it look as good as possible. It's just that in a doc, you would usually err on the side of packing in more content and in a feature you might err on the side of spending more time making it look better.

Here are some interviews I shot for my college football doc. All are one-light interviews where the light was used as an edge light: So they're not perfect, but you need to balance making it look as good as you can while also being light on your feet and fast. Time is money and the more you can do in one location, the less $$ you spend. In documentaries, money is a rare commodity. Next post- NO-light interviews.

As a one man crew, you need to travel light. I'd just take one Litepanel LED battery light and one stand. You can always find a spot in a bar that can provide one point of light from practicals. Then you can use your LED light as a key, fill or an edge light. It's important to suss the place out beforehand if you can. If you try to set up three or four lights in a crowded bar by yourself, you're gonna be sorry. It's a documentary, don't try to over-slick it. Your biggest worry is gonna be sound anyway.

One thing you can do is go to the clothes dryer outlet (if it's electric) and use a 220 breakout. Those circuits usually are rated for 60 amps and only have the dryer on them.

No is the answer. If I were interested in that sort of thing anymore and if I WERE to have a choice of shooting stills or video in a war zone, I would choose to shoot stills. TV cameras draw far more attention. The war in the Balkans meant the start of a very disturbing trend in that the press were actively sought out as targets. I'm sure that had been the case in other circumstances, but this war was the first where it became known that it was policy, Serbian snipers were given orders to take out TV crews. This is now the norm and so I would refrain from taking a war assignment. No story is worth- to me- getting my head chopped off. Others may feel different but todays war photos and video are forgotten almost as fast as they are shown and are more likely to be used as propaganda by one side or the other so the moral imperative is gone, in my opinion. When I was at CNN (and quite a bit younger) I applied to be included in the Pentagon Pool (which was formed as a response to the press complaints of being left home for Granada) which meant you went in with the first wave of a military operation (embedded). This was before the Balkan war and I would not have volunteered then knowing what we know now.

I don't know how ONE person could possibly know what all will be shot unless that person is in charge of credentialling the press. There will be 1000's of press credentials doled out and probably numerous others who are not working press but have film/art projects. If you have a need to know, you could contact the press office of the Int'l Olympic Committee: http://www.olympic.org/uk/news/media_centre/index_uk.asp

$15,000? I have a Mac dual 2.3GHz w/2 gigs of RAM, 2 20" cinema displays and a 500 Gig G-RAID firewire drive. All that for $5800. Add the Production suite (FCP, DVDSP, Soundtrack Pro) for another $1800 and you're at $7600. I've been editing DVC-Pro50 since I got it and not one hiccup (hardware or software related). I don't know where you're shopping, but you can get all this on the Apple website.

http://www.theworkshops.com/filmworkshops/index.asp

Yes, shoot in 24p Advanced. Then your timeline should be set to 23.98 fps. Final Cut Pro removes this advanced pulldown on the fly. I'm not familiar with how Premiere handles it.

Hi Dave, Yes you can make a 24p DVD. It is explained in this article down near the bottom under the heading "24p Delivery": http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/24p_i...P_nattress.html

Here's a local bunch trying to make something happen: http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/DCFILMMAKERS/ There's the kid who started it named Russell. He just put up a list of all his gear. Had nearly everything EXCEPT MP cameras. Could be where you fit in? Send him an e-mail.

I think if Scarlet had wanted to be nude, they'd have facilitated that.

To answer your first question: Can you make a living as a film DP in Washington, DC? The answer is no. You can be a DP and LIVE here, but you won't be getting enough (if any) work to support yourself IN DC. There is precious little film production going on here and most of what IS done here is either Hollywood (features) or NY (commercials) produced. There IS a budding homegrown film community but there is no money in it. If you want to work at Starbucks and do films in your spare time, you can do that here and still keep a roof over your head. I wouldn't mention your home situation in the interviews, though. Save that for your first screenplay.

You are mistaken.

Congratulations, Eric! Don't forget to do some actual SKIING while you're there: http://travel.yahoo.com/p-ski-533607-alta_...ea_ski_resort-i They're getting dumped on, by the looks of it...

You spelled "experimental" incorrectly.

THAT'S THE POINT! You can plug in a Mac and START WORKING!!! RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX! Many (can't say "most"- don't know of any actual studies done) big-name producers, directors, editors, writers: http://www.macworld.com/news/2004/04/12/writers/ own and use Macs- BY CHOICE- they could use anything they want and what they want is a Mac. No- they're not generally plowing through some home-brew compositing program, they're doing the work that people in the film business do. Writing, editing, storyboarding, sound mixing, etc. Ofcourse there are some highly specialized, technical functions that can only be done on a PC and there are plenty of people who are doing that stuff. But that's not likely what people going through film school are aspiring to. They generally want to write, direct, produce, shoot movies. Not spend three weeks compositing a 10-second sequence for an Alpo commercial. I'm not saying this isn't common, it's just not something I aspire to. So to say you don't recommend anyone new to the film business buying a Mac, I certianly DO recommend it, and for the reason that they are so easy to use. Why would you want to blow so much time just having to learn about computers? That's time that should be spent being creative. I don't know much about computers and I don't WANT to know. I just want to get my ideas down. I can do that and MUCH more on my Mac. When I need to do a 40-layer spinning matte effect with 3 1/2 twists, I'll give you a call. (not saying I wouldn't call you UNTIL... just sayin I don''t need your highly specific PC-only skills just yet) B)

http://millimeter.com/news/video_finishing...tain/index.html [/b] and: http://www.apple.com/shake/stories/ But what do Anthony Minghella, Walter Murch and Peter Jackson know? Clearly not much about computers. How many hundreds of examples like this would you like to see? The high-end of Hollywood (and NZ!) are Mac users. To imply that creative people are somehow stymied by choosing the Mac platform is ludicrous on its' face.

...and as the cicadas return every 17 years...