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freddie bonfanti

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Everything posted by freddie bonfanti

  1. as Jonathan suggested, keep it simple, Savides does the same in those commercials. i reckon big source through diffused material (or big source far far away) and soft bounce back
  2. the guy next to the operator is trying to add some soft bounced sidelight, to enhance the lighting on the character...the fire is used to light the actor as well, as a motivate source, at that moment of the film the whole village is in flame
  3. i heard planet terror was shot with the genesis, but tarantinos looks very film like.
  4. hey all, i just found this article on "Aint it cool news", where Clint Mansell tells why he wanted to score the no budget short i shot...i post it because someone asked why he decided to score a student film CM: I?ve kind of turned down pretty much everything that?s come along really. Not that there?s been that much of it. I?m actually doing two short films. One for a friend here in LA. He?s got a short horror film that I?m going to do. Then I?ve got this ten minute short for these two kids I met through MySpace.com. who are film students from Edinburgh or Glasgow, I can?t remember now? [sK NOTE: Robert Glassford and Timo Lange from the Edinburgh Film School] SK: Wow! How?d that come about? CM: They did this ten minute short and wrote to me through MySpace and told me about their film and they?d like me to have a look at it and would love to score their film. At the time, I was working on two films I told them ?I just don?t have the time but thanks for offering it.? So they asked ?Would you just have a look at it? Tell us anything you think.? If somebody is persistent without being a pain-in-the-ass I always think that?s pretty commendable. So I said ?OK, I?ll have a look at it.? So they sent it to me and it was really cool. Obviously they?d done it at school with no budget but it had a few special effects in it. They had done it so it could look cool even without the money. And so I said, ?You know what? This is fu**ing good, this is.? So I said to them, ?If you can wait for a little while, I?ll do it.? It felt like the sort of thing I should do. I was very lucky getting my break with Darren. It just felt pretty good. I don?t supposed I would?ve done it if the thing was a piece of poop but I saw it and I thought ?You know, I think I know what I can do with this. I think this will be cool.?
  5. There is this job on my site that is called The Angel on Chilside Road. This was for a Sony Dreams project and you had to use the Sony 900. David saw this and loved it. the photography of it was outstanding, i kept watching it studying the beautiful soft light on the little boy and when you said it was shot digital i was even more impressed. i loved the way the camera tracks back and fort in the room when he wakes up, and that shot when he is hiding from his mum, the colors were very particular. your website has lots of inspirational info, so thanks a lot for sharing.
  6. totally agree with Stuart, what i dont get is the reason why the company has chosen such a stylised and obviously very graded still to promote the product...it does look good but everyone with a bit of knowledge will notice the classic photoshop artifacts...and obviously its in BW so no idea how the camera handles the color dynamic range, overexposure and so on
  7. I have watched the film tonight, and what REALLY bugged me was the INCONSISTANCE of the look of the film, which was at times very videoish and at other times quite close to film. i thought that was very distracting and annoying. sometimes the cut would be from a super grainy scene to a clear one, from a flickery to a non flickering. it happened on MIAMI VICE, too, and i loved it because it suited the style of the film but here, didnt work well. this incongruence was a problem...i hope in the future people will stick with one style on genesis production, and as Mullen said, try not too make it look so much like film in terms of artifatcs (gain) but make it look like good HD.
  8. mmmmhh... it looks very strange to me, but George has a valid point. However i dont know what to think about the idea of using color stock and make it BW in post...im not convinced at all, not even on HD or video sets...i always make the monitor BW because i feel like lighting monochrome is a whole different story, i need so see my lighting that way, but thats just me
  9. all i can tell you is that DDR is the german name for East Germany (GDR in english), so i guess you have a lens from the now defunt communist East Germany...do a google, maybe youll find out more
  10. hi all, are the big two flags in this picture mainly used for negative fill?
  11. i know the show but i cant remember it visually as i left the country a few years ago, however i think its great we didnt give up the s16 format for tv shows old fashioned italians....
  12. do you mind me asking you WHAT series?
  13. hi all i have just took a peek at the trailer, the very second shot its something just gorgeous. i have rarely seen such a striking sunset scene...i cant wait to see this beautiful anamorphic picture on the silver screen. check it out Freddie
  14. hi there, i probably used a wrong English term, what i meant is that the adapterĀ“s structure, including the spinning disc, is very unpractical. the main problem i found was that the focus distances were all wrong, because the motor of the spinning disc was slightly offset from its axis, Redrock shipped us a faulty one. we had to unscrew it with a tiny allan key and tune it until the distances were just fine. i had to remark slightly the distances until they were accurate. the other problem is that with a spinning disc you cant use a high shutter speed or a higher fstop like 5.6 because it picks up the wobblying. also, its a nightmare when filming tv screens. i really enjoy using it but probably the movietube and the sgpro are a better choice unfortunately i cant access to any of the footage yet but once its all rendered and available ill post some
  15. i forgot to thank all the members of the crew, 1st AC Stewart McKenzie and Paddy Murray, gaffer Ben Riley and grip Andres Delcano, always top notch on their job. also, all the film stills were shot by Jethro Collins, a wondeful stills photographer Freddie
  16. hi all, i just wrapped this music video recently and i thought I would share it on the forum, mainly because we used a M2 micro35 adapter and cinema lenses, which i believe people, especially us low budget folks, are fairly interested in. the video was very ambitious for a low budget crew, and the two directors Robert Glassford and Timo Langer wanted to shoot it with a short film flavour. The story is all set on top of a roof, where groups of people meet to play an obsolete dice game, in which who loses has to jump off the building. The whole point of the story is that the main guy, Terry, keeps beating his challengers and once each one of them has jumped off and he is lonely on top, he finds victory being bittersweet and decides to jump off as well. The piece was filmed in four different locations: A parking garage, an office building, a rooftop and mainly a green screen studio. We were looking for a playful tone of the piece and our reference were the Jonathan Glazer?s commercial Dreamer combined with the provocative, energetic and electric visual feel of the Prodigy Voodoo People video. I was hoping to use the Panasonic HVX200 with our M2 Redrock adapter, mainly because i really wanted to avoid tapes and take advantage of having the uncompressed footage already digitized and stored. Unfortunately we found out that there is only a HVX200 (????) in Scotland and the rental price (including 4 P2 cards and the store drive) was way out of our budget. So i opted for the JVCHD101, mainly because i liked the in camera color correction options and because we managed to get it for free. The lenses were a set of ZEISS superspeeds, which i preferred much more than my other choice (COOKE S4) for crispness, contrast and a helpful extra stop. I went for four focal lengths: 18, 25, 50 and 85, all t 1.3 I have to thank Panavision Glasgow and in particular Bill Outch, for making us a very affordable price and for helping us so much. the main problem was that the JVC with the adapter and lenses was a beast, which made it awfully complicated on handheld work: the micro35 has the flipped image issue, so i had to get an extra 4x4 lcd monitor and mount it on top of the camera. i have a love/hate relationship with the adapter: i do love the DOF but sometimes its very annyoing to deal with all the artifacts that come with it, especially the spinning disc. i wish we had something less problematic, like the MOVIETUBE or the SGpro, which dont have the disc but a steady glass. the lighting package was limited, i wanted the film to be very low key and during testing i found out that i could push the adapter and lenses a lot on low light situations: we had two 1.2 k HMIs, four 1ks, two 2ks, six 650w fresnels, four 4 bank kinos and a few redheads. Our main location was obviously the rooftop, which we had to "remake" in a studio and place it in front of a greenscreen. now, the greenscreen was the main problem: we ordered 2 big silked skypans which i had planned to rig on top of it with a u shaped rig, but unfortunately on the day of the shoot they gave us a much smaller one by mistake which could not be replaced. We couldn?t use it because it was definitely much smaller. Me and the gaffer started to find another way to light the whole screen and we found out that placing the big skypans on the bottom of it, facing up, was our best bet. then we used some 650s to make it all even and my spotmeter read an overall 5.6 all the way thoug. i wasnt very happy with it, but we couldnt do anything else and we had to find an acceptable way around it my lighting for the rooftop was very simple. on wide shots i had a 1k with a chimera as soft keylight with a few kino tubes placed behind the edge and the 1.2 k Hmi bounced off a reflector as fill. i didnt want to make the rooftop too bright and i didnt have any "big guns" lights to place somewhere far away: the studio wasn?t big enough. On close ups i was able to make the lighting more interesting, especially during the game: i lit the main guy with two tungsten fluorescent tubes which i had warmed up with an amber gel, to make him look a bit more intense than the other folks. i played a lot with those kino tubes, i liked the softness of the light. here a few stills The toughest part of the shoot was when we had to set the main character on fire, which was the ending of the video: we could afford to rent a sfx guy from London and do the job for a thousand pounds, but me and the director were sure we could fake the effect and don?t spend any money. We knew this photographic trick where if you place a very clear glass on a 45 degree angle in front of the camera you can superimpose anything on that glass and make it look like if its right in the scene. We knew we could do it with fire, too, and because it was a locked off shot we were sure it would work. We built a reproduction of our main character with chicken wire and covered it in a not very flammable material, then we placed it carefully where it would superimpose perfectly with our real actor who was standing in front of the camera. With a few adjustments we found the perfect position and set the mannequin on fire. It was great, the fire looked very real, a very bad picture and diagram here i wish i had better in camera stuff but all the footage is in the editing suite and i cant get there yet so i will post more once i can access the real footage. hope you enjoyed and sorry for grammar mistakes ! Freddie
  17. Freddie, I can usually tell the difference between digital footage and film on the screen, I'm not that blind or unexperienced. i didnt mean that, i just gave you my opinion and some examples of why I THINK the two format still differ a lot. i am a huge fan of HD but i still see the limitations. Maybe you or Max would think the quality of that footage is poor and not even close to the quality of the film footage, I guess we'll never know that. as i said on the post, I HOPE the genesis will prove to be a good choice in terms of digital filmaking. i never thought it was poor, what i thought was very strange was the fact that a professional cinematographer said that he could not see a difference between the Genesis footage and film footage. my judgement does not come from experience, but from watching recent Genesis features which to be honest looked quite bad, like "Superman". "Flyboys" was better, still some skintone problems (very orangy at times), but definitely not like film. in the end, Francesco, i think that all the mediums have their pros and cons, its just a matter of taste and an artistic or logical choice of a cinematographer. there is no right or wrong. all the best
  18. Francesco, i am sure that the footage they looked at was surprising and very film like. what we are trying to say is that normally most of the people will never spot a noticeable difference between the two formats, but certainly a cinematographer or who is involved in filmaking and has a special and very scrupolous way to look at a picture would do. i personally notice a digital image mostly when theres camera movement and i tend to notice it on the skintones. for istance, have a look at the trailer of "flags of our fathers", shot in anamorphic, and you will see what i mean. the difference is quite big with the resolution of Apocalypto. I was very disappointed by the latest Genesis features, above all "Superman", but i hope things will improve.
  19. definitely not...i agree with that, Max. (sometimes we agree ;-))
  20. hi, if you can, use cine lenses on PL mount. i own a micro 35 and i have worked with it a lot lately; i can tell you that although nikon and olympus lenses work really well in terms of DOF, there is a huge difference when you put some cinema primes in front of it. if you dont have much lighting i would suggest you to rent a set of SUPERSPEEDS, theyre very fast (1.3), contrasty and quite sharp. then you have the cooke S4, a bit slower (2.0) but quite soft which sometimes is useful for the video image. if you cant afford those then some nikon primes are yor best bet. hope this helps
  21. I cant really answer this question as i never asked him...the director and him have a good connection, when we sent him the film he really enjoyed it, i thought he liked the fact that 3 kids in scotland shot a sci fi noir with some nice CGI for no money and made it work quite well. He is British too and he started somehow the same way as us. but its just a guess...;-) p.s. we got a BAFTA nomination a month ago for "best new work" which made us even happier
  22. i can base my judgement on the trailer ive seen and yes, the imagery was very pleasing. however, some shots give away the fact that it was shot digitally, especially the one with the panther and some close ups of the little (freaky) girl. having said that im sure things may be different in a theater and i hope the review is right. i believe that a part from scrupolous cinematographers and other folks involved in filmaking, the majority of the people who go and watch well done HD films never notice the difference with celluloid.
  23. Personally i make that choice after a few tests. i try the filters i want to use and shoot a few seconds with each one, then i shoot clean and once i see the results i make my choice. There are different way of approach, some people believe that filtration is obsolete and rather shoot clean to gain all the information and create a proper look in post, others may not have that priviledge or time or just simply cant go to the lab and try to get it on camera. hope this helps Freddie
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