Adam Frisch FSF

Just hook'em up to a dimmer and bring the voltage down - that'll make them start flickering.

How could I forget Nestor Almendros on my list.... :blink: Interesting posts about Watkin. For me he is a DP that hasn't really registered on my radar, but after reading this I realise he's shot a lot of movies I watched when I was young and my DP-to-be-mind wasn't yet fully developed. Definitely have to look into him. I always did like White Nights for instance - good film lit very well. Have seen Yentl, but it's all a blur - my mum dragged me along to it. Have a faint memory of Masquerade being quite nicely shot. Haven't seen Out of Africa. But there are a lot of guys like that - for some reason they don't enter your head although they're many times extremely good. One extremely nicely shot movie is Pacific Heights lensed by Amir Mokri. It's such a creamy, rich, "white" movie with real noir touches here and there. Amir is always good, yet you don't really register him. Don't think he's even in the ASC yet, which frankly, is criminal.

Your expertise in all forms of image processing, color spacing, video standards would be completely wasted behind a an old rusty film camera, no? :rolleyes:

Fellow swedish music video director Jonas Åkerlund did a movie called Spun last year that didn't get very good reviews. Lot's of repetitive cuts (borrowing from Requiem..), close ups with wide angles and so on. I find drug-romance nauseatingly boring, so I didn't see it, but you could probably get some inspiration from watching it - he is good with editing and visuals.

I'm clueless about these things obviously, but why couldn't you broadcast RGB? It doesn't seem to take up more channels or frequency, does it? I'm just amazed at humanity's utter ability to complicate stuff that really doesn't need complication at all. Life would be so easy without bureaucrats or Sony (BTW, anybody heard about their latest bastard child; Segmented Frame?)....

You sure you want to be a DP, Phil? ;)

Phil, Phil... :D I sent my reel off to a couple of agents in London before I moved here. And the one I really dreamt about being on - was the only one to call back!! I got lucky there, I know. But it's also important to remember that agents do not get you work. That's still up to you. They can put you in context, get sniff of jobs, get the right people to look at your reel and generally give you good advice - but in the end it's down to your tenacity (or frankly, pestering) and people skills. Yes, people skills. That's half the job. If you're a mumbling idiot, arrogant or just simply spread an air of incompetence around you - you won't get the job. Really, the reel is surprisingly not the most important factor - at least not at this level. I'd wait a bit before I get in such a hurry to get an agent - they just cost you money in the beginning - remember, they want 10% of ALL your jobs, not just the ones they get you.

I'd probably bring the 27mm, the 40mm and a 65 or 85mm. You could shoot an entire movie with just that and and never really have to "want" anything else.

I've played with it, It's basically an action- or crash-cam, not a useful production camera since it doesn't have a PL mount and just has a sportsfinder so you can't check focus or exact framing or anything like that. You also have to load the film in the actual camera - there are no detachable mags. Good thing it uses daylight spools. It's a fun and useful little camera for grabbing interesting shots in an action environment, but not useful for much else.

Actually, this is the perfect opportunity to do something different. Why not a moonlight from the top, just hitting half the bed? Could be a skylight, a ceiling window - as long as you don't show it, they don't know, right?

I haven't read the books, so for me they were nice escapist movies told well. I'm a bit sick of the phenomenon now since there was some overload there for a while - but I can't fault the movies except on some effects choices at times.

I'm sorry, but that doesn't sound true. I've shot with spooled Fuji on A-minima on at least 2 occasions within a day of spooling and there was no problem whatsoever.

Don't you guys use the coreless ones where you snap the film on the spindle? I think those are great - no hassle and less wastage.

The Sekonic's are very nice. It's just that on the newer ones thjey decided to ditch tried-and-trued AA size batteries and go for some odd Li-Ion type which you can NEVER get at a 7-Eleven at half past midnight when they batteries seize up. Who came up with that idea?

I agree - it can be very boring. But it is sometimes very refreshing to see low set sun exteriors photographed from the other side so that the light is straight in the actors eye. I wouldn't say it's more beautiful, just not so much of a cliche as a constant low set backlit sun.

I might add that it is a stills meter, so you do have to understand exposure-times. This is easy for you David, but it might not be a meter for first timers. Nothing complicated, really. The meter reads a value (according to the ASA you've set) that you then spin the dial to get the F-stop to set. There is no marking for 1/50th, only one at 1/30 and 1/60, so I normally read the value at 1/60 which gives me a slight built in overexposure. You could make a little marking yourself at 1/50 if you like. The absolute best thing however, is that the value you get from the display is linear: if you get the value number 8 and check the exposure and find that it's a T2.8, then a new reading at 9 will tell you that that source is 1 stop brighter, or T4. No need to recalculate. This is very handy, because then you can walk around the set and say, that light is 2 stops brighter than key, that one's 2/3 below and so on. It's much faster than having to having to interpret 2.8 and an eight, or 4,2 and a third and so on like you have to do with (most) readout meters. It's almost like an footcandle meter combined with a regular meter.

It comes in a little neopren pouch (it's not waterproof however, something I learned the first time I used it - had to have it repaired after dipping it in the ocean..) with a thin neckstrap attached to it. All very sweet. I normally have shirts so I keep the neckstrap around my neck and the meter in my breast pocket, always ready to go. It's very liberating.

I got sick of having a big heavy lightmeter dangling around my neck or getting misplaced on some grip box or sat on by myself when I left it on the dolly... So when my analogue Sekonic got lost - I decided to go for something small and light. This was just out, so I decided to try it: DigiFlash It weighs only 40g and is super-small: I love it - it's the only meter I've got, believe it or not. They laugh at me on set when I come with a meter the size of a walnut, but it does a brilliant job. Can both take incident and reflected light meterings and it's cheap too. Even has a temperature meter built in which is quite useful. Get one, at least as a backup. You won't regret it.

For music videos - keep it short. Nobody sits through 6 of them at full lenght. Make it steppable so that they can skip to the next promo with the chapter button. Cut them down to about 30sec-60sec. The nice thing with DVD reels is that they can have the option of watching them full lenght if it's something they really like. I've recently done some research for a producer friend of mine - logging reels and production companies into a database. And I can tell you there's a big difference between european reels and american reels. In America they include everything - it's literally like 20-30 commercials on every directors reel. In Europe the reels are much shorter, maybe 3-8 commercials. Generally, I'd say less is more, but if you have 20-30 clips that are really strong, why not include them? Never put anything on that's just a filler - kill your darlings. Best up front, short, to the point, never boring. Montages with music to them are either hated or loved. I try to avoid it, but I do have a history reel or history segment on my reel that's a montage of a lot of earlier stuff set to music. The nice thing is that you can include just the images you like, but the bad thing is that if you ONLY have that, nobody thinks you can do anything coherent. It makes it cheap. It's a fine balance. I'll probably scrap it for my next reel. My earliest reels all had like music and animated menu's and poop, but just like you hate websites with flash intro's and music playing on them these days, so do people that have to watch reels. Minimalist, ease of use and to the point is better. I have this straight from the people who had to suffer through my earlier reels.

That's a bit steep that price, when you can have a Lomo roundfront in PL for like a tenth of that. A much newer lens too, designed in the 80's.

I must agree with David. I too feel that I'm pretty confident with close-ups and "beauty" shots, but need to get better at the wider stuff. Frontlight, or close to front is always attractive on faces. It is a still, flashlight, Helmut Newton-y aesthetic, but it does work wonders with most faces. It can be achieved in many ways and even hard sources look very good if they're close enough to the camera. When I want real etheral, frontal softlight, I sometimes rig a big frost frame or hang a wide frost filter right in front of the lens. Then I light that from behind (often with flo's) and cut a hole for the lens to peek through. Creates a very nice softlight that doesn't scream "ringlight". Stole it From DP Thomas Kloss when I was watching one of those MTV making-the-video segments.. Frontlight is in many ways my safety zone. It always works and almost always looks good. It is however a convention and I sometimes get bored/mad at myself for falling into it. I'd love to get more into feature "dramatic" film lighting, but it isn't always appropriate for music videos. Fortunately I'm beginning to do more commercials and there there's more scope to get away from all that frontal light. But on the flipside, I also must say that frontal light is criminally underused in features. Everyone uses under-, over-, side- or backlighting, but rarely any frontal lighting. Why? In Alien Resurrection there's a heart to heart between Winona Ryder's character and Ripley - Khondji used a traditional ringlight for that scene, which is really brave actually - you don't see that a lot.

Yes, Ben-Hur is great. We always think that "our" generation invented good action footage, which this film disproves.

I think Heat is great with it's multiple character arcs. Otherwise, I'm very much into 60's, 70's and early 80's cinema. For some reason those films made then just seemes more intelligent, daring, and cool. What I sorely miss these days, is SUSPENSE. All directors think they know how to do it, but very few actually do. Blowing things up, gunfights, fistfights, car chases have got nothing to do with suspense. Or as Hitchcock said: "the disarming of a bomb is suspenseful, the blowing up isn't". Just bought Where Eagles Dare on DVD and that's suspenseful. Das Boot is suspense. Thief (Michael Mann's debut) is suspense. The Day of the Jackal is probably one of the most suspenseful movies ever made. Scarface is suspense. Three Days For Condor is suspense. The Conversation is suspense. All The President's Men is suspense. The Predator is madly suspenseful. Honestly, when was the last time you bit your nails at a movie, shouting at the screen to tell them to get out of there? Hasn't happened in years. Spielberg used to be good at that, DePalma was great at it, Cameron was made for it. What happened? Now, they keep redoing all these old heist movies, but for some reason they're never suspenseful. Italian Job for instance (not that the original was very suspenseful), or the Ladykillers.

I happen to think that the uglier or more "unclean" flourescents are, the better they look. It of course matters what your story is, but there's nothing saying that you have to shoot a comedy, for instance, in clean, well balanced light. I prefer to use the flourescents that are already there - sometimes augmenting them with other flourescents, especially ones you can stick in frame. Tungsten sources can be hard to match to flo's, since they have such different look. Even if you get the color right with filtering (which you rarely do), the light they put out is much more source-y. I'd try to get a KinoFlo instead and work with that. Much smaller and easier in a cramped environment too.

That's easy. No worries.