Jaan Shenberger

as a general rule, progressive footage is a lot easier to deal with when keying, in addition to making it less complicated when performing transforms (rotations, scaling, etc.) when you mix the shot into the final composited shot. as david mentioned, make sure you remove the pulldown for 24p footage, whether upon capture or when you import the footage into the compositing software (most have this option). if you've never shot dv25 for greensceen before, you're gonna have some challenges pulling a good greenscreen matte, though. there's lots of info online describing various recipes and techniques to optimize the key, so it might be a good idea to look them up before the shoot. hope this helps.

i'm not an electrician, but i've shot kinda a lot using residential and industrial house power. the 2000w figure is a great rule of thumb and you can often use it all without problems, but in my experience, if it's a residential house and you don't have the time to intermittently reset the breakers and lose a few takes, i'd try to use like a 1000w and a 750w tungsten on one circuit, for some head room. i've had 2000w units pop the circuit on a late model house, even though there is nothing else on it. if it's an industrial location (like a warehouse, etc.), they often have greater capacity per circuit, though i forget the exact number. some other things i've learned from experience... if possible, before shooting, try to figure out what outlets go to what circuits. you can do this by plugging in lights to various outlets and then playing musical chairs on the breaker box. this might save you time near the end of the day when you're changing setups at a faster pace than planned and are moving lights around the house. of course, the inhabitants of the house will have to be okay with reseting their clocks and vcrs, etc. and if it's an older house that uses fuses instead of breakers, it might be worth it to just find another location. hope this helps.

it's highly likely that you have, but just don't know it... the best vfx are the ones that are invisible.

a sound designer told me that the lord of the rings movies were 95+% ADR. it's more understandable since they probably had to create so many different language versions for that kind of film, and with such extensive sound effects.

not to be a downer, but 15 minutes of 'classic disney'/'bluth in his prime' quality animation would take a team of about 50 similar-experienced animators (meaning some of the best traditional animators that ever lived) about 6 months. when people speak of how challenging and time consuming good animation is (especially traditional hand drawn), there is no exagerration. you'll wanna ditch hand-painting the cels. there are several software packages available that can handle that very nicely, and give you great control over editing your palettes as things progress. you'll also be finishing digitally, which is hugely advantageous over shooting layers on a camera stand. you can finish at 4k res and just get a filmout if necessary. also, get a simple & quick digital/video pencil tester. that will make a huge difference in time. if you all are doing this to get jobs in the animation industry, i would highly suggest that you make a 1 or 2 minute animated film, and concentrate on making that film as high quality as possible. an exquisitely animated b/w line drawing animation of 20 seconds will do tenfold for your career compared to a 5 minute full color, multi-layered mediocre quality animation. are you familiar with the old film biz proverb: "fast, cheap, good. you can only have two of those"? well with traditional animation it's more like "months rather than years, more than two minutes in running time, good. pick two". seriously, i have seen dozens of ultra ambitious student animated films that end up being 60% non-cleanedup keyframes because they ran out of time or because they went insane and abandoned it. again, i would highly suggest something around 2 minutes, crammed with as much quality that you all can fill it with. hope this helps, jaan

because everyone uses search engines, there is no reason to get an overly descriptive domain (like "florida-cinematographer.com", etc.), since there is really no such thing anymore as people stumbling into your website via typing in a domain. i would just try to have a domain that is easy to remember, easy to spell (very important), and bears some sort of semantic resemblance to your name/company's name (for when you verbally give your website url to a contact). also, people are quick to forget that your site is .net, rather than .com, so i would highly suggest that you try to have a .com domain. it also works in favor to not use dashes (ie. "alan-smithee.com"), since people forget about those too. then just be sure to include metadata into your site so that whenever someone googles "cinematographer Dp florida", to increase the liklihood that your site will pop up. hope this helps.

really, i still don't understand why they're making their own lenses if it's PL mount. that was actually the thing that made me think it was a hoax when i saw the first version of their website. it just seemed silly to start up a company and make such a engineering-intensive camera, and then on top of it, start making lenses good enough for 4k. are there any advantages to using their own glass? or was that oakley dude already planning on making cine lenses or something? someone please ask if you are at the booth.

maybe to demonstrate pulling off a whispy blonde hair key? (the greenscreen skillz litmus test) dunno, just guessing.

hate to be redundant, but i clearly said that i never took eric's question as all those things you just implied. i was further commenting on something that heel_e stated (and was obviously divergent from eric's question). as for my comments, don't confuse "political correctness" for people simply voicing what they see as a perpetuation of silliness in language regarding ethnicity, as it pertains to cinematography. the only thing worse than "political correctness" freaks are people who needlessly take aforementioned voiced concerns as personal attacks. you have every right to call us absurd or hypersensitive, and i welcome it, but don't ever put words like this... "The posts above are so full of assumptions about his "real intentions and thoughts about people of color", that it proves what I've always thought; that those who insist on being politically correct are more racist than the rest of us. The guy is just trying to solve a technical problem, that's all. He's not making some grand statement about the superiority of white people, or whatever you guys think he's trying to say... ...But it seems that any attention whatsoever someone puts on calling out someone's skin color, even for obviously benign reasons, means there must be racist overtones in his remarks." ... in my mouth. and really, the eyes & teeth thing would be pretty hard to achieve by accident with modern film stocks, save for exceptionally poor skill in lighting & exposure. again, apologies to eric if he inferred any venom, there was never any directed at him.

just to clear the air, i wanna say that i don't think eric's asking or the way he asked was insensitive or foolish in any way. i hope he didn't take my remarks as such. i was really just addressing the numerous other times i've heard shooters/dps speak of lighting "black people" as if it's as fundamental of a difference as shooting under fluorescent practicals versus tungsten, even though the actor is only like a zone5. but a lot of people have brought up the use of incident meters, which i didn't really think about. if you light using incident and light ratios, then i can see why it would be a bigger deal to be shooting people with darker skin.

i agree, it always sounds pretty retardo whenever i hear someone say these exact words, because it implies that all other human beings fit nicely into the "light normally for good exposures"category while anyone black is so diferent in skintone that they require a completely different technique. ... exposing for different skintones is really no different than doing so for different shades of wardrobe-- if there's a particularly dark shirt/face or a particularly bright shirt/face, then you simply have to meter it and make sure that it's not going to show up darker/lighter than you want it to. like others mentioned, it's unwise to put a white shirt on a very dark-skinned actor, nor should you put a black shirt on a very fair-skinned actor. three techniques i've used for actors with unusually dark skin is.. to use warmer light-- skin has more red content that other colors, and colored light will effectively increase the relative luminance of anything in the same hue, or rather it's probably more accurate to say that colored light decreases the luminance of colors dissimilar to its color. you could use warm filtration for the same effect. avoid hard sources, or use more ambient/fill to ensure you don't lose the shadows. use powder to keep the shine down. a lot of natural shine on dark skin will create a kind of "perceptual darkness" in their skin, simply because of the visual contrast of the specular highlights of the shine in relation to thier skintone. often people talk of "keeping the blue out" of darker skin. you see this very often in news/doc stuff shot in africa, outdoors. this is usually just the result of the sky/skylight reflecting off the skin. powder will often help with this. this goes hand in hand with another principle in lighting dark skin/dark objects that came up in an earlier thread that i've pasted in below. hope this helps, jaan ---- other than the simple difference in luminance, the only thing to really consider is that any dark surface with considerable shininess will reflect light sources & color much more than a lighter-colored object of the same shininess (like the difference in shooting a grey car and a black car-- the black car will reflect your lights, rigging, skyline, etc. more apparently). this is something to keep in mind if you will be using little/no or sheen-inducing makeup. this color reflectence is also a common technique used for lighting darker skinned subjects, particularly in fashion photography. there is a photographer in particular who was known for heavily using such technique, even on lighter skinned/caucasion models with help of makeup. he did the guess campaign in i think 1999/2000 and i think he had a japanese-sounding name. also, i recall the film karmen gei used this technique quite a few times. ---

haspel, the cinematography looked excellent. i hope the final will be available online.

dunno if this helps at all, but... as recently as two years ago there was a czech company that makes cine film. can't remember the name though. dunno what the quality is like relative to kodak or fuji, but a lot of the film students in prague used it at the time because it was less expensive.

like chris mentioned, heat is probably your best bet. i believe that the withering is a result of dehydration. you might wanna using an industrial heat gun (basically a hair dryer on steroids). though i've never tried something like this, you might be able to speed up the process even more by applying a light coat of some kind of oil onto the rose, because the oil will conduct the heat.

keylight now comes free with aftereffects, at least the production bundle.

though the animation codec is of very high quality and can playback in realtime on most newish macs, it is actually a "virtually lossless" codec and not a true lossless codec, meaning it will band on certain kinds of subtle gradients... though this is very very unlikely to happen on photographic material (this flaw is much more prone to graphics/animation). a semi-industry standard nowadays is the blackmagic 10-bit codec. animation is only 8-bit. and the blackmagic codec is a more efficient compressor (animation results in file sizes that are barely smaller than using no codec at all). you might wanna find out what output card you'll be using to send it out digibeta, because it will probably require its own proprietary codec (even if you are working with animation, fcp will have to render it all out to the card's codec before sending it to the digibeta deck). for archiving projects at the utmost quality, i would recommend the microcosm codec, which is 16-bit, truly lossless and will compress your file sizes down to about 1/6 of its uncompressed equivalent. the only problem is that it will pretty much never playback in realtime (because of the complex compression algorithm), and would be of most use if you are coming out of software that can take advantage of the 16-bit color space (ie. your final color grade from aftereffects). but for archiving, it really is unmatched.

probably the best way to do this with limited resources would be to get a collapsable greescreen (that function like flexfill reflectors) and while you shoot, have two people carry it behind him and rotate around him as the camera dollies. of course, the difficulty of this depends on the camera's focal length and distance to the actor. but keep in mind that you only need to have the greenscreen occupy the area immediately around the actor, since you will wanna do a simple animated garbage matte around him in post anyway. just try to make sure that the greenscreen doesn't bounce green spill onto the actor (selective wardrobe can help with this) and that the grscreen doesn't cast shadow on the actor. it would probably be advantageous to do this in soft/hazy light, as direct sunlight would be more likely to create those two problems, as well as minimize the likely fluctuation in luminance of the grscreen as it moves. hope this helps. --- oops, sorry to be redundant... didn't see that last post.

don't forget reagan's secretary of the interior james watt. he was a born again christian that believed the world was going to end in 2000, so naturally the gipper put him in charge of the nation's natural resources. he virtually gave away logging leases for federal lands to the timber industry that were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. he told congress that preserving natural resources was pointless since the rapture was coming soon anyway. he was finally fired after publicly making the comment "We have every kind of mix you can have. I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple." regarding a coal leasing committee.

color correcting DV50 is without question better than doing so with DV25. if you do any major or substantial color grading, you will see the apparent blocks of color in DV25. but if you'll only be doing minor color correction, then there won't be much of a quality hit to the DV25. from the producer's perspective, i can see why they would prefer DV25... cheaper cameras, a well-oiled & simplified post workflow, less expensive decks, etc. also, as of late, DV25 has become a semi-standard for cable networks' final delivery signal, meaning they are actually pumping out a DV25 signal to the satellite or whatever-- yeah, i know, appalling. and then on top of that, it gets crunched down to horrible mpeg1 or mpeg2 compession by the cable provider or dish company. so your producer may be right. but who knows, you guys might have higher quality standards in europe. i would say that if it's "reality" tv, then go with the simplified process of DV25, but for dramatic stuff that may need substantial color grading, go for DV50. hope this helps, jaan

28fps would probably be useful if you needed to slow something down, without having the viewer be consciously aware that it's anything other than normal real-world speed. an example would be to shoot an object fall and float down, while trying to create the illusion that it's lighter than it actually is. martial arts fight sequences often use the inverse principal and shoot at 22fps. in some older, lower budget hong kong films, you can see the obvious "fast-mo" shots where they would shoot at what seems like 19 or 20fps. hope this helps, jaan

i feel that using ratios to gauge a kicker is not a good idea, since a kicker is going to react very differently to different subjects/wardrobe/surfaces. i'd advise spot metering the kicker's cast on the subject from the camera's direction, and then just adjusting it in relation to the key/fill exposure.

andersson is probably the best contemporary bonafide auteur that i know of. that film is genius. another great film which utilizes a lot of static wides to great effect is jacques tati's playtime, a masterpiece in my opinion.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0257568/fullcredits

old navy and the gap create the greatest fashion designs because they sell the most clothes and are most popular with the general public.

i never said it makes sense. but i would suggest you say "asian" before guessing and calling them by a specific ethnicity. in the US, where it is an undobtedly more complicated social and political landscape, you would use "asian american" in more formal scenarios. this is because of the 'perpetual foriegner' stigma many asian americans have been dealing with for over a century. by specifying "asian american", it, in theory, denotes that the person is an american of asian ancestry/ethnicity, rather than a 'fresh off the boat' immigrant/foriegner/tourist. there's really no need for you or anyone to feel offended. no one is trying to project blame or guilt upon you. it's simply a particular peoples' preferred label. just like someone named theodore preferring to be called "ted". doesn't necessarily make sense, but there's little reason to not abide. calling an asian person "oriental" is like referring to caucasions/europeans as "medieval". tapestries and rugs and paintings are medieval/oriental. to call the people who created them by the same is retarded.