Adam Frisch FSF

Look at any Luc Besson film, especially The Big Blue and Nikita, and you'll see some crazy barrel distortion! Combined with his center framing, it kind of works in soem strange way.

The iBook with G4 is about 800 quid, Phil. Check it out. Anyways, we might as well argue over a beer. :P

I'm a Mac man myself. Have owned both platforms in the past, but after the 99th virus spam killed my old PC, I switched back to Mac again for good. Life's to short. I will however refrain from going into one of those mac-vs-pc wars. Suffice to say is that Mac's and Final Cut Pro works like a charm and it really is a very competent program: it can do all of the basic things you used to go to an effects program to do. I did my whole DVD reel on it with the use of Final Cut, Photoshop and DVD Studio Pro down to the labelling on the disc and the box. On the other hand the new Premier version for the pc is apparently very good. Haven't tried it. Finally, if I just might be allowed to stick it a bit to the PC crowd: it's a complete myth that PC's are cheaper. That was 10 years ago. Today, I'd almost say the opposite. At least with notebooks and portable computers.

Actually, you could put ANY format or data on a DVD. It could be 4K uncompressed TIFF files or HD or whatever, problem is you won't fit that much 4K data on a 4,7gb disc... It's one of the misconceptions of the DVD video format: you often see printed on the label of DVD-R's "120mins of high quality video". Well, that's only true for a certain bit rate in the mpeg-2 stream. The more you compress the image, the more will fit. VHS-quality will extend that time to about 9 hours of video, or, 40 high rez 4K TIFF images... I often ask post houses to put the master of a commercial or promo I've shot on DVD as DV-quality Quicktime film. This saves me the hassle of having to capture it to my computer and dealing with the troglodyte-technology of tapes when I do my showreel. I keep it all digital. So it would be technically possible to ask a well equipped telecine house to take the D1 stream and burn it to a DVD uncompressed. Problem is that would take forever since mounting and burning a disc takes at least 20 minutes. And you probably wouldn't fit all your material unless it's something very short. So it's impractical at the moment, but it might get realistic down the line when 32x recording and faster gets here. DVDs still record at 4x as of now. Make sense?

Not very impressed with the cinematography in either of these films. Not bad, just not earth shattering. Saw the Last Samurai yesterday and I consider myself a huge Toll fan, but this just felt uninspired. Looked like super-35 even though it was shot on anamorphic. Strange. Cold Mountain felt the same way. I found myself only enjoying the picture of Natalie Portman watching through the window at Jude Law at night in her cabin. That looked fantastic. Master and Commander I quite liked. I thought the cinematography was rather harsh and hard at times. But the monochrome moonlit nightshots of the shipdeck were rather nice. The other night Pacific Heights showed on TV. Shot by Amir Mokri. Had a great late 80's look with really crisp visuals and great compositions. I know I've asked this before, why the hell isn't he in the ASC? He's really good. And has been for like 15 years. And David, if you want pretty urban cinematography, why not re-watch The Game. Brilliant work. So it's not impossible to make cluttered, mismatched urban grittiness look good. I just wish I knew how they did it:-)

Man, that's a killer. That's when you'd kinda hope for one tough director like Oliver Stone or Paul Cameron could run the show... Or as Mr. Stone said himself on the commentary track to Wall Street: "I don't suck much ass. Especially not movie star ass". I believe him. I heard that Gordon Willis had such a distaste for actors it nearly put him off filming for good.

Terryfying indeed. Not so much the money, but the cockroaches living in the wall- to-wall carpeting and the gale force storm that passes through every crack in, or rather beside, the victorian window panes... But charm goes a long way. And the brits have it. :lol:

I am. Although I haven't found a room yet - I've been staying at a friends place. I've been home for Christmas and 2 jobs, but will be back in London on the 9th. That's when the serious room-hunting starts. Love to have a beer.

I have an agent in London since about 6 months back. They've been extremely helpful and supportive although they haven't gotten me any jobs yet. But that's not really their job in the end: their job is to put me in context, so to speak. They represent about 20 different cinematographers. Some guys just do feature film work, others do only commercials and a few of us do promo's. A couple of these guys like Steve Chivers and David Ungaro and others are all real commercial pro's and they're always booked up. The thing that's good about an agent is basically that much like a cinemaplex, where if your film is sold out, there are others readily available. Say that client A wants Bigshot DP A for their commercial. He's in Bahamas shooting Nike commercials for 3 weeks so they can't use him. "Ok, then give us Bigshot DP B instead". Unfortunately, he's in Macchu Picchu with Spike Jonze shooting hummingbirds. "Ok, so what else you got?", the client says. That's when your agent mentions that they've got this brilliant South African promo DP who is very good. All of a sudden, the little swedish cinematographer Adam Frisch gets a shot at shooting a rather big promo that the "brilliant South African" DP had to turn down because he got his first really big commercial with the really hot production company. That's how it works many times - work trickles down. Me, I have to do pavement pounding in London. I do all the grunt work myself, book meetings, go and show my reel to people and so on. My agent doesn't get me jobs, I have to do that. Which is fine for me, I never expected them to do that anyway. I know the film industry - it's as much about your personality as it is about how good you shoot. A personal contact is much more important than a great reel. Be nice, be humble, meet people and let them know that you're a good guy and that you know how to shoot. Sooner or later that'll get you work. So the role of an agent is to put you in context with other shooters. They'll also help you with contacts, like whom to call and whom to meet. They'll send your reel to companies, book you meetings and negotiate fee's for you. All this is very helpful and worthwile. And for me, being new in London, it's easily worth 10%.

Master And Commander I quite enjoyed. A straight telling of a good story, with no over posted effects and "cool" shots. But then again, Peter Weir has been doing this for a long time and doesn't make too many mistakes these days. Love Actually - I agree Phil, I was disappointed. I had heard so much about it from everyone and I loved Notting Hill, but this was just too amateurish. You kind of can tell that Richard Curtis hasn't directed before - lots of scenes and settings should have been axed at the script stage.