Stefan Kubicki

Sorry for bringing up a dead topic but apropos Chernobyl, I shot part of a film there recently. We were looking for the exact some thing, a post-apocalyptic type city, and Pripyat certainly works, although Soviet-style towns that were built in the 70s and 80s from scratch are a bit odd in that when they're empty they seem more like full-scale model cities than actual real organic cities. The radiation isn't a big deal as long as long as you don't overdo it. And someone somewhere mentioned something about it affecting film somehow, well, it doesn't. The Russian x-ray machines at the airport in Kiev on the other hand...

Production design and practicals (fluorescents!) much more than timing, but I admire his naturalistic work more than the stylized stuff. Particularly his first films with Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Cafe Lumiere... although if you have the chance, see Millenium Mambo projected, the blacklight stuff and a lot the blues look very very nice compared to the DVD I have.

The best artistic use of focus I've seen to date is in Hou Hsiao Hsien's new film "Three Times", at the very beginning. Two characters play pool, and the camera moves back and forth from the pool table to the faces. The focus is always slightly slightly delayed, a simple technique, but the effect is mesmerizing. It's like motion blur, but for focus. Mark Lee Ping Bin has a very good first.

Indeed I tried something like this with 8552 a while back, it's a good look but these stocks have too much latitude. I just saw the video these stills are from a few days ago, it's definitely been crushed and saturated in telecine. I'm still going to do a few tests to see how much pushing I can get away with on some well exposed kodak stocks.

I want to try and replicate this "look" in the negative as much as is possible. Looks a bit like cross-processed reversal to me... and it looks like the colors and contrast were tweaked in post.. Can any of you suggest stocks/processing that would give me similar blow-outs and color saturation? Cross-processing is probably the best bet, but I don't have enough experience doing it with different stocks to judge which could work well for this sort of result. Test, test, test!, I know, but I'd like to have some idea of where to start. Bleach-bypass would give me the deep blacks but I want more color, not less. Thoughts?

I recall reading or hearing Chris Doyle somewhere commenting on the fact that he used some sort of silver retention/skip bleach process on Last Life in the Universe and that he "ruined" several Thai films shot by other DPs who tried to do the same for film that wasn't shot with that processing in mind. But watching LLitU I didn't really notice any obvious skip bleach look, although as usual with Doyle you had the great color saturation and all that other good stuff. Do any of you know any more about what lab processes the film went through?

How do you know he'll be at camerimage this year?

Yeah, I spoke with Jan, Panasonic's product manager for the US, at RESFEST in NY today. She said late November. She had the HVX200 prototype set up at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center today (and maybe tomorrow, so if you're in NYC you can take a look) along with an HD monitor with some raw footage (in 1080i, apparently 720p wasn't in the prototype) and it looked quite good.