Freya Black

www.foma.cz There is also another eastern bloc company called Orwo who also make motion picture film. Apparently Agfa are still selling their ST8 sound print stock, which some people use as a camera stock for weird effects, at least in 16mm. love Freya

Thanks Dimitrios, I'll keep an eye out for them but I don't tend to move in those circles. ;) Interested to hear you say I might need a plus green gel. Are some flouros lacking in green then? I always thought they tended to verge on being extra green and that was why you needed the minus green gel? Thanks also to you Christopher for explaining the T8. love Freya

I'm leaning towards daylight balanced tubes anyway but I didn't know that about tungsten flo's. That's interesting. I've never seen tungsten ones available. I'll have a look arount the BLT and see if I can find some. I was looking at these: http://www.thelightbulbshop.co.uk/product/...ilux+Deluxe.htm The daylight ones at the bottom. They are the £5 ones I mentioned. Also these: http://www.firstlightdirect.com/scp/Fluore...cent_Tubes.html They are the same as the tubes in there already but daylight temp. It's a shame the shop didn't take up the daylight option seeing as it was the same price but there we are. Maybe I should nip in the shop and complain. ;) All these sites give very little in the way of specs. I'd like to know the CRI and exact colour temperature etc. love Freya

Hiya Phil! I'm looking around at the cost of tubes, and I'm shocked at the vast differences in price. At first I thought it might be prohibitive to buy daylight tubes, but now I've found a supplier at a little over £5 per tube. However I seem to have found fairly ordinary tubes ranging in price from £0.89 to about £7! I'm wondering if you know of any u.k. supplier that might beat my £5 price for daylight tubes? Also can you tell me where in the u.k. I might get a 1/8 minus green gel from? If you know of more than one supplier please let me know. love Freya

I think this is the exact model that I have. It's certainly looks like these anyway: http://www.encapsulite.co.uk/prod6b.html I'm afraid they most definitely are not! They are just some fixtures that were used in a shop display I expect. All the same I am still happy. DMX fixtures would probably have been a pain as I don't have a DMX controller! There are some pictures of the fixtures I have on the link I posted. They look a bit like flo tubes from a distance as the fixture is also tubular. It's like an extra skin for the tubes. I should probably also point out that I am not a proffesional film maker. I work in the field of experimental film and video and so I don't have access to a colour temperature meter etc. However I have a video camera that you can set to daylight or tungsten, so I may compare them with that. Sorry for not mentioning that before, but it was already quite a long posting. :) I am interested in trying to get the best out of the fixtures that I can but obviously cost will be an issue. Otherwise I could just stick kino tubes in there! ;) Any ideas are welcome however. love Freya

Yesterday I was coming home and walked past a skip outside a large clothing retail store. I glanced inside in the vain hope that I might see some old Fluorescent fixtures, and there at the top of the skip I could see what looked like fluorescent tubes. I made a beeline for the skip as fast as I could and started to pull them out. It turned out they were not Fluorescent tubes at all but strange fluorescent fixtures, with tubes inside and a uk 13 amp U.K plug on the end. They are made by this company: http://www.encapsulite.co.uk/ A label on the outside says that they are HF T8 55Watts I have about 4 that are taller than me! I guess they must be about 6 foot tubes or something? They all seem to work except one that sounds like a rain stick so I didn't bother trying to test it! ;) I also have 2 smaller ones that are about half that height and both of which seem to work. They seem to have been gelled with some bizzare candy pink gel although the light changes colour across the tube from green to pink with bits of yellow when you actually turn it on, so maybe the gels are of more than one colour. I'm very happy to have found such a score as you might imagine. The skip was preety depressing as there was enough in it to build a whole movie set I reckon. There must have been about £1000 of stuff in the skip at a guess which was probably all new only a short time ago. Anyway I digress. I would obviously like to use these lights in my film and video work. Originally I was looking for some lights with which to build something like a kinoflo. I'm not sure whether that would be practical in this case altough I'm open to ideas. Either way I'd be interested in ideas in which they could be used on their own. Obviously most of them are preety large (boy did I get worried looks from the bus driver). I'm thinking I could use them as practicals as a part of some kind of set design or perhaps I could use them as they are, complete with weird colour gels somehow, that might be weird. Lastly the film subway by Luc Besson springs to mind too. ;) What else could I do with them? Also how could I go about using them at a more standard colour temp. I've been reading through the archive and someone recommends a 1/8 minus green gel to remove the green spike. Are there easily available tubes I can use? I'd be happy to find a compromise between price and utility and availability. Specifically that if I can get cheap tubes I am prepared to compromise on colour temp. If theres anything else you can tell me that would also be great. I think HF means it is a high frequency ballast but I'm not sure what T8 means exactly??? love Freya

Matte box. I assume you wouldn't be shooting without one anyway, but I once did and I got strange flares weird refllections, all kinds of phenomenom, some of it somewhat unexplainable. I was shooting with a preety cheap and nasty anamorphic lens, even so I think you should use one as a proportion of my footage was beyond use. Worst comes to worst you can make one from black cardboard. love Freya

IIRC the Beaulieu R16 has an electric motor, it's not crystal but it will stay in sync for longer than a clockwork camera. The R16 used to use pilotone for sync. Trouble is that it's not very quiet so you may end up having to jam sync the dialogue anyway even with a crystal motor. love Freya

If theres a choice then I would go with the cameflex or the arri. The Konvas thing is just a really low budget thing. Great lenses but lots of issues with things like motors and people shipping you cameras in a cardboard box with a bit of newspaper in it! :) I'd probably lean towards the Arri actually, because theres more knowledge around about it and the possibility that you could get help locally if something goes bad. love Freya

True enough, although it's quite a problem that the ending will be somewhat confusing and nonsensical to non-european audiances. I had to have the ending explained to me, and I'm still like "he did what?????" because that wouldn't be possible to do here in England and I'm still reeling from the idea that this would be considered normal in America, as when I've seen it in horror movies, I've always written it off in my mind as being a bit of a strange plot device and that it would be considered special or different. I think this is the main reason it got such terrible reviews here I think. The ending doesn't make sense. Then again, maybe they are out to get Spike. Theres also the problem that the passage of time is apparently so long at the end (a week!!!!) that the ending is just completely unfeasable. Having said that this was the least important part of the film for me in a way, but it did kind of destroy the genre aspect of it a bit, so that it's not quite as complete overall as it could be, which is a shame as Spike has done such a great job. Exactly, and I'm not sure that's just New York society either but then I do live on a backward little island too. :) Anyway, I just loved the way he made it more than a genre movie. I mean you can enjoy it as a genre movie (exceptions noted above) but it's also very much a spike lee movie and that is what makes it so radical. love Freya

Found some more: Monsters and another... Yet Another... Last One

I love these adverts created for the Tahoe competition, so I thought I would share them with you in case you havn't already seen them. :) Tahoe Advert 1 Tahoe Advert 2 I like these too but they could have done with a soundtrack: Tahoe Advert 3 Tahoe Advert 4 and I like this too but it's a little bit political, really well done tho: Political Tahoe Ad :) Enjoy! love Freya

Hey Hal! Aren't you going to give our friend alex a comment on his little trailer too!?? :) Yes we have those , tho to be fair wouldn't it be possible for the power to short thu the water but not into the ground wire? Either way, we now have devices that detect if there is an imbalance between the load on the live and neutral wires too or something. But it's just not allowed. If you want electricity in the bathroom other than lighting, then it has to be connected to a special kind of permanenly wired wall conection. No plugs allowed. In theory I suppose you could wire a microwave into such a wall plate, but I'm not totally sure even that would be allowed. You just aren't allowed mains sockets in the bathroom. It's interesting how things are different in different places. The ending of the film "The inside man" doesn't make a lot of sense over here, as the architecture is completely different. It's a good film all the same tho. :) love Freya

Yes! That's what I was trying to suggest! You definitely pick up different skills more easily from each format, and they also work together really well too! :) love Freya

No I think you can get a good final result with a cheap and nasty DV camera. You don't have to have really fancy cameras to make something good. It depends what you do with it. You will just be more limited. I like mini-dv a lot it is very useful It's very good for a first time film maker in fact. Most first time film makers will spend ages saving for such a camera. You are very lucky. Well a lot of people can't afford even a canon XL-2. The other thing is that cameras get updated and change all the time. So maybe for the time being it is better to get a cheaper camera to get going with and then to get a more expensive camera later, when better models are available or you can afford one. This was what I was suggesting in my mail, and that if you bought say an XL2 at a later date, you could still use the nastier DV camera as an edit machine so as not to wear down your XL2, or alternatively to edit footage shot on film. love Freya

I liked it a lot! One thing puzzled me a lot tho. Are you really allowed to have microwaves in your bathroom in Austria??? Here in England you wouldn't be even allowed to have a mains socket, let alone a microwave!! ...And why would someone have a microwave in their bathroom? Well I liked the soundtrack a lot, it was very atmospheric. I don't have clue, even vaugely, what the film might be about however. For a moment I wondered if she was an abstract expressionist painter or a vampire. Then I decided maybe she had a chocolate fetish and was smearing chocolate on herself or something. For me this seems like a waste of good chocolate, but maybe she likes choclate but is on a diet or is anorexic, but still likes the feel and the smell of chocolate. I noticed that she filled her drink right to the brim perhaps to stop herself putting sugar in it, but then she can't resist it. She hesitates for a moment but then it is too much and she drops it in anyway. By the end of the trailer she is overcome by guilt and thinks she can't take it anymore. That's all I could work out from the trailer but I expect that is only a little part of the picture? She has a nice bathroom I think, but smoking and flourecant lights will ruin your health, not to mention the possibility of suffering from a chocolate deficiency if you never eat any. It looks like an interesting and nice film to me! Are there many wide shots in the actual film? love Freya

Well yeah, that isn't really a problem, the trouble is that when you do put those bits together, they don't really make sense and are riddled with holes. I guess you have to ignore all the holes but even then it's still a really crap ending because he is supposed to be such a mega-genius and all but that's the best idea he can come up with? Really poor. Having said all that maybe the film will make slightly more sense to U.S. audiences. I've seen this kind of thing in horror movies too and it always seems really weird then, and the few places I stayed in in the states didn't appear to be like this but maybe there are places like this in the states and it is fairlly normal. Still the film has quite a bit going for it other than a lame and nonsensical ending, so maybe we can ignore that because although it's a big letdown it's not really what the film is about and it's got lots of other things going for it. love Freya

Okay, tenobell mailed me off list and explained the ending, and I feel I have to take back a bit of what I have said about this film. I guess my suspension of disbelief was working so well that I came to conclusions about the ending that were all wrong, and sadly in reality the ending seems to be quite badly riddled with holes, although I think some of this is probably down to cultural differences (I'm not an American resident). I guess the ending was a bit incomprehensible to me too which is also poor as I'm sure that was not the intention. On the up side, the cliched genre based plot was not what I really liked about the film in the first place in some ways, but that Spike had taken it and reshaped it in his own way, and this aspect is really good and entertaining. However it's poor if the ending doesn't make sense and is riddled with holes if it's meant to be a genre film of this type. It's very sad that the film falls apart at the end in this way because it was so close to being a very complete film. I still recommend the film as it is good and entertaining, but be prepared for a somewhat poor and unfeasable ending. Thanks for filling me in Tenobell. love Freya

Wow, that's really changed my opinion of the film then. It's quite bad if a lot of people find the end of the film incomprehensible unless it was meant to be. I mean the ending is one of the most important parts of a film. I actually feel slightly bad and embaressed I said so many good things about the film now. So the hole in the ground was at best superflous to the plot and should have been left out I think. So he just hid beined a false wall then or something? Suddenly large parts of the film seem to not make a lot less sense. :( I guess these things aren't that important as the things that made it special weren't really related directly to the silly heist plot, but all the same, it does detract badly from it as a whole. Can you mail me off list and tell me what happened at the end then? love Freya

You misunderstand me, I meant not that this paticular genre was trashy, but more that genre movies generally are trashy by their nature, but yes, people have managed to do things within genre that have been good. Spike in this movie for one, although I'm a bit shaken by the fact it sounds like I wasn't able to understand the ending of the film! Yowch! :( love Freya

It's really good, a lot of fun, and quite radical! In some ways it might be spikes most radical film because it is so mainstream but is also very, very Spike. It's a real Hollyywood genre movie. Really well done. The fact it is a bit Silly is one of the things I love about it. It's so tongue in cheek. I just found out that apparently the guy who delivers the pizza is even the exact same actor as delivered the pizza in dog day afternoon. :) Great touch. It is just the perfect stereotypical distillation of its genre. Me too, it is a lot of fun, but then I tend to see genre movies as throwaway entertainment normally, whereas this is not only a genre movie but something so much more too, it has humour and it has Spikes political edge. Great! :) I thought that he hid in the hole, but now you mention it, maybe I am confused about this. What did they use the hole for then? Ouch, now I'm wondering if I misinderstood the whole end of the movie somehow. love Freya

I have to say that personally this didn't suprise me either. I don't see that as being a problem however. It's quite clear how they are going to do it as it shows them digging a hole, so clearly they are going to hide in the hole or the hole is some kind of distraction and they are going out the front door when they evacuate. In the end they do both. It's quite clear what is going to happen a lot of the way through the movie because Clive tells you, and you are also shown things. It's also a genre movie. The bit that suprised me was that the parking tickets weren't bugged but I guess that would have been a little out there. For me part of the movie was the frustration that the police were going to do all the wrong things even tho it seemed obvious they shouldn't. It was just like "noooo!" and the urge to bang your head against a wall. :) As I say I really liked the film and see all of the above as good points not bad. :) love Freya

I guess he either knew because he is hyper intelligent, has x-ray vision, or he saw that photo on Mr Case's mantlepiece! ;) On the other hand, lets face it, the guy is a bank owner! ;) I just assumed he did some reasearch into where the ring came from, that bit didn't seem so bad to me... But surely it was supposed to be silly! The whole film is kind of silly, that is why it is fun. It's just a bit of a parody. love Freya

The time code module is either a midi time code module or a smpte time code module, either way it is presumably a device for syncing soundtracks to picture. For instance if you had a video recorder with SMPTE output, you could sync it to a computer that would play all the sound tracks in time with it. Not sure how useful that will be to you. The Sampler is the obviously most useful part, kind of neat, you can use it to create soundtracks for your film, compose music that contains short samples etc. Didn't Peter Gabriel use an S950 on "the last temptation of christ" or something? I forget now. The Dolby A units are noise reduction units. There is an encoder and a decoder. They can be used for noise reduction on open reel recordings. Here is what Dolby say about Dolby A on their site: So maybe if you were going to make a 35mm film print with optical sound you could use dolby A noise reduction and the cinemas might be able to play it back. *shrug* love Freya

Well I meant to test for flicker in the flo's. Pal video cameras are also 25fps. I'm not sure how well a video camera would be good for testing colour, so your tip of a polaroid may be good too! I suppose if you have a good video camera it should have a tungsten setting, that might give you a vague idea, but a lot of the cheap ones have all that auto W.B. and stuff. So I think the polaroid is a better suggestion for that, it is really film too so should look closer to the real thing! :) love Freya