Toby Gorman

Set of 12 Arri / Zeiss Master Primes for sale. Great condition, Well looked after and serviced, photos available upon request. Focal lengths are 14, 16, 18, 21, 25, 32, 40, 50, 65, 75, 100, 135. Selling as a set but potentially interested in selling individual lenses depending on the focal length. Price is USD $216,000. Open to offers.

Interesting idea with the salt and pepper, thanks Stuart!

Ah yes I did see those and they look pretty great. Shame they are not dimmable but definitely worth looking at. Thanks

Thanks for the input Adrian!

Hi all, Im wondering if any of you have started using any high cri dimmable LED bulbs in practicals yet. It's an age old problem I have been wanting to solve for for a long time - in an ideal world I'm looking for a 4000k ish dimmable led bulb for practical lamps (Edison sockets). Colour adjustable between tungsten / daylight would be a bonus. I'm shooting a Christmas movie and want to mix daylight through windows at a practical bookstore location with warmer tungsten practicals, but I want to bring the two colours a little closer together, and generally key with 4000k inside to let the exterior play somewhat cooler. I've used bca's in the past (too green and hot and they never seem to match each other) but haven't really found an led that fits the bill. In this case the windows are too big to gel and there are actors entering through the door etc, so cooling down the practicals seems the simplest way to go. Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

I did just this, moving to Vancouver from England. As a shooter, and working freelance on a job by job basis, there is no easy way I'm afraid. Check out the CIC website for the different options, but I basically applied for Permanent Residency as a Skilled Worker, which took almost 3 years from application to getting my PR. If you have 4 years experience in a qualifying job category, and a decent education, you should meet the points requirement. If you are offered a full time salaried role working for a company, and the application is approved by HRDC, you can get a work visa just for that job. Those jobs just don't exist in film production, so that is the only route I'm afraid. Good luck!

Here is a still from a shoot I did last weekend that sounds pretty similar to yours, only I went for a more late afternoon look as opposed to sunset. First off, I would say make sure you get a great hazer, one of those cracked oil ones that put out a very fine haze that hangs around for ages. Expensive, but worth every penny. We had cheap party foggers and they drove me nuts and didnt work out in the end. They banged out far too much smoke at first, and when it started to settle and disipate, boom, it was gone. The film was one 10 minute take, so obviously by the time we would get to the end of a take there was nothing left! So i ditched the foggers and just lived with no smoke, which I was obviously upset about. This still was taken while i was still trying to make it work! Besides the smoke it was just a 10k through the window as far back as i could get it for the pattern of the blinds on the wall, a direct tweenie through the window for her hard side key, and the rest were 2k skip bounces to provide directional fill on her and model the face a little more, and bring up areas of the set where necessary. The thing i love about interior sunny days, especially as the sun is going down, is the way hard light bounces off floors and walls etc to create lovely soft sources from where ever the hell you like! They can be more directional than creating ambient fill and still feel natural. I would probably go with some kind of straw / orange on the 10k if this was sunset, and perhaps let your ambience run bluer, yet retaining the warmth of the 10k for anything motivated by the hard sunlight bouncing off the walls. Really depends on what the script calls for and your own preferences!

Hi JD, Great to see you on the forum, I am very much looking forward to your contributions! I had the pleasure of working for you for a few days on The Invisible a few years ago when I had a temporary Canadian work visa, and if my Canadian residency ever comes through I hope to one day work with you again! In the meantime I will continue struggling in London :) Toby

Thanks for the info Gus, I will certainly try and get hold of some 100ft spools. Great suggestion regarding the cape, I will try and do some similar tests if wardrobe have some ideas in mind. I would love to see the results of your film, is there any chance you could post some stills perhaps? Many thanks, Toby

Hi all, Apologies if much of this has been answered before, I have searched the forum as much as possible, but am in need of some further info and suggestions. I am shooting a short film in a couple of months time, a dark comedy on Super16, and I have my eye on the Fuji Vivid 160t stock, as from what I have seen of it, it looks beautiful and I think the saturation and contrast will suit it well. I am thinking of going with a highly saturated, high contrast look, and I would like to get a better idea of how the stock will behave under certain circumstances. Presently we are planning on finishing on HDCam (hopefully HDCam SR). As I havent used this stock before I have suggested we shoot some tests, and as I havent had the opportunity to shoot tests before I wanted to pick peoples brains... I would like to do some tests processing it normally, testing contrast, lattitude, and colour, and also I would really like to see how it holds up pushed a stop, to increase the saturation and contrast further, and also because the whole film is interior night, and our lighting budget wont extend much further than 2k's and below, so being able to rate it at 320 would be a welcome bonus, though not essential. My concern however is that I don't particularly want an overly grainy look, so I would like to be able to assess this before committing to it, especially considering this is super16. We haven't decided on a lab yet, so I'm directing some questions to you folks first if you don't mind... Considering there isn't much of a budget for these tests... Would it be simple enough for the lab to process say 200 feet normally, and 200 feet pushed one stop? Would this force developing incurr significant extra cost for the test ?(assuming they don't do us a nice favour) In order to assess the tests properly, am I right in thinking that the best way to do this would be to follow the workflow we are planning for the whole film? i.e, should we get the tests transferred to HDCam and view them at the lab on a decent monitor/projector? I would imagine that would be the only way to accurately assess the grain, as a cheap digi beta transfer would surely not have enough resolution to see this. Other than the grain, if we can't afford an HDCam transfer would a cheap one-light digi transfer be good enough to assess everything else? For the tests I am planning on setting up a shot with a grey scale, colour chart, and a person, taking bracketed exposures, and also different key to fill ratios. I would also like to test some of the lighting gels I have in mind for skintones. Any other suggestions for exploring the behaviour of this stock? I assume it would be wise to do all these tests twice, once processed normally, and once for the push. I will be more than happy to post the results of these tests once completed. Many many thanks in advance for any help you can be, Toby

Hi all, I have a little conundrum I was hoping somebody could help with... Just finished a low budget indie weekend shoot. We had two 2.5k HMI's amongst other things. We couldn?t use them both at the same time because the locations electricity was not as robust as it originally seemed, but both heads were used at different times, and both were fine. We have just been contacted by the rental house who are claiming that one of the bulbs is blown, and they want to charge us for it. We never noticed either of them blowing, and I am wondering whether this could have happened in transit. The kit was picked up from the location by a driver from the rental house, so I assume that if it was broken at this point that the responsibility would not be ours. So question is, would there be tell tale signs if the bulb was damaged through transit rather than blowing onset, such as lack of burn marks etc? Anybody else had this problem, and if so, how did you deal with it? Many thanks, Toby Gorman

Thanks for the replies, most helpful and much appreciated.

I know the DVCam/MiniDv vs BetaSP debate has been covered several times, but which format (NTSC) do you think will hold up best for projection in a theatre, when exporting from a DVCPRO 50 HD master (from FCP)? The reason I ask is that a certain festival can screen either DV-CAM, Mini-DV, or Beta SP, and we have access to all 3 decks, though I can't vouch for how well they have been maintained... Thanks in advance, Toby Gorman

Yes, me too. Great forum.