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Satsuki Murashige

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Everything posted by Satsuki Murashige

  1. That would be the Bayonet mount. And the Zeiss lens ain't that heavy - it was just too heavy for the camera! Come to think of it though, the culprit could be the shoddy, out-of-spec, film school camera. I tightened all the screws I could find on the turret, but it was still loose. A well-maintained Arri might be able to handle it.
  2. Also, make sure the rental house gives you the right size of silk or net for your overhead frame. There's nothing more embarrassing than spending all that time putting together a 20'x20' frame, then realizing that the net is too small to go on it. D'oh! Also, make sure the rental house gives you the right size of silk or net for your overhead frame. There's nothing more embarrassing than spending all that time putting together a 20'x20' frame, then realizing that the net is too small to go on it. D'oh!
  3. There's a montage that someone cut together for the Academy Awards in the 90's featuring the most memorable shots in American film history. I saw a print of it a few years ago at the Rafael Theatre in San Rafael. It was great because I've only seen most of these films on DVD. Can't remember the name of it, though.
  4. Well, this is probably obvious, but the most important thing is that the scenes are original and imaginatively written. Then the "how to shoot it" aspect will suggest itself, without having to resort to cliches. Check out Akira Kurosawa's "Dreams", which is essentially a series of short films based on the director's dreams and fantasies. He's got one where he dreams that he's Van Gogh - if I remember correctly, he wanders into one of his paintings, and the painting becomes animated. It occurs to me that the "disturbing dream sequence" is lot more cliche than a happy one - maybe there's your jumping off point to something original. As David says, you can do anything in a dream sequence; you can do anything in cinema as well. Godard's "Alphaville" feels more like a dream to me than most "dream sequences" in mainstream Hollywood films.
  5. Won't increasing the shutter speed essentially ruin your test by introducing an unwanted variable into the look of the footage, given that you say you prefer a slower shutter speed anyway? If so, then ND is the way to go. If you can't get a suitable glass filter in time, then one (admittedly ghetto) option is take a gel sample pack, cut out ND's in the shape of your lens's rear element, and attach them with snot tape. This is assuming you don't have a camera that can take filters behind the lens like the Bolex. Just remember to stop down to T8 or so, as the thickness of the gel will shift your focus slightly. I wouldn't consider pulling the film, since this would throw another unwanted variable into the footage and cost you more money.
  6. Oh yeah, I just realized how the Scoopic's lens was able to compete in perceived sharpness with the Zeiss lens - it's the modern lens coating, cutting down on flare and increasing contrast. The lens itself does not resolve as many lines/mm, but the increased contrast creates the perception of more sharpness. Also, I realized we would always use hard light, undiffused fresnels. I've shot a lot of stuff on the Arri S/B this past semester with various lenses, and if it's a choice between an Arri plus a crap Angieneux 12-120 or crap Cooke Kinetal prime and a Scoopic with the stock lens, I'll take the Scoopic any day. On the other hand, the Arri with the Zeiss 10-100 T2 kicks the Scoopic's ass. By the way, the turret on the Arri is suspect with heavy lenses - I AC'd a short a few weeks ago with Zeiss zoom on the Arri, and the turret was very loose, throwing off the FFD. We compensated by never shooting below T4 and avoiding the wider focal lengths when possible, but we still had a few soft wide shots. There was also some slight vignetting when we zoomed in. I'm still confused about this, actually - how could there be vignetting at 50mm and none at 10mm?
  7. "I was shooting 7217 with an 85b ..." If you were shooting for telecine, you could have shot without the 85, giving you an extra 2/3 stop to work with. "The close ups were beautiful, very real, but in a large view, it looked blank..." Are you saying that the wall behind your actor was lit too flat, or that the actor's face was lit too flat? Because when I look at your reference still (which looks great, by the way!), what I notice first is that the back wall has a high degree of fall-off, almost like you darkened the left side with a soft matte in post. You might have been able to get away with doing the same thing to the wide shot in telecine (Of course, I'm sure you would have preferred to get it right on the negative). Good luck, six months is a very short time to be getting such work. Hope I'm that lucky some day!
  8. Hi Annie, Just curious, but is this for Panavision's New Filmmaker program? I worked on one of those last year that used an Elaine. We don't see Panavision gear up here very often, so it was a kind of a big deal. I tried to sneak a sniff of those sweet Panny mags, but they wouldn't let me. :)
  9. I'm also an undergrad (senior) at SFSU, but I've crewed on a few graduate projects and have a few friends in the graduate program. The school produces a lot of indi film/experimental filmmakers with a good knowledge of film history and film theory, but not so much technical expertise. The students who really know their stuff technically supplement their classes by reading, shooting, and crewing constantly on their own time. So, I'd say if you want to be immediately employable as a DP, AC, or a grip/electric and make lots of industry contacts, then you should go to a school closer to LA, like Chapman, AFI, etc. But if you want to get a solid foundation in film history and theory, then consider SFSU. Equipment wise, the grad students get Arri SR2's (reg. 16mm, not Super 16). The lenses are pretty bad, but you can always rent from the local rental house, Lee Utterbach camera. http://www.lucamera.com/joomla/ Grip equipment is pretty minimal, so if you want something like a Fisher 10 dolly, you'd have to rent it from DTC Grip in Emeryville. Just tried it recently, btw, pretty cool! http://www.dtcgrip.com/ Lighting equipment is pretty minimal, mostly small tungsten fresnels, but there is a soundstage you can use with 10K's, 5K's, and the like, so you'll get some soundstage experience. You can rent stuff like HMI's very cheaply at Photographer's Supply Lighting. http://sanfrancisco.citysearch.com/profile...y_lighting.html Here's a link to an SFSU grad film I worked on recently (I was a 1st AC). The DP and I both took cinematography classes at City College of San Francisco, which I found were better than the one at SFSU. The cinematography professor at CCSF is John Aliano. If cinematography is your focus, then consider taking classes at CCSF on the side. http://www.carrienoel.com/nowplaying.html Hope this was helpful.
  10. Phillippe Rousselot, ASC, AFC wrote an article about how to do this in "Reflections: 21 Cinematographers at Work." Here's a still frame. I've done this myself with a 12' china ball and it looked pretty good. 500w is too much though, you'll burn the lantern. Make sure your fixture is rated for the wattage you're using as well - you can screw ceramic sockets into the plastic fixtures to keep them from melting. I'd start with a 75w PH211 enlarger bulb, then the 212 (150w) and the 213 (250w). I get the lanterns in Chinatown for a few bucks. I use these: http://cinemasupplies.stores.yahoo.net/chinlansocas.html http://cinemasupplies.stores.yahoo.net/lepomesoex.html I like to run a dimmer between the fixture and the outlet so I can lower the color temperature and output. I wouldn't try to do a flicker effect with only one source though - it just looks fake.
  11. So Mr. Rogers was really on to something, then. ;)
  12. That's a good point, though I would argue that as the viewer studies the picture, he or she becomes aware that the event it depicts is already history. The man died a second after the photo was taken; there's nothing the viewer can do now to save him. Instead, our gaze lingers on the face of the (soon to be, already?) dead man, noting his battered face, his disheveled hair, his wincing anticipation of the bullet entering his brain. Then we look at General Loan, and examine the small hand gripping the tiny pistol, the wiry muscles of his outstretched arm, the rolled sleeves of his clean uniform, his expressionless face. We feel pity for the prisoner, and horror at what war has revealed about human nature - that we are capable of killing each other without feeling much of anything. That's the story the picture tells. Watching the 16mm newsreel footage of the execution, I'm struck at how quickly it all happened. The filmed event seems at once more real and less meaningful than the photograph. I guess that's the tyranny of cinema, that we're forced to experience events in the flow of time, rather than outside of it. (I still dig cinema though!) :)
  13. Well, consider the effect of each form on its intended audience. What expectations does each fulfill? Both are recordings of past events; one appeals to the conscious mind, the other to the subconscious. A photograph exists only in the past - in effect, a photograph stops time and forces us to contemplate an image of something (morning light in September of 1962, your mother when she was a child, etc.) that no longer exists. As viewers, we experience an ironic distance from the subject which moves us. A film exists both in the past and in the present - a child chases (note the present tense!) after a ball into the middle of a busy street and we cringe in anticipation, even on the twelfth viewing. We are moved by the illusion of reality. Some filmmakers attempt to break this illusion and create the ironic distance that photography takes for granted; then we are aware that what we are watching is not life at all, but merely a crude imitation. If a film does convince the subconscious mind of its reality, then it is almost inevitably narrative, because the camera by its nature captures a series of events, and the editor by default structures those events into a sequence. Even if a film is constituted entirely of still photographs, those images must appear for a definite length of time on screen, then to be succeeded by another image, and another, ad nauseum. So cinema is not necessarily cinematography, but cinematography is necessarily cinema. I guess if you wanted to make the analogy, photography is to cinema as memories are to dreams. And Godard's films are lucid dreams! *EDIT: Okay, that made no sense at all, but it's late - give me a break!
  14. When you say you want a "gritty look," what do you mean exactly? Can you describe the mood you want to create for the scene? Once you know the mood, then you can interpret that in your own way in terms of look: color scheme, more grain or less, more contrast or less, more color saturation or less, focal length of the lens, lens flares, more or less depth of field, camera movement, framing, and so on. Then you can determine what lighting tools (if any) you need to accomplish the look you want. Personally, a "gritty" look for me would be one that went to the extremes in terms of grain, contrast, color, etc. For example, there's this driving scene in "Se7en" which is naturalistic, low key, and monochromatic. Then the sun bursts out from behind a highrise and creates a brief, overexposed, backlight on the character, Detective Mills, and flares out the lens. Mills is telling a story about watching a fellow cop die - the mood of the scene is "brooding" and "grim." The lighting accomplishes this.
  15. Awesome, thanks for all the tips! So would you say that you always tweak the lighting for the coverage if you can? Have you ever watched the footage the next day and felt that you went too far?
  16. Thanks for the details, Daniel. Sounds like you made the best of a really difficult situation. Michael, how do you calculate how much you can cheat in lighting the coverage from the master? Is it just experience?
  17. Cool, thanks for the details. The comp shot looks very real. Did you keep the same lens on for the two composite elements, or was that not an issue?
  18. Wow, this looks really gorgeous. I especially love the slow push in on the woman with the train passing in the foreground. Were those dolly shots difficult to get? Also, are those clouds in the extreme long shot over the titles real, or was the sky added in post?
  19. So how did you light it and power it? I ask because I'm also shooting an elevator scene in a practical location about a week from now. My plan is to rig a dedolight on a polecat for hot toplight and use bounceboard to fill faces. The elevator is large, has several outlets, and also has a lightswitch for the overhead flourscent practical, but if I didn't have the outlets I would rent a very small generator like the Honda 1000i EU or a 12v battery belt/block to power the dedo (the shots where the elevator is moving are MOS). The door of the elevator is glass, so I plan to have gelled fresnels beaming in from each floor, creating an intermittent key light on the actor's face. I really couldn't have picked an easier elevator to film in, but I wonder what I would do if I had to film in one of those modern steel jobbies.
  20. I like the framing very much - great use of negative space and the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The lighting seems very spare and minimalist - I see what you were going for, but I'm personally a fan of more baroque lighting styles with crazy colors, chiaroscuro, smoke, shafts of light. The look you chose works well with the song and the concept, though. You've got an eye, that's for sure!
  21. Does this mean that the footage goes from color to B&W during the shot? Obviously then you'll have to do it in telecine or go through an optical printer to get that effect. If you intercut a desaturated color shot (which the "dissolve to B&W" shot will have to be) with a B&W stock, they won't match, texture-wise. The "blood splat" shot will probably have to originate on color stock as well, unless you want to do it as an FX shot. Also, how much footage needs to be B&W as opposed to color? If the amount needed of one or the other type is very small, then it might be more efficient to shoot only color stock - that way, you wouldn't be left with 300' of short ended color neg at the end of the shoot. And shooting only one stock will be cheaper to telecine since there will be fewer camera rolls. I can email you some side-by-side comparisons of color neg (7212 100T) desaturated in telecine and B&W neg (7231 100D, 80T) that I shot. You can see that the B&W neg is a lot grainier, contrastier, and has less dynamic range than the color neg. 7222 will be grainer of course. The B&W really has it's own look and texture which is hard to duplicate in grading color neg. If matching the stocks is the overriding concern rather than an "authentic" B&W look, then you'll probably want to avoid shooting real B&W stock. If I can figure out how to attach these pics in the body of the post, I'll do that instead. Each time I click the "add attachment" button, nothing happens. The "Help" FAQ is not helpful.
  22. Please post the serial numbers and any identifying characteristics (ex. RX3, 4, 5, particular lenses) and I'll keep an eye out for them. You might want to notify ebay and give them the serial numbers as well, though I've heard they're pretty bad about keeping track of that kind of thing. Hope you guys recover your cameras - FAF is a great local resource.
  23. Kodak makes a grey card called the "Grey Card Plus" which has black and white reference chips on the sides of the 18% grey card - you can only order it by phone for some reason, and it's about $25. In telecine, the colorist can zoom in on each of these sections and quickly neutralize the color balance of the midtones, shadows, and highlights by looking at the RGB parade/waveform monitor. One colorist I know swears by it and says he dislikes the Macbeth because the color chips are so small. Grey cards are especially usefully for determining when the lab or telecine house has made a mistake at your expense. I recently shot a grey card at the head of a 100' roll of 7218 exposed in front of a tungsten light gelled with 3/4 CTO - I wanted the print to be timed bluer. The lab totally disregarded my instructions to time to the grey card, and the minute I saw the orange card, I knew what had happened. The director was very unhappy with how the film looked, but felt better after realizing that the lab had screwed up (not me), and was willing to reprint the roll for free. Because I had shot the grey card and specified how the roll should be timed, I was able to ask for the reprint - otherwise, we'd be SOL. So it pays to cover your ass. David, I've read your comments about shooting a grey scale (as opposed to a grey card) and was wondering which one you used, and what the advantages of a greyscale would be as opposed to a grey card.
  24. Well, I guess the consensus is that a jib is not the right piece of equipment for the shot. What I've decided to do instead is to have my camera op. handhold the camera while crouching on the doorway dolly (with two apple boxes for a riser), then slowly stand up, pan, and tilt down. He'll have a spotter, of course. I guess the simplest solution is best, at least for no-budget student/indie types. Thanks for the rope tip, Jon. We have insurance for separate bits of equipment, but no production insurance per se - it really is a "no budget" shoot. Most of our gear is coming from our local community college (they don't provide insurance), with a few items like the doorway dolly coming from a rental house (which doesn't require insurance for that piece of equipment). Honestly, I know very little about how "real" productions handle this sort of thing; I'm in the process of crossing over from student-type guerrilla filmmaking to more professional filmmaking where most of you guys work. I've been working for the past year as a 2nd AC, and more lately as a 1st AC, but I DP student and indie projects on the side to learn and grow creatively. Anyway, thank you to everyone who responded and offered their experienced perspectives - I'll let you know how it turns out!
  25. Hi Paul, Thanks for the heads up! I was under the impression that the camera mounted directly to a plate at the end of the Microdolly jib without the need for a tripod head (I want to rent the Microdolly, not the Porta-Jib); I also thought you could control the tilt of the camera plate from the back of the dolly - is this not the case? I'll give John Chater a ring and ask him if I can go see the jib in action before I decide to rent. I may go with the PeWee afterall. For those who are interested, I'll let you know how much insurance the rental house actually requires.
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