Rakesh Malik

So you consider any film with a sex scene in it to be soft porn, then?

I'm looking forward to those. I really liked that trilogy, and I was both happy and sad when I learned about it being made into a film, because I knew the studios would pander to the religious folks instead of being authentic to the story. I liked the film, but I wasn't surprised that the sequels didn't happen. Disappointed, but not surprised. The religious angle was part of why I wasn't surprised; I knew the religious cults would complain, and even though their complaints violate their own purported ethical standards, they have a lot of influence, and I knew from the outset that the studio would try to make nice with them, most likely ruining the story. IMO the studio didn't ruin the story nearly as much as I'd expected, but I still wish we'd been able to get some more of it.

Prepping is the only way to pull off good and fast, and since time is money that's also the most economical approach. I like being able to prep for a shoot, though sometimes things till go awry like the power outlets being non-functioning on the day of the shoot (argh), but since we had a plan we were able to get what we needed filmed anyway. If we hadn't planned for that shoot, we probably would have ended up having to scrap a shot or two.

Two directors that I've worked with stand out in particular. One was actually a pretty bad director when I first started working with her, but I kept working with her because she had a lot of vision. She just wasn't good at conveying what that vision was, both to me and to the actors, making it rather challenging to get what she wanted from the shoot. However, she's also one of those people who cares about as well as respects the people she works with, and has learned a lot; while she hasn't learned much about how to light a set, she's gotten a LOT better at explaining what she is trying to accomplish with a shoot, and her couple of films have been great to work on. The last one is still in post, the previous one was quite well received locally (got a jury nomination for "best short" for one local film festival). She takes a lot of inspiration from classic filmmakers. Another has worked with me on probably something like a dozen projects now, though only a few as director. He directed the first feature film that I shot, and that was our first big collaboration. He goes his best to take care of his cast and crew as far as keeping our working days reasonable, saving the really long days for when we really need them (like when we have a particular location for only one day). He's also seasoned enough that when we're short on crew, he can jump in and assist with lighting and that sort of thing, which nearly backfired once when he was doing sound while I was operating the camera handheld with a shoulder rig, and I was using the battery as a counterbalance. He was looking over my shoulder to see the viewfinder, not accounting for how far the battery extended behind me when I did the whip pan... and accidentally gave him a good wallop on the jaw... on the take we ended up keeping. It turns out that since I didn't pause, you couldn't see the bump in the final footage. Anyway, he and I quickly established a working relationship where I was able to get a solid sense of the style of what he wanted. We ended up using footage shot during rehearsals as our reference, like they were storyboards. He always had a very clear idea about what he needed in order to get the piece we were working on to fit into the edit, and I had no trouble figuring out how to light it. He's working on raising funds to pay for some pickups; hopefully we'll be able to get it into the festival circuit this year.

ASICs are more basic processors. CPUs/GPUs are very sophisticated, require significant system resources, and involve a lot more silicon and complicated fabrication that goes with that in order to offer high performance for a wide variety of workloads, most of which aren't particularly useful in a camera.

I like to light, but I also like working with gaffers who DO give me suggestions. Sometimes they're better than what I originally had in mind, and when they are, I take advantage. And then try to keep working with those gaffers. :)

Phil, right now I would tend to agree. There's some cool stuff going on in the VR industry. It's pretty cool, and GoPro had a demo that showed some storytelling, but most of them were just showing "vr is cool" demos. The most frustrating part is that most of the HMDs didn't make allowances for glasses or focusing. I think there's potential for it to be useful, but at the same time, I think you nailed regarding the sensationalist claims about how amazing it is. The idea that it might replace traditional filmmaking seems a bit silly; I think it's going to shine in interactive entertainment, but I don't see it replacing cinema. It's a different style of storytelling, but IMO the two can coexist just fine.

Now I'm going to be looking for a good reason to do something like that moving dialog shot you described, David. :) I try to design shots that help dialog scenes feel the way that the director describes them, rather than always relying on the shot/reverse method all the time, so I'm always looking for ideas to draw inspiration from.

A Rode NTG-2 might fit the bill on the mic side of things; it's inexpensive and has good sound quality, and it's pretty directional though its pickup pattern is wider than preferable for dialog recording. Its sensitivity is moderate, so with the lower end Zooms you'll probably end up with pretty noisy recordings in situations where you can't get the mic close enough to your actors.

Why several? The worst case is that you render some offline proxy media for editing, and then conform back to the originals for color grading. If you have fast enough disks, you can work directly with even CinemaDNG sequences in several NLEs, including Premiere, Resolve's NLE, LightWorks, and Grass Valley plans to add raw support to Edius in an update due around NAB time.

An unsubstantiated opinion backed by authority isn't useful, IMO. "I hate it!" doesn't tell you anything about WHY the person hates it, and if the only explanation they offer is authority, then it's probably just a waste of space. I've run into this in software development, also; I suggested a way of doing things that the supposedly more experienced folks didn't think of, and they claimed it was wrong based on their "experience" rather than for any valid reason. When working with quality management, their opinions ended up being dismissed because they had nothing to back them up, since authority means nothing in practical terms. I got the distinct impression that they were just jealous because I came up with a better idea than they did, and they were too insecure to admit it. I learned early on to tune out the people who judge and throw around of the weight of their "experience" because it's not helpful. People who tell me that they hate something I've shot and explain why they hate it however, I appreciate... because I can learn a lot from the why part. I personally find that people hating my work opens my mind about new things more than people loving it; when people love it, it encourages you do the same thing again, rather than to experiment and branch out and grow. Of course, if someone loves something I've shot and explains why, I appreciate that also... then I get to enjoy having my worked liked AND get some input about worked with it.

Also to take advantage of the left = evil and right = good bias common in quite a few cultures. Villain approaching from the left, hero approaching from the right, foreshadowing their future conflict.

I'd agree with that definition. If the cinematography draws attention to itself, then it's drawing the viewer's attention away from the story, which is certainly not good.

While I agree that the two worlds have to a large extent merged, that isn't what he was talking about at all, as demonstrated by his examples. He pointed out that Men in Black was lit and shot like a science fiction thriller, and that Kingsman was lit like a spy thriller. Both films are parodies of the genres whose style they are emulating, while Ghostbusters is lit flatly, like a comedy, rather than like a horror film, even though it's parodying horror.

The biggest flaw with film schools is that they are catering to the easy money... which is to say, the market of people who think that cameras do all of the hard work of making movies. I didn't come out of film school with many useful contacts; most of the people in my classes were dead weight at best during group projects, so who'd recruit them afterward? The "tests" in the production class were multiple choice... and the final was (gasp) setting up 3-point lighting for an interview. (Yes, seriously. That was the final.) That's not to say that I didn't learn anything at all in film school; we had a great screenwriting teacher and a great film history teacher. I learned to edit while working as a intern for a production company. I got my first couple of opportunities to be a DP by networking with nearly budget-free indie productions... based on my photography. Now I'm working on getting a company started and finding clients...

The 4K models have started shipping, the 4.6K models are apparently not due to start shipping until later in November. Its closest competitors all cost more.

Study the work of Rennaissance painters and fine art photographers.