Mitch Gross

I don't know the details of the job or the contract, but I can understand a Producer asking for a release that essential says that your work -- even free work -- is work for hire, so that you could not at a later time try to claim it as your own and thus prevent them from selling their product. At the same time, I see contracts and deal memos all the time with illegal clauses in them that cannot be enforced. Thing like they are not responsible for you if you get injured when in fact they always are even if you are there for free. They also can't make you say that you will accept responsibility instead--itis illegal to assign risk. I read things in contracts all the time that even if I sign I could still choose to sue over (and I'd win) such as these. I also love it when they say they're not responsible for paying taxes or providing you with tax info such as a 1099 document and such. That's their legal obligation under the US tax code no matter what they write on some piece of paper and ask me to sign. Nonsense.

Kodak just laid off something like 15,000 employees. I don't think research on Ultra-16 is likely to be a high priority. Matt, once your scanning system is up and running, what do you have in place for the material once it gwts turned into whatever type of digital file? Will it be compatible with most post systems, using Cineon files or the like? Will it be the equivalent of HDCam or HD D-6? How will people edit this material, color correct it and then what will they do with it? Do you have a way to turn it into some form of HD master or a way to burn it out to a 35mm print? I'm not saying you don't have any or all of this. But I've only heard you mention your scanner, which is just one small part of the entire post path. Even if it cost very little to use Ultra-16 (or whatever medium) and then scan it to some digital format using your scanner, it's still an enormous cost to burn it out to a 35m film print. I can shoot HDCam and color correct and edit in a souped up version of FCP, but it's still going to cost $50,000 to burn out a 35mm print. A Digital Intermediate is just that, an intermediate step. It still needs to be finished.

There are, but they aren't the greatest. Still you might find that they're good enough for your needs. Check the Homebuilt Stabilizer website and do some Google searches. There's now more than 40 companies making Steadicam-like devices.

Oh God, don't do it! I've shot with a 2c in a blimp and believe me it's a major pain in the ass. Mag changes take forever, lens changes take forever, you can't use modern lenses or modern accessories, the damn thing weighs around 100 pounds, the viewfinder sticks out the back (non-orientable) and is very dim after going through the blimp extension tube, and on and on. You can't use the more modern crystal flat bases because they are too thick to align properly so you have to use the old style ones which are just gear boxes and the stalk motor mounts next to the camera. Most of the blimps were designed to take an external AC power supply, so you'll probably have to have it modified so you can send battery power in to the camera. Seriously, for the cost and what you'd have to go through, you're so much better off buying an old Arri BL-1 or 2, even with the lens blimp. These cameras are likely to be newer than any given 2c and are so much easier to use and offer so many advantages. There's a lot of accessories available for these cameras and just the fact that you can use 1000' loads instead of just 400' makes it worth it to me. You can get a decent BL-1 outfit for around $10,000 depending on lenses and accessories. By the time you outfitted a 2c with lenses and crystal motor and blimp and whatever you'd need to make them all work together you wouldn't be far behind that number.

Good luck on getting your free or discounted film. Perhaps the Maine Workshops have an arrangement with Kodak or Fuji. I know that Kodak regularly offers a substantial student discount to accredited film schools, something like 20%. I think you are seriously under-budgeting your film stock needs. A 4:1 ratio is very, very small. I generally reccomend students budget a 10:1 ratio, or rule of thumb one 400' roll for every page of script. That would mean about 12,000' of film for your two 15 minute films. I've worked on literally hundreds of student films and taught and advised hundreds more students on their projects. 4:1 just isn't going to cut it.

The fact that you are developing your own scanner sets you apart from everyone else on this topic. For everyone else, the cost of a DI so vastly outweighs that of any Super-16 camera rental that the use of Ultra-16 becomes a meaningless savings.

????? What do you want him to do, quit? Or maybe he should shoot something really poorly, just to change things up a bit.

Interesting analogy. While piano music for centuries required an actual piano, various synthesizers have replaced a huge part of the market. Yet there are many classical mechanical pianos still made every year, although the numbers are far smaller than in the past. And far more people have access to a form of keyboard then ever before. Before the mid-1800s, the only was to reproduce an image was by painting (or drawing, sculpture, etc.). With the photography suddenly the need for portraiture painting dropped dramatically, and the "industry" as it was declined greatly. There were still some but relatively few that made a living painting portraits. Painters were also freed to use their skills in other ways and this gave birth to the various art moments of the last 150 years. And while it is decidedly fewer, there are people who paint. When motion picture technology first came about, it took a relatively short time to become an exibition industry. But its use by the masses took until the mid-thirties, largely with Kodak's introduction of the 16mm format. I'm sure David & John can correct me with details here, but the point is the same. While 35mm never was of much use to the consumer as an aquisition format due to the expense, 16mm thrived as a consumer format for about three decades. 16mm declined as a consumer format with the introduction of 8mm and then Super-8 film formats in the fifties and sixties. Yet people still worked in 35mm and 16mm was widely popular as an industrial format for research, low-cost distribution and newsgathering. 16mm remained popular for these industrial purposes up into the early eighties, when portable video gear finally began to overtake it. Portable video equipment was first introduced in the early seventies and some consumers and artists did use it, but it took more than a decade before consumer-level equipment became available. Super-8 sales declined as consumer video became affordable. Film as an art medium certainly has had an industrial revolution, and each format of the medium keeps getting bumped up as a new, generally lower-quality and lower-cost format comes along. People made feature films in 35mm until 16mm came along and then they tried to make feature films with that. Then Super-8 came along and they tried to make features in that format. Then video and people tried to make features in the new medium. But the older formats continued to improve along the way and people continued to make movies in them. There was a time where all motion image capture was in 35mm film -- feature films, newsgathering, industrial/scientific, even some home movies. Now 35mm is generally reserved for the most expensive commercial production of entertainment and certain scientific uses. In all the other areas, cheaper technologies have replaced it, and arguably for the better (such as the immediacy of newsgathering in video). So 35mm use is now for the elite few, just as is a Steinway piano. Perhaps a better candidate for industrial revolution is the exibition technology and paradims currently in place. 35mm as a projection format is bulky and expensive. Film prints cost thousands of dollars each and are expensive to ship. Digital projection technology continues to improve, although it also exacerbates a huge issue with piracy. As John freely noted earlier in this thread, the much larger portion of Kodak's motion picture product is in print stocks. A large Hollywood production may use 300,000' (30:1 shooting ratio) of 35mm film to shoot a movie, but then use 30,000,000' to distribute it (3000 prints @ 10,000' each). This is an area ripe for a technological revolution, and everyone in the industry including Kodak knows it.

Good luck on recentering the lens mount on a Filmo. Mitch

You'll find that the regular fluorescent UV light fixtures (aka "blacklights') will not have much strength or directional control. There are a couple of companies that make pro-style lighting fixtures with UV bulbs. Wildfire is a leader in this, and they also make fluorescent paint that will work well with these fixtures. You'll generally need to keep the ambient light level down in order to work well with the UV glow. Best way (other than by eye) to meter is with a spot meter. Check out "Batman & Robin" and "The Game" for some nice UV lit scenes.

Yes. Plug in that ASA (ISO) rating and assume that the camera has something close to a 180 degree shutter, which means that ideally you'd set your still camera to 1/48th of a second for 24 frames. Your still camera will likely not have this setting, but will have 1/60th, which is close enough and protects you should the shutter be a little larger than 180 degrees.

Negative, on the only and only stock available at the time. 125 asa.

Okay, I guess I didn't read that far in the Google hits. Thank God he didn't make another photobook...

The are a few systems that can do motion tracking to match the background plate to your foreground element, and in fact that's the reason for the yellow balls for reference points on the greenscreen set (don't need them otherwise). But this does get very expensive to do properly. And what will your composited background come from? Will it be computer-generated material, which would need to be created in a 3-D not 2-D environment in order to follow the motion tracking? Or will it be a natural plate that you photograph conventionally--in which case you would need a servo-driven head and dolly system that exactly replicates the motion from the greenscreen stage. You can do this without a lot of expensive hardware on set, but it simply means that you'll need a lot of expensive and time-consuming hardware and software in a digital suite somewhere, especially if you are doing it in HD as you mentioned. Sorry, no such thing as a free lunch.

The only way to get the benefit of the Ultra-16 image area is to go through an expensive post phase. This stage (either optical or digital) will vastly outweigh any cost difference between Ultra-16 and Super-16 (your own personal scanner notwithstanding). Super-16 is better so that makes more sense to me. No one is saying throw out all those 16mm cameras. But I hardly think there are 8 million of them out there, and that would be including all the very amateur home movie cameras that probably could stand to have the gate filed out anyway. Believe it or not there is a relatively small trade in the used 16mm camera market and production was never that huge even when all the local TV stations used the gear. The only cameras we're talking about that would even begin to make sense for Ultra-16 upgrade to attempt to use in 2004 would be Aaton, Arri (S, M, BL, and SR), Auricon, Bealieu, Bolex, Canon Scoopic, Cinema Products (CP-16A & R, GSMO), Eclair (ACL & NPR), Mitchell, Photosonics and perhaps some Russian cameras. Most of these I really wouldn't bother with, but even if I did I seriously doubt there would be more than about 20,000 cameras around. There's just not that many out there to throw out, and most of them are seriously old. This coming from a guy with a 20-year old Aaton S-16 camera body.

This got me interested and I've learned a bit about Mr. Photonovel, Richard J. Anobile. Imagine my surprise when I saw that he'd done versions of Ninotchka, the Maltese Falcon and Duck Soup! Apparently he was quite the film historian in the seventies and conducted many interviews with subjects like Groucho Marks. He made one photonovel that caused a stir and perhaps is the controversy David referred to. Here's what I pulled from a UK website: "Back before around World War II, it was not uncommon for movies made in the U.S. to have two almost (but not quite) identical versions. They would shoot the movie with two cameras placed side-by-side. The idea was to generate two negatives of the movie so that after they got through editing the one that would be duped for America's theaters, they could edit a second negative and ship it off to Europe. Usually, the two versions would be identical in cutting and the main difference would be slightly-different camera angles and cropping of scenes. But sometimes the European print would also employ alternate takes from the camera shooting the U.S. version. Chaplin, it is said, edited two different prints of The Gold Rush and they differ in some gags. Several Marx Brothers movies exist in two versions made from different takes, and this is not generally known. Years ago, a gent named Richard Anobile published a couple of books of frame blow-ups and quoted dialogue from the Marx movies, and several British film buffs became incensed. He had, they insisted, slightly misquoted a staggering number of lines. But he hadn't. The prints of Duck Soup that were then widely-circulated in England simply had a lot of alternate lines from the prints circulated in the U.S. Chico especially seemed unable to say any chunk of dialogue precisely the same way from one take to the next." Learn something new every day.

So I just reached onto my bookshelf and found "Battlestar Galactica: The Photostory," which proudly proclaims on the cover "This is not a book! It is the biggest and best full-color photo-adventure ever!" It also goes on to note that this is from the Universal movie release, and it does in fact contain the scene of the evil Baltar being executed by the Cylons which is not in the TV movie cut as the character returned to be the villian in the TV series. It's fairly silly reading now, but then again we are talking Battlestar Galactica, not Tolstoy. I do see all the poor composite mattes and misaligned rotoscope animation effects for the lasers (excuse me, blasters) that I remembered. It was published by Berkley and has the credit "edited and adapted by Richard J. Anobile." Somewhere back at my parent's house I have a bunch of the old Star Trek TV series, which are probably from Pocket Books since that was Paramount's (Gulf & Western's) publishing arm. I don't think you get any grand knowledge of the productions from these, other than noting some bad lighting and how rough rephotographing a 35mm print can look. More a curiosity factor than anything else, and a chance for David & myself to relive our nerdy youths.

I guess my issue is that there's already something better that's commonly available--Super-16. Back in the day there was only regular 16mm and 35mm. Super-16 was introduced as a viable alternative and it took a good decade to really gain acceptance as a proper format. If Ultra-16 had come out first it may have seriously slowwed Super-16, but the fact is that Ultra-16 is a lesser format to Super-16. The only reason to use it is to keep 25+ year old cameras and lenses functioning. It's not really a step forward in that regard and will always be looked at as a lesser, bottom-feeder format. Super-16 is available on modern, new equipment with state of the art lenses and accessories. Using old cameras, old lenses, old transfer machines (such as at TFG Transfer, state-of-the-art 1978 gear) to get an inbetween result and then spend a small fortune for a Digital Intermediate -- well forgive me if I'm not too enthusiastic.

filmemporium.com

He also did them for many of the original Star Trek television episodes. And yes, I have them in my library as well. I actually really liked the Battlestar Gallactica fotonovel because it gave me a chance to really study the visual effects up close. Misaligned mattes and rotoscoping lines can really help a teenager learn the process. David, it's a wonder that we're both married.

You tell 'em David--get it off your chest. I don't want this to collapse into a Democrat v. Republican discussion or Liberal v. Conservative, especially when I think it would be so one-sided by the vast majority of posters here. But we must remember that a film production is a classic example of a Management & Labor situation, no matter how many people want to idealize it into some "filmmakers collective" concept. Management reaps the end benefit while labor toils away to make it happen, so therefore management should provide for the labors while they work to the management's eventual benefit. And that's what unions are there to make sure happens. Phil, I know England is a very different place than the US, but's it's not a different planet all together. I don't think you can realistically or historically justify your statements with any great veracity. They're just not realistic. Read "The Jungle." Last year I had some meetings with a first time producer/director with very Republican/conservative views. He went on about how he didn't feel that it was his responsibility to have to provide healthcare for everyone else whether it was through taxes or any other way. People should be go out and earn money to provide for themselves. Five minutes later he was telling me how he didn't want to pay anyone on his four week, six days per week feature more than $100/day. I guess in his mind film crews didn't deserve healthcare in any way if it was going to be on his dime.

It would be so nice if people indicated where they are when posting such messages. I'm in New York, but for all I know this is a job in Borneo.

Don't think this is true for the '85. About the same for the stock and the processing is double the price. But what a look.

Just checked the B&H website. They sell this mattebox with frontrod assembly for $999.95.

I'm really unclear as to what you're saying, and I fear that you missed my point entirely. The reason that I can make this stand to not be exploited is because the Unions exist and have been fighting this fight for some time. It was a big deal in the late 1800s when the Chicago meat packer unions finally won the right for workers to not have to regularly work 14 hour days, seven days per week. The standard work week in the US is now 40 hours, but it used to be more than 80. When I work on indie films I often work 72 (6 days @ 12 hours per). Even though I am not a member of the union, I benefit from the battles it has fought. I would not be able to enjoy the standards I work under now if the union had not been there.