David Mawson

Possibly because you haven't realised that films are about story? The book is about the director's role as the intermediary between the writer and the actors, not as a camera operator. (Which in fact is a job of its own - in other news, the director doesn't manage catering or hold a mic boom either..) Anyhoo. Obviously you've been mystified all these years why people study Godard and Hitchcock and Kurosawa, so it's just as well we've cleared that up... Obviously you must even more confused by the fact that screenwriters and directors study Aristotle's Poetics, Shakespeare's act structure and Lajos Egri's texts about play writing - I mean, Aristotle never owned a digital camera! (That's assuming you know who those people are, of course.)

I'm not sure who gave you the exclusive right to decide what a masterpiece is, but I'd say that The Lady Killers and TSOS certainly are, and a fair weight of opinion agrees with me. The comment about "cheesy soap opera" is possibly a symptom of your not very open-minded. Styles change: imaginative people look past that.

Unlike you the OP has seen the kitchen he wants to shoot in. It may well have no windows (mine hasn't - I live in an apartment and the kitchen is an internal room.) Which makes it damn well impossible to chop or saute anything without it being in shadow from the ceiling bulb. Fine for the human eye, lousy for the camera. Or his hob may be nowhere near the window and/or placed so he'll block the light when cooks. Etc, etc. Well, you can if Godox gives so many more lumens per buck without problems... To the OP - - My best suggestion is that you google for reviews of the Godox. Which you've probably already thought of. But pay particular attention to whether there are any problems, especially fan noise. (It seems to be slightly noisy and people often replace it.)

Anyway, my suggestion is that the first thing that the OP should do is to read Mackendrick's On Film. The book was written by a superb practising director who became probably the most loved and influential person ever to teach at a film school.

Then they have an affair with a colleague at the office and think how much easier life would be if their income doubled. You get home and find the locks have been changed and your joint bank account has been emptied...

Yes, but I don't care and nor will any other sensible person. We'd care if you gave an intelligent reasoned response. Just repeating that you haven't changed your mind without that intelligent response just reinforces the negative impression you've already made. So was Phil. (Only his was based in facts rather than fantasy.) Stop being hypocritical. I think the problem here is that you haven't managed to understand what you are reading, despite it's extreme simplicity and the number of chances you'e had. No one is talking about how to "develop talent." The issue here is the risk of investing years of your time and ruining your life. People need a fair warning of this risk. And people who give that warning shouldn't have to put up with abuse from the We Can All Be Special Snowflakes If We Wish Hard Enough Brigade. Yes, that warning might discourage people. But keeping people away from the truth because it might discourage them is a form of lying - it's shameful and, really, you should know better. Talent is something else altogether. (And I doubt you know anything about it, but that's another subject.)

That's just being gratuitously sensible.

...Well, it should get rid of the less pompous and pretentious ones, yes. Otoh, you could actually something meaningful like what short lighting is, how they'd colour balance their camera, what focal length they'd shoot a close up in, how they'd expose log, where skin tones should be on a vectorscope, etc. But that would select people who were actually competent at using a camera rather than posing with one. The time you should ask if someone has shot on film is if you are... shooting on film.

If you want to reach people by physical mail - Put the video online. Take a terrific still frame from that. Get a shortened version of the URL Print the still with the URL. Send that. ..And ad the link to your business card. But emailing the link is cheaper.

I think you're being unfair and harmful. Firstly, Phil was NOT "beating up" anyone. He was being realistic out of compassion. Secondly, if you are confusing "Helping someone do something they are very unlikely to do" and "Helping someone not to make a grave mistake." Phil's advice was excellent for the second. Quite simply, you're attacking someone and simply because they're mature enough not to encourage unrealistic fantasies and want someone to know the odds they face.

Again, my advice is to buy a $150 EOS-M body, one lens and a monopod or tripod, practice. Then add gear using the $1600 you'll still have handy, as you know what need. Or sell the EOS M (or 7D) for what you paid for it and buy the right camera. Which you'll be able to do safety at that point, because you'll know what you are doing rather than relying on Invented Facts merchants. Even if you decide you want a BM you'll be better off because you'll have let other people take the risk of buying the early models and finding out what's wrong and needs fixing. (BM has a truly horrible reputation for ignoring quality problems as long as possible - https://marvelsfilm.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/blackmagic-cameras-stuck-dead-pixels-problem-no-solution-offered/)

Like the 7D that Tiny Furniture was shot on. Or the 5Dii that was used for Captain America. ...I think you need to learn the difference between hysterical claims and logic, Tyler. You don't make things that are untrue truer by shouting and going red in the face. Obviously a camera that can shoot a high feature budget or an indy hit that gets into Criterion's catalogue isn't "useless". Insisting it is just makes you look silly. The BM is better, yes. Different. Yes. And you still haven't bought ND filters or audio gear - because the poor OP probably imagines that he can use the camera mic and you haven't told him this is a bad idea. And your entire spend on a tripod is less than a Benro S6 head, meaning you're either buying a toy or gambling on a used fluid head to be in good condition. Now, it might well be worth the OP stretching his budget to do what you say. (Although if he does, then someone should warn him that you want him to buy used lenses from a brand notorious for falling apart after a couple of years...) But that is up to him to decide based on facts, rather than BS you invent to cover your ass Let's count them the absolutely untrue statements you've made - 1. You can't buy cheap cameras that WB in Kelvin 2. You can't use the native format of the 7D etc for serious work 3. You can't edit if you shoot in raw 4. No one shoots on DSLRs any more. Just tell the truth and stick to what you actually know, yes? Don't make statements about every cheap camera on the market unless you're actually reasonably familiar with every manufacturer's products. Check to see if anyone has shot a successful feature using a camera or codec, etc.

This is both snobbish and ignorant. People have shot films that I'm pretty damn sure outweigh your entire career with "still" cameras, eg The film got added to the Criterion collection, distributed by IFC, won two awards at SXSW, and got Lena Dunham a show of her own at HBO. Shot on a 7Di without even using raw. Or Like Crazy was shot with a 5Dii and bought for almost 20 times its production cost by Paramount. ...So you may feel more important clutching a larger sized box, but the audience and distributors don't care. This is doubly nonsense. First of all, even if the body wasn't good enough, the other $1850 would be spent on gear you could carry on using later. And you'd be able to re-sell the body, so you'd be out, what, $25-$50 when you upgraded? Second, again you simply seem to invent pseudo-facts. People do shoot commercial work on those cameras today. (Trust me: go check videography posts on reddit.) You might not feel up to doing so but if so that's about you and has nothing to do with anyone else. And a $150 EOS M with the latest version of Lantern will get significantly better image quality than Tiny Monsters was shot with - and no one has any problems with that film's image quality. And if you want to spend more you can buy a 7Di or 5Dii and get even better image quality - and still spend a fraction of the cost of a BM, letting you buy the other stuff you need. Yes, a BM will shoot better again. (Or at least more easily.) But one won't fit inside a $2000 budget with lenses, a usable tripod, power, ND, etc. You simply can't learn to how shoot cinematically without a fluid head and slider. Wahhing about better image quality is silly when it means you can't learn the essentials, which is the point here. It's like telling someone to buy a fast comfortable car to learn to drive in and ignoring the fact they can only afford it if they forego having a reverse gear. It's better to forgo a little comfort and speed and to actually be able to learn to parallel park. And seriously - someone should warn this poor guy about the need for ND filters - and myabe an IR cut - and audio gear. If his film school didn't explain what a prime was or crop factor is, he probably doesn't know what an ND filter is and thinks the in-camera mic will do. If the OP can stretch his budget to fit a BM and the other gear he needs, great. But if he's tight on money, then really, invented facts and false claims aside, he won't have any problems if he needs to save a $1000 bucks by swapping to that cheap EOS M body.

Yes. But if you're a big enough idiot that you can't learn what shutter angle is without this, then you shouldn't be using electricity anyway. But is your opinion worth anything as evidence, as you seem to think? Well, no. Because what you feel in you tummy is not a fact, which is what we need to look at. The fact is that you're not supposed to edit raw. You transcode to an editable format - an operation with edits about 0.1% to the effort that editing takes. Yes, it would better not to have to do this - even minor reductions in effort are good. But enough so to justify paying at least 5x more for a body and speedbooster? Again, if you can't cope with the minimal extra effort, you shouldn't be trying to learn to shoot - you're wasting your time because other things you have to do are a thousand times harder and more laborious. Paying $1200 for a body instead of $150 because you're such an idiot that otherwise you'll never understand shutter angle, a concept an averagely intelligent 10 year old could master, and because you don't want the effort of of clicking on a file to transcode it, is just silly. At least when you're on a total $2000 budget and have other stuff to buy. There are reasons to buy a BM in many circumstances - better image quality, ease of achieving the same. But buying one because you think you can't edit work shot in raw would just be stupid.

..And whatever you, leave money to buy a tripod or you're going nowhere. Even if you have a camera with IBIS, too many camera moves need "sticks". Buy a used set of legs and a decent new - or as new - fluid head. I'd be suspicious of anything cheaper than a Benro S6. You should really learn to use a slider too, but you can compromise quality more there (imo) or even diy one. If you're learning to use a camera then you're learning framing, focal length choice, colour balance, professional exposure techniques (which are aimed at maximising dynamic range and can be quite different) and camera "moves". That's why you manual focus, vector scope, false colour, log or raw, and a fluid head. But once you've got those, you're good to go - more money spent won't help you learn more once you have those things.

We were mostly talking about the operating style affecting the whole visual style. Nope. And if you're any good, it shouldn't. You go in knowing what shots you want (hello - storyboard, shot list, shooting set-up diagrams?) And you bloody well get them without being distracted by what font the GUI on the camera uses. If you're thrown off by the difference between a GM1 and a C100, you need to get your act together.

Sam - A prime is a lens that doesn't zoom. Image quality and brightness are usually much higher for the same price. A typical 3 prime set up would be a wide or semi-wide, a standard lens, and a moderate telephoto. In fullframe terms, something like a 28mm, a 50mm, and a 85mm. Whole movies have been shot with this lens range. Or even less - eg Rosemary's Baby or The Wrestler. A cheap aps-c set-up with all those tools you need to learn like vector scopes would be an EOS-M with Magic Lantern, a modern Chinese 25mm, a vintage 50mm and a wide angle converter. That would get you 30, 40, and 80mm full frame equivalents for $600-800. You could add a decent vintage 135mm or 200mm lens for another $50-$100 if you ever wanted to play with more severe perspective compression.

Again, you haven't thought this through. They can alter the final look - but often not by much once you've compensated by eg using a wider aperture on a faster camera. But that has nothing to do with your claim. Which wasn't that there would be a minor impact on aesthetics - how polished a rendition of a style might be - but that camera system meaningfully limits the style you can learn to shoot in. Once again, with less than a $1000 of body and lenses, you can shoot like Ozu, Kurosawa, Godard, and in a mainstream style. Your "anamorphic" will low quality, but you can still practice Kurosawa's blocking. You'll have problem's shooting like Ozu because you won't be able to afford the sets he relied on - but you can shoot Dogville style, and that isn't a camera system problem anyway. This true, obvious, and irrelevant to the ridiculous claim you made and I'm debunking. Camera body, once you reach a level of sufficiency you can easily buy for $150, does not sanely restrict the style you can shoot in. Your claim was ridiculous, your defense defied basic rules of logic, and you're continuing to hide behind nonsense. Yes. But that doesn't stop you from shooting in a particular style except in very rare case. Eg every 50mm lens made might have its own imaging style, but so what? Variations will normally be so minor that you - and I mean personally - wouldn't be able to tell a Contax F1.4 from a Pentacon f1.8 once they're at f5.6 and have bee through post. And nothing about those slight differences impact your ability to learn a shooting style. The idea that you can't learn to shoot Ozu 360 dialogue without exactly the lens he used is utter piffle. Honestly, you've made one of the silliest claims I've ever seen on the Internet. I can only believe that you don't know what actual cinematographic style is.

Unless Stanley Kubrick was shooting it... (I'm sure everyone knows his reputation for re-takes, but according to Paul Thomas Anderson, he also used very small crews. It's funny, trust me...) ..Does anyone know often Super 35 film cameras had to be serviced to be safe for production use? 20 meters of film per minute times a c. two hour production times a shooting ratio of ten to one is, what, 20km of film? Or 100km with St Stanley directing. That sounds like a lot of work for a camera.

If you use one of the Canons that run Magic Lantern (the EOS-M is the smallest - in fact it makes an XE2 seem large) then you get a "super viewfinder" with programmable zebras, false colour, vector scope, a really nice spot meter, etc. They make very nice tools for viewing lighting and they can do all the other jobs a viewfinder or hybrid camera can.

Once again, this nonsense. Because - 1.Cameras really do not have a style 2. You can easily change lenses - including by renting as well as buying 3. In fact, a lot of styles can be shot with the same focal lengths. I gave examples to show this, but you don't seem to understand. (You should probably find out what a jump cut is and who Ozu was.) This is just nonsense - literal nonsense, in that it is the Argument By Conclusion fallacy. Yes, Alexas are widely used. But do they impose a single style? Well, were Skyfall and Hugo shot in the same style? No. You're being silly. Style is a product of framing, camera movement, lighting, editing. Not Alexa vs Red.

That would be one hell of a speed booster. The standard models give you a 0.7 shift in FL. The very expensive XL models manage 0.64. And the XLs cost enough so that it would be cheaper to buy a used 5Dii and shoot full frame raw to get the original FL back. You can but fairly nice wide angle converters from high-end makers like Raynox very cheaply on ebay sometimes. The tolerable ones top out at 0.7x (and even then you'll need to correct for barrel distortion.) But if you put one on the front of a lens and a Zhongyi or Viltrox 0.7 booster on the back of the lens, then you'll get back the original FL and gain a stop in aperture. Quality won't be perfect, but it should be good enough for a lot of shots.

Nearly all of the low-end beginner cameras, don't really teach "cinematography" language like shutter angle or kelvin color balance. You shouldn't need a camera to teach you shutter angle - it's something you should understand completely with about two minutes of reading. And any camera running Magic Lantern - which should really be the default for a low-end beginner camera - will white balance in Kelvin. I'm pretty sure that Fujis allow this too. And most Canons even without ML. So it's actually a common feature. Any camera with Magic Lantern will have these. But you still have to add a decent power set-up. And this is not a camera you can hold your eye and shoot, so you need a tripod and fluid head. Add in memory cards and you really are looking at more like $3000. And then you'd better have a beast mode PC for editing. Otoh, you can buy an EOS-M for $150, install Magic Lantern and get all those tools, and get then a decent three prime set-up for another $150-300. You don't have a power problem that a couple$20 of generic batteries won't solve and you have plenty of money left over for support - even an HD editing PC if you need one. You won't get 4K and you'll have a couple of stops less DR, but do those things actually affect the learning process? People shot career making films like Tiny Furniture on the 7D Mk i (which you can buy for just a little more than the M, but has drawbacks as well as pluses) and the current stage of Magic Lantern development means you'll be shooting at a higher level of quality than that. The BM is nice, but while I completely agree with your emphasis on getting advanced tools, I think underestimate the real lower cost options. (I'm guessing that you must have heard of ML but didn't realise that it runs on a lot of the cheaper Canon aps-c bodies as well as the 5Dii and 5Diii?)

If "extreme" means beyond the point of reason and diminishing returns, yes. Once again, those lenses don't let you pull focus properly. Why on earth would you want that in a camera you're buying for learning with? What gain in learning are you getting from the BM that makes up for this? With a cheaper body that runs Magic Lantern and a more balanced spend you can learn to pull focus, use a slider and a steadicam, shoot with a wide range of focal lengths, expose for SOOC, log, or raw. You'd even have money left over for lights and audio. Yes, the BM makes it easier to get good image quality (ignoring the problems from lack of other gear) but it lets you learn less - you're replacing a complete DOP school set-up with a point-and-shoot.

The first of these sentences has nothing to with the second: there is no logic or reality to what you are saying. You can shoot classic dialogue following the 180 degree rule and Ozu style with the same camera. You can shoot classical continuity style and jump cuts with the same camera. You can shoot a chase scene with a steadicam and a wide angle one day and a tripod and a long tele the next and use the same camera body - and long teles are cheap on ebay. Then you can shoot the next week's chase from a wheelchair or a skateboard, or a drone. Same camera. As long as your camera body has a decent codec and lenses are available at a reasonable cost then it won't reasonably confine you at all. Lighting certainly might - there are things you can't do without a huge lighting budget. But a $150 EOS-M shooting 14 bit raw with an ebayed old f1.2 lens and a Chinese speedbooster would let you do something as insane as shooting the candlelight scene from Barry Lyndon. You can learn to shoot 95% of the styles shot through cinematic history with a single cheap camera system: shooting style and camera system have almost nothing to do with each other.