Jaan Shenberger

this was one of the most dissappointing films for me. paris in the 60s, self obsessed filmmaker, cheesey scifi, i mean it's like this movie was custom made for me because i'm totally all about those things. i actually saw the world premiere at the sf intl filmfest. i thought the film was completely trite. i never once gave a care about anyone or their problems in the movie. it was all style with no real substance in my opinion. i don't mean this in a venomous way, but it's kinda to be expected from a music video/commercial director. one very interesting thing about this film... his dad was in the audience for the screening. and when someone asked roman coppola about the "twin" in the film, he ended up mentioning how dean stockwell's father character said "you never know when things from your everday life will pop up in your work" or something like that. and as roman was saying it, his father started saying it in unison, loudly, from the audience. when this happened, it all kinda became obvious to me that dean stockwell was more or less playing his father in the film, because it seemed like his dad was saying it as if it's something he had told his son. it was kinda weird actually. also, father coppola started out as an editor on exploitation films and on one film the director was fired and the producer told him to just credit anyone else as director, so he put his name in even though he didn't direct it. at least that's what he said in a 'fresh air' interview with terry gross. so it seemed to me like "CQ" has some direct references/relationship to his dad.

whoa, that's weird. it just combined my last two posts. i didn't know it did that.

looks nice. but the kicker feels a little too hard and consistent, especially on the chair. maybe if it was selectively flagged with practical shadows or a scrim to soften it up in some areas where it falls (but not the typical corporate video "cookie wall shadpw"). the key/fill/frontal light also feels like it could be a little more organic and less artificial. a quick technique i use sometimes is to grab a practical element and set it at the edge of frame or right off camera and let the kicker bounce some color & light back into the shot. this tends to look a lot more natrualistic than setting up a bounce card off camera. also, though i understand this is somewhat out of your control if it's digital, i feel the shot could have benefitted from a shollower depth of field. the geometric pattern of the books in combination with the vertical bands of the chair are successfully battling with the coffee cup for visual dominance. i like the specular highlight on the cup. hope this helps, jaan it's because of the angle of the lens relative to the particles in the air. having the light positioned as a kicker or backlight maximizes the intensity of light reflecting off the particles and into the lens. you can really see this concept by looking at black asphalt. at midday, asphalt looks relatively matte. but in the late afternoon or morning, when the sun is acting as a kicker/backlight, you will see a lot of specular highlights in the asphalt. i guess that's the long answer. the short answer is to just try it out, with various light positions. i didn't make this "rule" up, i read when i was starting out, and it has only proven itself true numerous times. hope this helps, jaan

generally, if you want it to show up as clearly as possible, you backlight and shoot against a dark background. this is the general rule of thumb for popping out any transluscent materials. hope this helps, jaan

good. now go make something.

i remember reading walter murch's "in the blink of an eye" and getting to the part where he talks about dictating to the color timer how the color balance and exposure should be. it's a very insightful book and full of wisdom, but that part kinda creeped me out and immediately kinda reminded me of the bazillion editors i've met that are actually wannabe directors. i've heard a lot of editors speak as if once the tapes/prints are delivered to them that it's "their turn" to implement creative decisions and that the photography/production stage is over and dead.

the biggest advantage to shooting in overcast or very soft lit situations is that the texture and color of the subject matter will generally become more visually dominant over light & shadow. maybe using well color-coordinated wardrobe/production design/location might help. or integrate pattern and texture in a similar way too. or you could create your own kinda de facto light & shadow by juxtaposing dark objects against light to create the contrast missing in the lighting (ie. person in white outfit standing against a dark blue wall, etc). and you could overexpose a stop or so to saturate the colors (just use an nd grad for the sky, overcast skies often come out as white). and there's always shallow depth of field. hope this helps, jaan

i hope your instructor at least called the kid out on it, because it is a blatant rip from stan brakhage.

this may be news to you, but living in a region or country with a lot of production going on only helps you. there are more rental shops, post houses, film labs, people willing to work on your project for the experience, etc.. and film/video equipment costs several times less, relative to income for us in the US and UK (cameras cost the same in new dehli as they do in minneapolis, even though they only make like $5000 a year). honestly, if you wanna make a movie you really have no excuse nowadays because of dv and hdv. just be glad it isn't 1990 and your options are basically shoot on film, finish on film (lab costs galore) or shoot on crummy-looking video and try to figure out a way to get access to expensive video editing equipment and then (even more difficult) try to get someone to respect your project that was shot on video. in my experience, i've met two kinds of aspiring directors/filmmakers... ones who really wanna make their films and are willing to do the work necessary to make that happen, and those who really just care about being able to walk around and tell people "i'm a director-- i made a film". needless to say, the latter have gotten nowhere. except for the ones with trust funds who hired skilled professionals to make their film appear.

yeah and it's totally unfair how he was born in the world's richest country with access to the best technology, while you guys were born in the US, a third world country.

to me, dreams and madadayo are amongst his most powerful films, both made very late in his career. they get little mention when people bring up kurosawa, mostly because they feature no samarai or swords. madadayo, about an old man reflecting on his life and trying to delay death, is particulary powerful when you consider that it was his final film made just a few years before his death.

if your feature is 75-80 minutes long, you could always add on a long title sequence later to squeak it into the "qualifying" runtime of 85/90 minutes. it just better be compelling enough to keep people still for ten minutes. don't know for certain, but it seems to me like this is what mtv & the producers did for napolean dynamite after acquisition.

i would say that if a DP has 40+ low-budget genre features under their belt, with repeat jobs for producers, that's a good indicator of their ability to keep things on schedule and work around resource limitations. that in combination with a great looking reel would sound like an ideal combination if your project is low-budget. of course, if his reel looks bad or mediocre, then that probably explains why he hasn't ascended beyond his current career status. also, if they're not located in LA or nyc or other big cities, they're gonna be severely limited in what kinda projects that are available to them. they may just be taking whatever they can get. i'm kind of a "bad b-movie" enthusiast and have many many times seen stinkbomb scripted movies with crummy direction that have some very commendable cinematography and lighting, especially considering the obvious restrictions they must work under.

landon, no offense but have you seen "the dark crystal"? it makes "labyrinth" look like a lump of fluffly garbage. labyrinth seems like some horrid compromise where henson had to inject a bunch of crowd-pleasing muppets show stuff to get a budget (ie. the kid-friendly puppet musical numbers, the celebrity guest host, etc.). also, hate to sound like a snob, but if your top 3 are all american films then you've probably had pretty limited exposure to the full creative gamut of cinema. sorry to veer off-topic.

there was an article in an issue of AC when the mars movie with val kilmer was released a few years ago. or maybe it was about the other depalma mars film released that year, i can't remember. but i remember it directly addressed getting the "mars red" look. one thing they mentioned was using orange reflectors for fill/bounce to address a certain problem (that i can't remember, of course). but anyways, maybe that article will help if you get your hands on it.

i'm 99% certain that there are indeed 1080 consumer tvs available.

yes. once the analog signal from the betasp deck goes into the minidv/dvcam device, it's encoded to the dv25 format, meaning that it's identical to what would be laid to minidv tape. also, i've had to wrangle with footage that was telecined to betasp and then dubbed to dvcam/minidv. it looks pretty crummy. especially 16mm... depending on what your footage looks like, the grain may may look all mushy and kinda "color clumpy". telecine to digibeta then dubbed to minidv looks better. but as someone stated, theoretically a telecine straight to minidv/dvcam should look better. though you should find out if the telecine truly is routed straight to the minidv/dvcam deck. i've heard of telecines sometimes being routed to the digibeta deck and passing through to the minidv/dvcam. this would yield the same result as going to digibeta, then dubbed to minidv. if there is a similar "pass through" set up but with a d1 deck, then the signal will maintain its full quality (same as going straight to minidv/dvcam deck). hope this helps, jaan

Brandon, there was a similar thread about how to handle transfer/post on a 16mm feature with a finish on digital. it includes a post by me describing a workflow that i'd highly recommend... http://www.cinematography.com/forum2004/in...wtopic=9351&hl= hope this helps, jaan

i heart huckabees was so good and awesomely unusual that i couldn't believe it got made. also... beaver trilogy hukkle treasure island (1999) the woman chaser dog days the homecoming (kinda old though) the american astronaut playtime (old) barcelona love and death on long island judy berlin goodbye dragon inn funny haha walkabout back to the future (never before had such freudian and abstract concepts been made so smoothly digestable for a mass audience) 8 1/2 and i think galaxy quest had a greatly original concept, though the execution was less than par.

sidney, no need to apologize. i think we're all better off after your posts, which were very informative and well written. Any real world insight into the often murky business side is greatly appreciated, at least by me. thanks dude.

haha, that's funny. i once read an interview with a kinda bigtime concept artist who works on big budget effects films and he said that one of the things he learned early on was that whenever someone asks you what you think of a project's script, the only acceptable response is "I loved it!".

i totally agree. i didn't mean to offend.

generally, the "taught" method of writing a short is the same as the syd field three-act, except you merge acts two and three, meaning the protagonist goes from the end of act one to the end of act three without being interrupted by the "mini-defeat" of act two. though i've seen plenty of shorts that try to cram all three in. imo, any aspiring filmmakers should read his book. and then read it again. then pee all over it and set it on fire. it's nothing but a huge, imposed limitation on narrative cinema. if you look at the greatest films ever made, you will see that a large percentage of them deviate if not ignore three act structure. but if you look at the crummiest, most forgettable contemporary hollywood studio films to ever be released, you will see that they almost always follow three act structure to a tee.

there are numerous software-based methods for uprezzing digital images using various algorithms, and doing it this way would undoubtedly yield better results than just outputting a 2K image to film. though these methods won't bring in texture or detail that was faintly captured from the 2K scan, it would generally make the final output look perceptually sharper compared to the standard "all 2K" method. though these aren't what i would consider to be the best examples of advanced software uprezzing, these examples illustrate the difference that the method can make... http://www.benvista.com/main/content/conte...=photozoompro_2 hope this helps, jaan

though i don't know for certain, it seemed to me like it was shot greenscreen for the closer portions and the motion control camera started the move. the cgi camera was seemlessly married to the real camera move. the process then worked in reverse as the camera flies around the car and back towards the car. there were a few instances in which the actors inside looked like cgi (the further shots)... but only because i was sitting in the second row at a sold out show. creating very realistic cgi cars and highways is pretty commonplace now and the marrying of the shots is a combination of motion tracking and very skilled compositing. there were like twenty of my favorite shots of the year in Tony Takitani. great film.