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Will Barber

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Everything posted by Will Barber

  1. Did NOT expect to see someone from my school on this list when I clicked on it. Went to college with Colin Shepherd, great guy. He's actually deaf, but that doesn't affect what he's able to do, and actually probably had a big impact on the way he was able to think visually. I remember seeing that film at the first public screening at the end of the semester at school, it's enjoyable and well executed, and I'm glad to see one of my colleagues get recognized!
  2. Thanks for the advice! I agree with you completely about that, and that will be my next addition for sure.
  3. Hey all, I've been around here before but it's been a while so I figured I'd introduce myself. My name is Will Barber, and I'm a cinematographer. I'm recently out of film school, and have been working at Maine Media Workshops since May. My job here ends in November, and after that I'm shooting a short film (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sherman-senior-thesis-film-by-patrick-hogue#/) for a senior at the school I went to (feel free to donate if you're so inclined, every tiny amount helps). However, my main mission here is not to fundraise for the film, but to share my work and get some opinions on my website, portfolio, and my work options going forward. I plan to move to NYC in early December, and my dream is to work completely freelance in the city. I've been looking for and applying to jobs, but having the flexibility to determine when I work and what I do is very appealing to me, though of course a job brings security and consistency. So any opinions anyone might have on my options for work in the future would be greatly appreciated. So, without further ado: http://willbarberfilm.com
  4. https://vimeo.com/128315805 Password: experience Here's a short I shot last year. Used Blackmagic Pocket, with Metabones Speedbooster to Nikon Lenses. Tokina 11-16, Nikon 17-35 f/2.8, Nikon 50 f/1.8, Nikon 85 Tilt/Shift (no regular 85 available). The slow motion was done on the Sony FS700 with Zeiss CP2, a 35 and 50 I think. The reason I'm posting is that this film just got its first film festival honor for best screenwriting, and I thought you all might enjoy watching it. It's been a while since it was finished and even longer since it was shot, so I've had plenty of time to meditate on my decisions/self-criticize, and I'd be interested to hear what you personally like and dislike about the style I used and what I did. I know a lot of what I'd do differently; some things I wish I had thought of on set, others were beyond my capability at the time, and still others are purely hindsight from knowledge I've gained since filming this. So again, really any thoughts you have about this film I'd be really grateful to hear. I hope you enjoy it! I think it's a pretty enjoyable, quirky little film.
  5. A guy here at our school had the same problem with the 500T. I believe they got it eventually, but ended up having to reschedule a night shoot cause all they had that day was 200. They may have gotten it from a different source though. What I believe the problem was may have been a bad batch of film, if my memory serves me right, so they didn't have any available for a while. I can ask later when the guys are around school though. It's a sad day when you can't get the film you want in Rochester where they make the damn stuff.
  6. What for, and why do you want to know? If you're trying to establish a studio catering to commercial shoots you may want to include a nice looking "client" area, but if you're only going for films you may not need that. A cyc wall is a plus. For mid level you wouldn't have to go all out, but a nice cyc that renters could paint white, black, green, whatever would definitely be an incentive to use your space. The reason I ask why you want to know is if you're making a studio space to rent to others your concerns may be different than if you're just making one for personal/company use, though I'd say David's suggestions are a pretty good place to start for either perspective.
  7. The worst feeling is to know exactly how you want to do something and not be able to do it. I hate lighting day interiors from the inside, but I actually did it last weekend and was pretty satisfied with the result. All I ended up using was a 1.2K booklight and a couple Litepanels. I've done similar things even with Tungsten lights and gels, and still kept it backlit. It's a real pain in the ass when all it'd really take is a rig like that through the window. The biggest thing I'm looking forward to as LED lighting improves is saving on the cost of power. When you're working with LEDs, it takes a lot less to run them, which makes rigs like this more accessible to smaller productions. Even what we have now is awesome, the Astra EP draws 110W at the output of around a soft 575HMI. The Mactech lights are pretty nice too, the 960W model is pretty bright for under 1000W.
  8. There's a few methods to getting a light up there. Hell of a lot safer than a big stand. I TA'd for this gaffer at some workshops http://www.moflam.com/moflam.com/Photos.html#18 He really does some extreme setups.
  9. Everyone who touches it at my school is very disappointed. I predicted at the beginning of the year that no one besides me would be able to make it work for them, because I'm the only one who actually read up and was able to avoid the flaws of the camera. Even then, I wish I had been able to capture my lighting efforts more accurately, and should've just used the FS700 for the whole thing.
  10. After looking at their site, the example photos on the 150mm version are what look super unsafe. The 100mm version photos have a lot better setups, with the "C" of the clamp adding a 3rd point of contact that would resist spinning. It does look like a really handy device.
  11. Have you encountered any issues with it falling sideways, rotating on that screw? Doesn't seem particularly safe to me, based on my experience with C-clamps, though I admit it looks pretty beefy compared to the ones I've used.
  12. It seems you solved the issue, but GoPro had an app to transcode it to Cineform, I'd imagine you could change the framerate in that as well. You could've also used 5DtoRGB, which is free if you don't need batch transcodes and gives you ProRes, I don't recall if that does framerate changes. Also Adobe Media Encoder could've given you ProRes or DNxHD and changed framerate. Honestly I'm surprised FCPX doesn't handle a mixed timeline without putting a special effect on it.
  13. Thanks for clearing that up. I don't really use booklights at all, but that makes sense now.
  14. A couple weeks ago. If you squint, you can make out my LED "sun" above the car. I love those little guys for some super guerilla shooting. Second pic is returning to the location with my sodium vapors and a genny for the final showdown scene. Can't wait to share the trailer with you all.
  15. Have you tried transcoding it at all before editing? That seems like a strange issue, most modern editing systems should have no problem with mismatched framerates or codecs like that. I'd try converting it to Prores or Cineform before editing, see if that helps.
  16. I'll be sure to share what I can, but it likely won't be for a while because we don't want to release too much info on the film. It's sad, because I'd love to show people how well this camera works. I'll be sure to let people know once it's screening in festivals. If we get some free time with the camera we were thinking about shooting a little extra footage and posting it online, but I doubt we'll get that. We nearly rented one for an entire month from NYC, in which case we would've had a lot more downtime with the camera, but settled for just doing weekends because we got a deal on the camera and lenses locally. And as a person who doesn't own much gear, certainly not much professional gear, the main drawback to investing in the RED system seems to be the media cost, their SSDs are ridiculous. The LCD screen, sure, whatever. But I mean besides those things and the cost of cables, there's not much you need to get the camera up and running. Maybe a bit more to get it rigged up to fully function in a super professional environment, but if I was at that level I'd probably have different considerations and not even own a camera at all. But for me personally with the Dragon sensor it's finally become a camera worth using, and with the low cost of the Raven body, a camera more worth owning.
  17. I think I understand what you're saying. Basically the booklight, while cutting intensity, enables you to fill the frame more and evenly, so that though you have to move it closer, it becomes softer because of size. But what about a hypothetical situation, lets say distance of the setup stays the same. You have a 1k Redhead barndoored which fills your 4x4 of 216, or a 2k Blonde with 250 clipped on it, cut and scrimmed to fill the same frame at the same intensity. The 4x4 is still the source at the same distance and size. The amount of wrap would stay the same because of the size of the source, but wouldn't it still be softer at the same intensity because there's more diffusion in front of the light? That's what leads me to say the booklight is adding another dimension of diffusion by going first into a bounce before the frame, because obviously you can't always move the light closer to the subject to compensate for the lost intensity, and rather use a larger light into the same setup to get the same intensity with a softer light.
  18. I used the Epic Dragon on a shoot last weekend, and I've gotta say that sensor is incredible. Dragoncolor2 with REDlogfilm is the best color I've ever seen straight out of the camera. All it took was 2 minutes in Resolve to get a base grade, and another couple minutes to get something very close to a final look. We're shooting in 4k 2:1. I've never worked with the old sensor so I can't attest to it's accuracy, but the Dragon is the first RED I've actually considered acceptable. There were very few cables to deal with, all we were running was one for the LCD and one for the Bomb. We could've run an XLR in for scratch, but ya know film didn't have any scratch so that's not really putting us back any, plus we were running some complex handheld shots and an XLR may have killed me. We also ran out SDI to a small handheld monitor for my director, and it was nice not to have to use an adapter like on the RED One. Functionally, there were a couple things that bothered me. The RED EVF mount doesn't go far enough forward to put the Bomb in the right place for proper handheld. The cheeseplate on top of the camera doesn't have a 3/8" screw hole (which would've allowed me to use my longer noga arm) so I was forced to wrestle with a shorter arm which had 2x 1/4" screws, and using an EVF on an arm like that is a pain. Also having to use a breakout for timecode isn't cool. It'd be nice to have some more standard SDI ports for timecode, non-RED monitoring, etc. Long story short, helluva great camera but not without its shortcomings. Looks beautiful with old Zeiss Standard Speeds. I'm interested in the Raven primarily because not every production can afford even the Epic Dragon, and based on my success with this camera I'd like to be able to bring a similar quality to those smaller productions. The price of buying it doesn't really phase me, cause honestly you're talking about a brain that's 5x cheaper than the Epic Dragon entering a rental ecosystem that is already heavily invested in the proprietary accessories. So those have already paid themselves off, you're looking at a reeeeeally cheap rental on these things. And who knows, if people ask me to shoot enough on the thing and I'm making money on it, why wouldn't I buy one?
  19. A booklight will make a source softer than the same light just through the same diffusion. You're either using a soft bounce like white, which will scatter more before the diff, or a harder bounce, which adds distance between the fixture and diff and thus creates a larger source on the diff, causing the light to be softer. So a booklight would be good for where you don't have space to get the light far enough from the diff to create a large enough source to wrap/be as soft as you want. But the side effect is that light gets everywhere and if you don't have the grip equipment to deal with that it can be a bit of a pain. So Robyn, you're kind of right in that its really the size of the diff frame that matters in terms of softness, but also a booklight can make light softer by using a soft bounce to double diff the light. As actually in the example I posted earlier for this thread, I put a Joker 800 through opal, decided it wasnt soft enough, and added a sheet of 216 or 250 to the fixture in addition to the opal. Similar effect to using a booklight. The opal is still the "source" but the light coming into it is already soft. Unless you're making your booklights with a mirror, you're definitely adding softness before the diff frame.
  20. I just got done with a short film on the Cion, 8 days of shooting. Full 4K, Prores 422 HQ. I can attest that the highlight issues are true, though you can still underexpose a stop and push it no problem in post. But sometimes you get a weird flicker in the shadows, some sort of fixed pattern noise. It's mostly in the completely black areas of the frame, though I saw it creep into the lower mids. It happened inconsistently, sometimes 2 scenes with nearly the same lighting would come out differently concerning the noise, which leads me to believe it might be an overheating of the sensor causing it. The camera is Fairly easy to color grade, though the white balance settings are crap. I shot everything at Unity, which to my understanding is no white balance, and it's easy to correct that using the gamma wheel and vectorscope. But the tungsten setting causes a nastly blue tint over the entire screen, as with the fluorescent. Daylight (corrected from Unity) looks beautiful on this camera, as long as you're able to expose for your subject and the sky at the same time. Sometimes to do this I had to underexpose a stop or 2 on my subject because blown out highlights on the Cion are the worst I've ever seen on a camera, with a NASTY bluish fringing surrounding the pure white blown out area. Basically the highlight rolloff is crap, happens way too early above good exposure. It's very hard to shoot in a location and balance for the windows, and letting them blow out is absolutely not an option with this camera. For reportedly having the same sensor as the Blackmagics, they're basically a step behind where Blackmagic was with the 2.5k, with the only advantage over that old camera being framerate and resolution. I don't know about you, but framerate and resolution don't sell cameras for me, the integrity of the image is what sells. ISO wise, you cannot use this camera over 500. Don't even try. You gain almost no exposure because you're not able to use Log gamma on 800 and 1000. I wish I got the chance to use it with AJA Raw. We have 2 Cions at school now, so I'll probably be testing that in the spring to see if it improves the image. But honestly the Ursa FAR outperforms this camera at a comparable price point, even with the $5000 summer price. And CFast is barely more expensive than AJA Paks, though the price is dropping while the price of AJA Paks is likely to remain what it is. That being said, in a controlled environment, yes I'm sure you can create a beautiful image with this camera. I know I did some of my best work ever with it. I'll post a trailer once we get it cut and graded and get the website up. Maybe some of you will feel inclined to donate to the campaign, we'll likely be offering both an HD and UHD download. If anyone has any questions or would like clarification, please ask, I'd love to answer as well as I can. On the flipside, just started 8 days on the RED Dragon and I'm in love.
  21. I don't know what the exact watt output on that thing is, but I know the Kinos it powers aren't very strong. May be possible to run LED's off it, but you'd have to solder on the 1/4" connector.
  22. There's a lot of options for doc cameras, it depends on how you'd like to shoot. If you already have Canon glass and are renting rather than buying, a c100 may be a good option. Canon's great for battery life, and with the compression in that camera you'll be able to shoot forever on a couple 64gb cards. If you want a more all in one system, I'd go for the XF300/305, those are pretty standard and create a great image. I hear the Sony EX1 isn't too bad either :P Since you are looking at the Canon g20, I'm guessing you're looking for something a little less pricey, but if you're used to a 6D you may end up very aggravated with the lack of professional features on the cheaper handicam style cameras. There's a decent set of cameras in the $2500 range that I see a lot of ENG shooters in my area using and would probably do what I could to get something like that if I were in your shoes.
  23. http://www.red.com/tools/recording-time Use that, plus your calculations of how many minutes you might shoot to calculate an estimated storage size. I'd say for something like a music video or short film, 2TB would be fine, but you'll definitely want to do the math to be sure. I'd also get extra storage, you never know what might happen. I personally would recommend the Lacie Porsche 3TB, it's about $140 on Amazon right now. The 5TB isn't too much more either.
  24. If you're looking to learn, perhaps look at a week at Maine Media Workshops. It's an immersive atmosphere, and a week there is equivalent to taking a 3 credit class for a semester. They have classes from introductory to advanced, and the classes are MUCH more focused than in an actual college environment.
  25. Based on the quality of light on the chair shot, I'd say they were using a large diffused source, like an HMI through a 6x6 or larger silk, shaped with flags to kill the spill on the wall, and using some sort of white bounce for fill. The sink shot looks like something smaller but similar, using the window as a natural fill/edge, and adding something like a Kino off the right side for key. If your window is going to be in the shot, then you'd obviously have a place to start. I personally prefer not to rely on the sun, but if it's giving you what you want then it'll obviously work for you. I might suggest looking for some sort of small HMI if possible, like a 575 Arri or 800 Joker, with either a 4x4 frame or a Chimera for the key. Even 4x4 daylight Kinos would work, but you'd likely need diffusion on them still, and possibly to double them up behind a single frame of diffusion. My main issue with Kinos personally is that they lose a lot of intensity quickly, which is difficult to work with when you're trying to fight the sun. I did a similar high key setup using just a Joker 400 with a pice of 250 through a frame of opal as the key, which allowed the ambient light in the room to fill it.
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