Scott Fritzshall

I'm not an authoritative source, but I'm pretty sure that there are no 16mm cameras that will do 1000fps. I think you'll be limited to specialty cameras like Photosonics or Phantoms. Those will probably eat up your entire budget as well, so you'll probably have to shoot outdoors at noon or something, since 1000fps would require an additional 5 stops of light.

Uh, why won't you do it through lighting? That's pretty much what lighting is for.

It's actually really simple math to figure this out. Film cameras generally use a 180deg shutter. What this means is that for every frame, the shutter is closed while the film is being advanced and open while the film is being held in the gate. 180deg is half of a full circle, or 50%, so each frame is exposed for half of the frame rate. At 24fps, each frame thus gets 1/48th of a second worth of exposure (1/24 x .5), which obviously affects both exposure and amount of motion blur. This is what you're generally used to seeing. If you speed the frame rate up 2x to 48fps, each frame is still exposed for 50% of the frame rate. Your exposure time is 1/96th of a second (1/48 x .5). This gives you half of the exposure time per frame, which means you lose a stop of light, and you get half as much motion blur. Still, as far as motion blur is concerned, you're still exposing for the same percentage of the frame rate, which is going to give it the same perception of blur. In other words, you've got half as much motion blur, but you've also got half as much motion, so it looks "normal, but slow." Changing the shutter angle changes the exposure and the amount of motion blur, but it does not change the speed at which the action is being recorded. At 24fps, if you set the shutter to 90deg, you've got half as much exposure, and half as much motion blur. 90degrees is 25% of 360degrees, so your exposure is 1/96th of a second (1/24 x .25). Again, the rate at which things move does not change, but the amount of blur and exposure does. So if you combine the two, you're going to get slower motion, less motion blur, and much less exposure time. Shooting 120fps with a 45deg shutter, for instance, will give you 1/960th of a second exposure time (1/120 x .125). Everything will move at 1/5th its normal rate, and also have 1/4th its normal amount of motion blur. In order to work out what values you need, you've got to figure out how long the event takes place in real life, and how long you need it to last on screen. If it lasts half a second and you need it on screen for 2 seconds, then you need to shoot it 4x the normal rate. At very high speeds, the exposure time is so low that you're naturally going to have very little motion blur, but if you want the action to have less than its "natural" amount, you can reduce the shutter speed to make each frame more "crisp," and the overall motion choppy. Obviously, though, you're going to need a pretty massive amount of light in order to shoot that. In my example of 120fps and a 45deg shutter, the exposure time of 1/960th of a second means you need 40x more light, which is over 5 stops. Better pull out the Softsuns or whatever. Does that help?

You should get it processed at a place that does processing for professional photographers if possible. But yeah, that's the basic idea. Learn how exposure works, learn how to judge what it's going to look like when it comes back, learn what effect light has when you place it here vs. there, or when you bounce it, etc.

If you're able to spare a few hundred dollars, you should pick up an SLR and some reversal film. Go out and shoot, and get your film processed and mounted as slides, and you can project it and see exactly what you shot. There are a ton of books on photography and about how film works; check some out from the library and go to town. There are some books that are recommended on this site through the link at the top. I really seriously recommend doing this- very few kids coming out of school today have any knowledge about film, and having a really thorough understanding of all of the principles of photography will give you a leg up on them. You don't need a motion picture film camera to learn about film. A stills camera will serve you quite well.

One good technique I've heard for doing floors is to have some sort of mirrored surface that the actors stand on; this reflects the greenscreen down to their feet without needing to be lit, and plus you can get the actors' reflections if you need that. Most of the time, though, when people are doing keying on the floors, they just lay down some crappy blue or greenscreen fabric and don't even bother to light it differently. You're probably going to have to rotoscope everything from the waist down regardless, so I don't even know if it's worth the worry. Lighting-wise, frankly if you're putting a lot of effort into it you're in the minority. Getting it evenly lit is the most important thing. I personally think that one stop under tends to be best, but I've heard people saying that one stop over is optimal for RED; I haven't used it yet though so I can't confirm or deny.

Yeah, back then the CG would have been done on SGI workstations. Today all of the software runs on PCs, so the computers they're using are more or less the same as what you're using at home. If they're doing 3d stuff, they might have a workstation graphics card, which accelerates the interactions and makes the display a bit more precise- these are just off-the-shelf parts that cost a few thousand. Other than that, the only real difference between what they're using and what you're using is that they have large render farms in order to process vast numbers of complex scenes much faster. Sometimes they'll also steal idle processor cycles from other users' workstations on the network. I don't remember the exact specs on my workstation at work, but it's got 8GB of RAM and dual processors- not sure if they're the Intel Xeon ones or just Core2Duo. Basically it's probably twice as fast as my PC at home, and to tell you the truth, I've got one of the newest machines in the company- most people use computers that are way slower than the one I've got. I'm not a 3d guy though, I'm a compositor; which means I work mostly with 2d elements, and my work generally isn't as processing intensive as the 3d stuff.

Usually 2k. It's still pretty rare to go beyond that. I know that Flags of our Fathers was done at 4k, and sometimes the odd shot here or there will be done higher, but as far as I'm aware, the vast majority of effects are still done at 2k.

You would think so, but it's actually backwards. The DMR process to bring 35mm films to IMAX basically runs the whole thing through noise reduction via wavelets, and then upsamples it significantly and I think adds new grain. So basically when you see it in IMAX, you see less of the original picture information. For a film that probably had (I'm just going to pull a number out of a hat) $50million dollars in VFX, doing the whole thing at 4k is a huge additional expense and would probably add several months to the post schedule. Yes, storage and processing power improves all the time, but even doing 2k for hundreds of really complex shots already stretches resources to the breaking point. On the film I just finished working on, we had ~550 shots, all at 2k, and we were severely strained for storage space and processors. I actually ended up rendering almost everything on my workstation, tying it up for over an hour at a time, rather than submit my shots to the queue. Had I needed to work in 4k, each shot probably would have taken me 50% longer to do, given the additional needed attention to detail and the vastly longer rendering times. It's likely that the producers considered 4k, but looked at the additional cost and scheduling, and compared it to the somewhat marginal increase in image quality, and decided that it wasn't worth it.

Basically any compositing program will have rotoscoping tools. After Effects, Combustion, Shake, Nuke, Fusion. You might also want to consider specialty programs, such as Silhouette. The principles are the same throughout.

Yeah I know. It's not even necessarily a criticism of the movie or the way it looks, but I just think it's kind of silly that they're talking about the amazing image quality and that it's got a totally unique look. It intentionally looks like every no-budget action movie ever made by 20-somethings.

Those guys sure have a lot of praise for themselves considering that they intentionally made their film look awful. I mean it was a reasonably entertaining movie and the look works for it, so I'm not necessarily complaining, but let's be honest with ourselves that it looks really really ugly.

Very true. For my upcoming reel, I'm probably going to rip the DVD when it comes out in order to get my shots. I could get them from my employer, but it takes forever and I might not even bother. I should go over my contract when I get home, but I don't think there's anything in there that says I have the right to use any footage for my reel- everything I've been doing for the last 6 months belongs to Universal. My company probably has something in their contract that says they can use the shots on their reel, and maybe something that says that their employees can use it, but I really don't even know. If the studios had their ways, no one would be able to make reels to begin with.

I don't think I've ever seen a demo reel that didn't have a copyrighted song on it. Like ever, except for the rare handful of people who ask their friends to compose something for them. And I've never heard of anyone looking down on reels as a result of this, nor have I ever heard of anyone getting in any kind of trouble for it. It's definitely against the law technically, but there's a 0% chance that you're going to get in trouble for it. Not just people- many VFX companies set their reels to copyrighted songs as well. If you've got ethical qualms about it, though, then by all means don't do it.

So you shot a person without greenscreen and you want to separate them from the background? Depending on how it was shot, you can still try to key it using whatever color or brightness differences exist between the person and the background. Most likely, though, you're going to have to rotoscope it.

It will be grainy, but you can deal with it. You'll probably mostly be doing luma keying for the sparks, and you can just roto the cigarette. You'll have to boost the lighting according to your fps; there isn't any way around that. Motion blur isn't really a problem; you'll deal with that either through keying or by adding the appropriate falloff in your roto. You might want to shoot additional spark elements so that you can add them to taste, since you might not get the look you're going for with a single shot.

It sounds like you're shooting this as an element to be composited into a plate, is this correct? If so, is there a reason you can't just get this in-camera on set? If you're doing it as an element, you want to have the lighting on the cigarette be as similar as possible to the lighting on set. Shoot it against an unlit duvatene (or however you spell it) backdrop.

I've never used Color, but I'm almost sure it could. Many programs can read .dpx, including Photoshop, and virtually any video application will allow you to write quicktime files.

Yes, Combustion can handle .dpx files, and you can render out as quicktime files. I'm hoping you'll just be using the quicktime for editing, because the .dpx files will be of much higher quality, so obviously that's what you'll want to use to create your final output.

I think it would help if you could be more specific about what you want it to look like other than "striking." There's a virtually infinite range of things that you could do on set or with compositing.

The script and the acting. Don't get me wrong, I really wanted to like it because I'm a big fan of Silent Hill 2, which it takes most of its imagery from, and overall I did like it, but they kind of picked and chose which parts of the stories they were going to follow, which led to it being kind of incoherent, and basically the whole thing kind of falls apart after they get inside the church. Disappointing because Silent Hill 2 on its own would be really similar visually, but it has a much more coherent and disturbing plot that doesn't rely on the whole "massive plot dump right at the end" technique. My favorite parts were definitely the "Dark Silent Hill" sequences, which I think are the closest I've ever seen to putting a nightmare on film, and it was great to see Pyramid Head even if he was completely out of place in the story they told.

I totally agree. Cinematography, production design, visual effects; everything onscreen was amazing. Too bad everything else was so awful. I don't know about Hard Candy, but there's an article about Silent Hill in American Cinematographer, so that might be worth checking out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical) The viewer's attention is, or can be, drawn by a number of things. In certain compositions (think looking down a street, for instance), the vanishing point may be the focus of attention. Attention is also drawn by use of focus, brightness, colors, motion, etc.

That effect in both those films comes from using a camera with the pulldown phase out of sync with the shutter. In other words, normally the shutter is closed while the film is pulled down through the gate, but for this effect they have it slightly offset, so that a portion of the exposure happens while the film is being transported vertically through the gate, which causes bright areas to smear upwards. There really isn't any way to do this with a digital camera, since the physical action doesn't exist. Your options are basically to: 1. Shoot on film, either with a camera that's been deliberately offset, or with something like an Arri 435 Extreme, which lets you throw off the phase interactively (I think) using a control box 2. Use some sort of streak filter. I know that there are ones for horizontal streaks, but I don't remember offhand if you can rotate them or if you need a different one. 3. Approximate the effect in compositing.

Wikipedia has a good explanation of it, with diagrams.