Michael Collier

I havent done a helecopter shot before, but I have done plenty of small aircraft and even a few dog sleds and found its all about your body technique. (FYI, a small bush plane like a cesna single prop flying close to mountainous areas gives tons of shake, so even a bungee setup wouldnt work for me. If anyone wants an amazing show, come up to alaska, I'll get you a good bush flight around Denali (Mt. McKinnley) and show you some CRAZY pilots. good, but crazy) My general technique for a situation like this is to think of slipping on ice (for those of you who are not seeing -20 in their back yard think of slipping on a wet floor) as you fall you are naturally trying to place your torso in your center of ballance. Legs and arms are used to position this dead weight where it needs to be to stabalize yourself. Its quite natural and if you ski or snowboard you should be quite addept at doing it. Now apply that to a sitting situation. you want feel firm on the ground so you can use them to shift yourself. Slump your backa bit (posture is for loosers) and let yourself go flexible and prepared, dont stiffen up. As the plane moves shift your body to the center of ballance. You may not know where that is exactly but you will pick it up quickly. Its all a matter of feel, and since you do it every day unconciously to walk and run. as you ballance yourself you are actually compensating for motion like a gyro would. Its not perfect but instead of sudden bad jerks the frame moves a bit smoother and with more grace. I have been able to zoom into about a 30mm lens (on 2/3" camera, so 75mm in 35 film) and keep it pretty steady. the drawback is a succession of quick jerks in different directions can confuse your internal gyro and your shot will go loopy for a second until you regain your composure

One thing I always loved about noir was the composition. I love not having to light the main charecter whos talking. You can let them go black, you can put them in a little window in a weird place in frame almost so you dont see them, but use the composition to draw the eye to that charecter. Like has been said before flag. Let blackness devide the scene. you dont need to rely on closeups very much. I like to shoot wide and let the space tell the story, if the scene supports that. One trick I like to use is to make two charecters whos faces are visible in frame light them such that each ones key light is comming from a different part of screen. It sells the idea of depth in a shallow depth environment. I could go on and on and on about what I like about noir and how to light that (noir and dark dramas are my favorite) but the main point is you are in the inverse of a comedy. If you want something to go black, let it go really black. If you want just two pools of light to light the only two charecters in the scene and let everything else fall almost dark, do it. Play around with light to your hearts content. The frame is totally yours, not much would be considered 'wrong' in a noir. Watch the old batman cartoon (90's version, really dark, almost frank millers)

A good base if you have never done anything professionaly is about 20 bucks an hour. Keep in mind that since our work is usually based on a one time project (not 40 hours a week, with 2 paid vacations) your rate should be higher than what your worth for a continual gig. Various other factors should be counted in. Is there travel? Usually a travel day is half full rate. Is there long days? after 8 hours (or 10, if thats your agreement) you go into overtime and should make time and a half. Are you providing your own gear? If so find a rental company in your area, find what they charge and then give the production your working on a break (producers love saving on rental services, and most houses cut break to long time customers, so give that to them right off the bat, they will love you for it) Are there difficult conditions? I have shot for the Iditarod, and if its between a nice studio shoot and -10 degrees in a town with 3 cars and 80 snow machines, well the latter should pay better. In the end they will pay what they need to pay and if they cant afford you (i assume your rate will be far lower than many of the ENG freelancers in the area) then chances are they are a shady operation trying to get a bunch of cheap work from a guy whos eager to get his feet wet. Then you gotta decide if you should do the shoot or not. I did a shoot in my early career for 200 bucks. 2 cameras (3 chip miniDV) that I provided, 2 hours of rehearsal and 2 hours for the performance, plus 5 days of editing (they wanted the whole 2 hour performance on DVD) Do the math and thats about $4.54 an hour that I had to split between two people in the production company. Add to that the guy misrepresented himself as a 'local artist promotion' and promised more work (which never came, even the artist we did the video for left his company) and he didnt even pick up the DVD for 7 months. Every 2 weeks we would get a call "hey is that DVD ready?" "yeah, its been ready for a while, you can pick it up right now" "oh well I'm actually kind of busy right now, I will give you a call in a few days" Our producer had to drive the damn thing to his house (so add $5 travel expense to get it from anchorage to the Mat-su valley in a Dodge ram pick up)

Finnish your offline DVCAM edit. Conform back to digi and playout with that. Since the footage goes to Digi in the first place you want your final tape to go through as little generation loss as possible (Digi beta I know, digital, no generation loss, but you do loose quite a bit going to DVCAM or other formats.) If you do the final conform from the original tapes it will give you the highest quality. Now if a fest doesnt take digibeta, transfer it to the highest quality tape they accept (another conform from original would be good, but probably unpracticle given your budget) If you are doing an online conform (IE you conform in avid by ingesting footage at full data rate and push out from computer) I would have the post house do a Digibeta, a Beta SP (although you can skip this one, its a dying format) and HDCAM master tape. That way you have your bases covered if one fest doesnt take Digi. Bottom line, if it starts Digi, it should end Digi with as few transcodings as possible.

Well there are tons of variables here. 16 mm drawbacks for me are: *too much grain *high depth of feild *proccessing/handeling nightmares But there are drawbacks to HD as well. So I would ask you, which are you more comfortable with. You will get a speed increase from not having to load film and work like that, but you will be slowed down in your setups, those highlights are killers in video. Drawbacks of HD for me: *same depth of field in a 2/3" chip unless you get a GG adaptor *Low exposure lattitude and poor handling of highlights means your lighting must be more precise *Without GG addaptor you usually get one zoom lens to work with, no primes. Also what is your HD budget look like? I would take a viper or a camera aimed at HD cinema before a cinalta or one of the ENG models. If your photography is like mine, where selective focus is more than key, its essential you may look into getting a pro35 addaptor and work with primes and maybe a cine zoom. An advantage of HD is it guarantees some form of DI. no film scanning headaces, just pop open the color correct tool in avid and your good to go. Monitors and vectroscopes should be on hand to help guide your lighting and exposure which always gives you a nice comfy feeling knowing what your getting. I would go with HD, but thats because I'm more familiar and comfortable with it. Of course if it was the choice between 16mm and HDV, I would go 16mm.

Just cause they can modulate high frequncys, doesnt mean they would. High frequency is made more ineffient the greater the load that is applied (inductions a pain unless your talking about the coil in your car) so they may scale the freq down to save battery power. Remember, their goal was effiecient flicker free (to the eye) use, not scaled to film or video use. test it. its cheap anyways FYI, i used a lamp that was a plug-in unit, but used a wallwart to convert to 12vdc, and an internal ballast to drive the light. Using a HVR-ZU1 (sony) at 30i cine frame mode I did not detect any flickering or phase shift.

The best way to do it is an all digital pipe. So you need a camera to playback and a deck to record to. Most decks and some cameras have menu options to set the DV to input. The other will toggle as output. Though I am pretty sure if you set it up and press play on one, the other should toggle as an input automaticaly. If this doesnt work for you or you cant get enough equipment to do that, you can always hook your camera up to the computer, ingest all the footage onto hard drive and playback. However your timecodes will change, and it will take at least twice as long. not to mention the fact that if the computer glitches out, you have to start that dub over.

Its always a tradeoff to correct in post. Sure it can be done, but essentially all post color correction is is turning down certain channels and turning others up. Every channel you turn up will highlight the noise already present in the image. This applies to white ballance too. If you want an overall warm scene, use a filter to do it. that way your image stays clean and you still have the headroom for post color correction. to keep your image as sharp as possible figure out the look before you shoot and apply the filters as needed to get to that look.

basicly you set your marks (little peices of tape on the floor etc.) measure from the focal plane to the mark and using your follow focus, dial that into the lense. now make a mark on the dial so you can remember. then when the talent is walking through the scene you should hit your focus mark as they hit their tape mark and you interpolate the rest. sometimes you need a sharp monitor to check by eye as you go, as talent doesnt always hit their mark.

Ford did invent the auto, columbus did discover america, washington did cut a cherry tree, Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman, depending on your definition of sex, and the whole Iraq thing, well Canada started it Its about time everyone started giving America credit for the things others have done. (except for Iraq. I am as outraged as you are, but my taxes are paying for it.) (BTW, that was all satire, so chill your responses a little) Politicing has its place, religeon has its place, in cinematography you can use your religeon to come up with a 'look' to impart. However I agree that this is neither the time or the place and since someone is footing the bill for server space to host my satire, lets leave controversy out of a forum whos purpose is to help photographers converse with other photographers on matters of cinema.

I noticed the second time through that at the end, when it pans from the house back through all the scenes to obrians desk, if you look at the car it is much much longer than when you see them get into it. I still crack up at the end when they say 'hey thanks for being in my video' and obrian replys 'no problem. im just so depressed now. its like my head is getting bigger, more square, like a cube'

I think he is asking for help with 'ghetto lighting' a subject I became well versed in my high school filmmaking days. keep in mind guys he started by saying he doesnt know anything about light. Light is Light is Light. The best instruments money can buy only give you more light, or better controls on that light. But you are looking for interview lighting, something that can be set up quickly, purchased inexpensivley and give you the look you are trying to achieve. Most interviews work with only 2-3 lights. Key (main light on the interveiwees face) Backlight (or hairlight, puts a soft reflection in their hair and really defines the side of the face) Background light. (a light to break up the background so it doesnt look like a bookshelf normaly would) For the key you should have at least 250w, 500 is better. For ease of use and cost I would recomend an aluminumn reflector type light. You can buy these at home depot for about 20 bucks. They come with a clip to attach to whatever is handy. Take a milk crate box and attach a 1" dowel to it. Put weight in the milk crate and clip your light to the dowel. Instant C-stand. Make sure you have a chain or a rope attached to the top of the dowel, and tie it to the clip. Those clips sometimes slip and if your light gets busted its the end of the interview. For the backlight use a 100 or 200 w light (depending on how far it needs to be. This goes behind the person and on the opposite side of the face as the key light. (It usually works best to put that one on the side the interviewee is on, ie if he is screen left, put it to the left of him and behind) if you reverse this you get a sharp edge light on their face, not the light to define cheek bones and such) For the background light use a 100 or 200w source and shine it through something to break it up. You can buy cookies from a photography web site, cut patterns into aluminum foil to project the patterns, or my personal favorite for ghetto lighting, shine it through a house plants fooliage. The idea is to make the background soft and organic looking, so its pleasing, but not distracting from the talking head. I think you can get all of that for under 100. If you want you can add some real C-stands to make yourself feel a bit better, but in the end you are still using a spring clamp to attach it if you dont have proper lights. Keep in mind the difference between soft and hard light. you can make a hardlight source soft by increasing the area that is projecting that light. If you put a big (4'x 4') square of thin fabric in front of the key, it will become soft, and will make the shadows softer. That way your picture isnt too sharp.

I have been wondering the same thing. I just am in the middle of shooting a feature length on the sony ZU1. I wanted to see certain scenes in 35 mm or 16mm film out. If anyone wants to help fund a transfer of about 5-10 minutes worth of the video to film I just want to see it once (the cost to rent out a theater to see it in 35mm would cost a lot) after that I can mail the print to those who helped fund it

Did Michael Gondry do that one too? Watching the DVD of his work blew me away. One of those guys that makes you think differently about what film making is, a rare trait. I saw one he did for WS where I guess he shot the scene from one angle and then played that back over a projector with the same projection angle as the lens' angle (I hesitate to say focal length) and then filmed from another angle. Simply brilliant. I have yet to see this video. is there a place on the web to find it? My TiVo wont record MTV (not because my TiVo is broken, but MTV that is broken)

Did anybody like this movie? Thinking back to old history channel docs i thought there was more story there to the murrow story. It just fell really flat for me. I think the problem was using only original footage from mccarthy, it seemed stilted and out of place. I never got that big payoff I was expecting. Nobody to tell him off or put him in his place. A bunch of aimless stuff happened with no real outcome. At least thats what I got when I saw it. The lack of story pulled me out of the cinematography, i couldnt tell you if I liked the shooting or not.

The mic connects through contacts in the shoe? What will camera manufacturers think of next. Every non-standard 'solution' they come up with is riddled with problems Can you get the shoe that mates with it and then splice the wires with a 1/4" addaptor? can you hook wires directly into the shoes electrical contacts? none of the other jacks you listed will accept audio, so tapping into the shoe sounds like the only method. If you can find a shoe to canabalize, i would try that

I have built a million different lighting tools with just blackwrap (special aluminum foil with a matte black coat designed for cinematographers) Snoots are easy, I have made gobos that project sun-beam patterns, cookies, etc. its about 20 bucks a roll and worth every penny not having to spray paint it and wait for it to dry.

Does it have to be shaddows? What I mean is does it have to show the elongation and compacting effect that shaddows have, given the surface they hit? would it work to just have the outline of people? You could take a white backdrop and really hit it with light, make it bright, then shoot your subjects in front of that with little or no light on them. Then in post crank up the contrast setting to crush everything into white or black. Then add a bit of a gausian blurr to give everything a soft edge. Would that work? or does it have to be shaddows? You can show their feet because everything below IRE 50 will go black and everything above it will go white. Just make sure they dont wear light clothing. I realize this is similar to davids idea (that guy always posts while I am typing my . He must be better at describing things quickly. I need pages to get accross what I mean. Photo is worth a thousand words right? thats my eternal salvation.)

I have seen this, its amazing. Make sure to capture HDV from the start, if you convert in camera to DV, it will drop all information in favor of the 4:2:0 720x480 The extra latitude in color correction is great, also I have noticed that the camera overshoots NTSC standard. Images that look well leveled in the computer seem to blow out a little bit on NTSC. This means that if you take the level of the video down just a tad to put it into spec, you have opened up new headroom for color correction. I'm not big on gama selection in feild. Usually I set it to match the gama on my computer screen with adobe gama correction software. This way when I bring it into the computer no additional setup is needed and I see it with linearity. Color correct with a WYSIWYG NTSC monitor plugged in and get a good TV color correction. Color correct on the monitor for film out color. The only problem with the HDV models that I have seen is the lame lens designs included. But what should you expect. The lens on the SDX is more expensive than the whole HDV camera. I have always been a fan of the mini-35 HDV combo. The look that is imparted to the total frame frees you up as a photographer. Bottom line of photography is directing the eyes of your veiwer. Make them see things the way you see things. I do this with DoF and using the environment to 'draw lines' to my intended subject. With the cameras I am using now everything is way to sharp. I hate to cheat DoF but every video camera on earth is 1/3" or 2/3" and iris' only go up so high. One day we may see a T.03 with a razor thin depth of feild, but I doubt it, so its all about increasing the target size. And for those who have questions about the compression level in HDV, it doesnt seem to be a problem. I am finnishing up a feature length movie on the ZU1 (sony, stock lens) and it looks great. I have scoured several motion frames to find MPEG compression artifacts, but they are small and not obvious. MPEG has gotten better over the years. I think an HDV with mini 35 and some prime lenses will look better than the stock SDX-900 in both HD and SD deliveries (after a little color correction).

If I understand your question you want to know why CCD manufacturers dont provide a spectal response chart showing the density response at given exposure levels? The reason this usually isnt shown is because most cameras are going for a balanced look, it does them no good to print that information, few who use the cameras would understand it or use it in their purchasing consideration. Also, video cameras have white ballance and color matrix to make up for the relative non-linearity of the CCD itself. Most CCD work should be color corrected, not because you shot it wrong, but because its best to shoot clean, with ballanced color and exposure set to put the scene just within the cameras quantization abilities. This way you capture as much information as you can from the start and color correct in post. The only difference in this comes with regard to glass filters. A picture that is ballanced to tungsten and then has a filter placed over it will have less noise than shooting without the filter and color correcting that up to the color you want, reason being is your cutting the light before it gets to the CCD. all prossessing done on the signal comming out of the chip will influence noise base. If your looking for a guide on how to assume the curve of the cameras response, I assume an engeneer can perform a test, but its much easier to understand how to capture the sharpest picture with the most color and then correct in post to fine tune contrast, pedistal and gama to your liking. No chip will look good from the get go (at least, you cant choose chips like you would a film stock)

But then it would be too close to Halloween. you have to give some time for your stomach to recoup from days of sugar abuse. We got about 1 1/2 - 2 ft of snow over the last 2 days, isnt nice? our ski resorts opend and it finnally looks like Alaska should during November. My t-day. hmmm. I had to work, new photog for a local station, so I had a 2 minute story to cut on the history of thanksgiving, which was cool, we found 2 people who were direct descendants of the original mayflower compact signers, one who was related to the first man ever hung in america. but mostly it was a lot of work all day to get everything done, and by the time I got home, I had to finnish cutting my demo reel and then played X-Box 360. A reporter cooked some awsome turkey though, so I popped my head out every now and then to get some food.

You have lost probably around 30 seconds where the break occured. the only way to fix it is to have 2 shells handy. Like has been said already tape taveling over the delecate head would mean more headaces for you. take both spools off the original shell. each spool represents footage before the break in one and footage after in the other (duh.) if you take an extra shell you can attach the end of the tape to the empty spool. use the remaining spool from the extra shell and attach the end of the other spool. put both shells back together and you have two tapes you can edit without a splice running over the heads. you will loose a some footage and you must make care the attachment is strong, try and attach the tape the way it is originaly. Make sure your working environment is dust free and use non-latex gloves.

For the camera he is using its overpriced. DVCPRO 50 has one advantage. 4:2:2 compression as apposed to miniDV 4:1:1 (I think these are right, its off the top of my head, so correct me if I am wrong) If you can master to digibeta I would recomend that, even if the SPs are free. odds are the SPs are old and out of spec, and even if not its not much better than mini-DV which means more loss. Digi will also keep the digital production change, and if you have a way to send it from the computer or DV deck through a digital connection like SDI, you will elimiate loss from multiple A/D D/A conversions. (it will go through a computer algorythm, in a digital setting this is much more precise.) one more thing, with the advanced setting you must be careful, the motion wont be anything like film right off the tape. you will have to remove the redundant images the camera records to fill the mandatory 29.97 fps of miniDV. I think there is a program called DVmovie maker or something like that. I have used it and its pretty easy to set up. Once its done it saves everything as an AVI with the DV codec, but in 23.9 fps. if you want that onto video again with the right pulldown cadence, you will have to run it into after effects or something like that to apply the 3:2 pulldown or the 3:2:2:3 pulldown. complicated, but worth it compared to the regular setting (the end result is the same, but with advanced if you need to do a 24fps blowup or have a projector that can do 24p then you can show it without the redundant frames and pulldown, with the regular you will loose about half the video information on about half the frames, anyone with a pulldown attached to it.) my other advice is to expose white to IRE 90 to give you headroom in color correction. make sure the exposure range of your scene is within the chips performance levels (havent done a check on it, but when I shot my film with that camera I would estimate it at around 6 stops.) use a vectroscope/waveform if you can.

sound works in addative fassion (think of how light works) yes, if you add room noise underneath a track containing room noise and dialoge, it may not increase volume much, but more importantly the white noise to dialoge ratio would double, effectivley making the background sound twice as loud. What I normally do is only put ambient sounds in where I have absolutley no sound. if there is a gap in the audio I will do a butt cut to replace the natural room drone. if the changover is too stark then I would try a linear cross fade, if that still doesnt correct it, try a natural fade (have 80% of the volume decrease in the first second or so of the fade, then slowly pull the last 20 out over the next 3, do the oposite when brining up the ambient sound) That way you keep the dialoge to white noise ratio at a constant level. The ambient sound should never overlap dialouge. if the noise is really bad in the dialoge track, try and eq it out. most rooms have similar white noises, which are in a different frequency range than most voices. Try a 60hz "notch" filter. it should take any sound in the 60hz realm and attenuate it at least 5db. most north american homes have 60hz power, and that induces sound in the mic and in the line just by the magnetic feild created. past that find the range that the white noise is in and attenuate that out too. The range is usually determined by the acoustic properties of the walls and carpet and surrounding noise generators (washing machines, etc) If you have a spectrum analizer software play the ambient track and note what frequency ranges the ambient noise falls into. Then use the EQ to attenuate those ranges. be carefull not to harm the final track too much, and add the same audio filters to the ambient gap filler so that is a constant.

yeah, when I think of being in a movie theater, I dont see much of anything. if you set your 1k up far away with maybe 1/2 CTB and just aim for a soft, faint line around the contours of a persons face it will sell the shot. will the projector be running? does footage from that need to be in camera? if it does then the brightness of the projector will dictate your apeture and in turn will determine what level of light you need. If it tuns out the projector is too bright for the lights you have, you can put a glass ND in front of the projector to get the lights closer to in ratio. As for the switch, you can either do it with a dimmer or if you want to go cheap, take a power strip and plug all the lights from one 'light scene' into it and plug all the lights from the next 'light scene' and plug it into another. this will make it easy to switch one off as the other switches on. The natural thermal inertia of the fillament in the bulb gives a nice ramping or dimming effect when you make the switch. If you rate your film for one stop over you should be ok as long as you have 2-3K of power. remember if you use more than 2k to get the rest from a seperate circut (read as another theater or from the hallway) to avoid blowing fuses. I dont know if you have any monstor stands, but watch out for sprinkler heads EVERY time you set a light. A mistake like that will ruin your day. and dont be afraid of dark. let the whole scene go dark and choose what gets light.