John Allardice

I think it was David Puttnam who said . " The best editors can turn a good movie into a great movie, a mediocre movie into a good movie, and a bad movie into a short movie." :)

another classic Connie Hall set of daylight flares, the ones flickering through the fence in the raindrops keep falling on my head sequence from "Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid".

y'know, I've no idea if that is sublimely brilliant or hopelessly stupid .....it's probably both.

Just saw it, loved the look, a nice semi-emulation of Chris Doyle, without following the style slavishly. Also liked the 'avengers/prisoner' touch you brought to the scenes with their agent, there was definitely a slightly retro-thing going on there with the framing. Loved the love scene in the woods in the latter 1/3rd of the movie....it just screamed Alex Thompson at me.....dunno if that was intentional or not. Dont want to make it sound as if you were just copying others work. I really liked the style, wouldn't neccesarrily say it was a perfect fit for that story, but that's more the directors choice than yours. Were you happy with the DI? it seemed a little soft, but not sure if that was an aspect of the DVD transfer or not.

Not helpful, Phil. J

Just started airing nationally today I Directed, shot & cut. VFX by SWAY Studios , Los Angeles http://swayftp.com/Hyundai_HNCS_0114.htm

It wasn't actually a question of expanded disk space, but more a question of lowering the compression ratio, with the cropped picture being only 67%(anamorphic) or 74%(spherical) of the original size, it would theoretically lower your 27MB/s from 11.7:1 compression, to 7.9:1 compression (or 8.7:1 compression) .....that's gotta be worth something :)

The math works out this way you'd have to vertically crop the width to 3048 to get a 1.2 pre-anamorphic aspect ratio so 3048*2540 = 7,741,920 pixels shoot spherical & crop the height to 1884 4520 x 1884 = 8,515,680 pixels its a 9.99% increase in picture area. At that difference, I think it comes down to a matter of asthetic preference, as to whether you want your anamorphic artifacts or not. As a sidebar, I still think it'd be a great idea to be able to tell the Red to pre-crop your picture to specific parameters BEFORE ENCODING, thereby saving your 27MB/s just for the info you intend to use.

Not to put too fine a point on it but, bullshit... you're talking as if pre '77 was some golden age of intellligent SF movies, whereas in reality for every '2001' we had a hundred "Moon Zero Two"s. The financial success of the series gave the studios confidence to invest in SF again....yeah, we got a lot of garbage, but to quote Sturgeons Law. "Sure 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud". If the overall output of SF films go up, by all rights so will the number of gems..as well as the number of turds. Without Star Wars there would have been no Blade Runner, Contact or Brazil

looking to stay

Meteors budget was $16m, one and a half times that of ALIEN. Alien was also shot with no motion control and simple double exposures. J

It's an odd thing, wider lenses,( not just wider compositions) play better for broad comedy. The only comedic style I've ever really seen work in longer-lens stuff is the sort of knowing, slick, one-liners. Shane Blacks stuff comes to mind, "Last Boy Scout" & "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" are both very funny movies (to me, anyway) but are both farly long lensed. Strange...broad & slapstick plays best wide. Slick & smart-aleck plays better long. Discuss J

Heathans...you see these spots as cheesy or corny, but at the time (30 years ago, remember that) they were fresh, evocative, nostalgic and gorgeous. There was maybe 3 or 4 guys in the world doing ad work that actually looked as if they cared about the work. The Scotts, Alan Parker & Hugh Hudson were the apex of the industry then. Jeezus, the Scotts are still up there 3 decades later.

Blatant trolling...Not by you, Dominik, but by the original writer

...and who exactly appointed you as the arbiter of quality and taste for the cinematic world? This is the worst kind of artistic snobbery. The assumption that because something is popular that its automatically poop. Whilst the studios embark on these endeavors as an obviously calculated moneymaking exercise, ( and why not, they don't make any money, we don't get any more movies) apart from above-the-line talent, these movies are made by people like us. They're out there working, trying to do the best possible job they can using the time & budget allotted, they're not deliberately out to make poop, why would they? I'm not defending this particular movie. I thought frankly, that it was it was an uninspired adaptation of a middle-of-the-road potboiler. But to dismiss it in such an uninformed an arbitrary fashion is pretty foul, coming from someone who supposedly likes cinema, ( if you didn't you wouldn't be here, right?) This kind of elitism actually works against good cinema, making the public more wary of 'art-house' projects. It propogates the idea that 'art' in cinema should not, under any circumstances, attempt to be enjoyable. "One should never attend the cinema to be entertained, that is just for the great unwashed, one should attend only for intellectual, social or political enlightenment". It's the sort of thought process that holds Brecht in higher regard that Shaw or Wilde. Why? Because the latter two were actually popular...so therefore they must be woth less artistically It's also bullshit Popular cinema does not need to be mindless, it often IS, but the fact that it is enjoyable, accessable and occasionally profitable entertainment is not what MAKES it mindless. end of rant. J

Actually the was no greenscreen involved in that show, the backgrounds were all rear-projected. J

Digital Domain's commercial division added the Ipod a couple of years ago for some big keynote speech Steve Jobs was giving on the 20th anniversary of the mac, all had to be done very hush hush...as no-one had told Ridley. J

Ah, the apotheosis of 80's buddy movies...a film where everything is cranked to '11', including Ward Russels' photography, which seems to be trying to emulate Jeff Kimball on speed. One of the guiltiest cinema pleasures of the last 20 years. J

Yeah, it's much easier to time everything down to match the 95% of footage that shot under bleak, drab, concrete colored skies, than to try and match the 5% of your footage that's actually gonna be sunny. ...and anyone who thinks i'm joking hasn't spent enough time in the UK. J

If so, then they've been going through it for over 100 years, visual effects have been around for as long as movies have. There's nothing inherent in CG that makes it more worthy of scorn than, miniatures, glass mattes, painted cyc's, puppetry or pyro, all of which Melies was using in 1902 J

I find a lot of the fault lies, nowadays, with the newer trend in FX houses towards the digital "artist'...It's a sad truth that the older generation of fx guys, ( the ones who come from a backround in FILMMAKING) are being pushed aside by the art school graduates who've learnt how to push pixels in maya. It's a different asthetic nowadays....we're seeing an increasing move towards an overtly art-directed "painterly' look in cg ( in features anyway, the best fx work on the planet is still reserved for commercials) and there seems to be a feeling that it doesnt have to look photoreal, as long as it's 'pretty'. A horrible concept An example, I spent a few years at Digital Domain recently and saw the development of the 'Stealth' stuff there, the work went from rough, to more refined, to gorgeously photoreal....and was then consequently pushed too far to the technically exellent but thoroughly overworked 'hypereal' styling that it was eventually released with. I think it takes a strong director to pull the work back from that point, to a place that it fits with the look that he and the DP have defined for the film. Or you go the PJ route and make absolutely every shot in the film art directed to oblivion. Funnily enough though, I didnt mind the stylising of Kong too much...it's very much a fantasy picture anyway. As long as the fx work is consistent with the look of the rest of the film, the job's been done, and done well. J

If you're trying to assert that aquisition format has no bearing on picture quality, i.e. that a 4x difference in data rate is just 'mumbo jumbo', then there isn't much point in continuing this. J

that should really read.. 1. Pick a HD camera that costs under $10k that scans progressive and creates an OK 24p picture or Pick a HDV camera that costs under $10k that scans interlaced and creates the BEST 24p picture on the market? the only flavour of HD that the canon can record natively is the prosumer 25Mbs HDV format , the panasonic however records both 720p & 1080I ( progressive encoded with pulldown) with the 100Mbs DVCPRO HD stream. The BEST 24p (sic) picture on the market?...in an HDV stream?....I dont think so J

Most of the guys that I made my living by doing previs for over the past few years would disagree with you. Try telling Fincher. " Oh, a sketch'll do for now, we'll just work it out on set." That smacking sound would be the door hitting you in the ass on the way out of the studio. :) J BTW...is that ILM Scott Squires?

Heh, I'd love to see you draw the difference between a 21mm and a 27mm prime, or a 35mm & 40mm. J