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The Revenant is an amazing experience


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I'm surprised it's still lawful.

 

Its not, city ordnance - Might be state law now? Anyhow I was more bothered by the fact that the people didn't seem to care - it's just a big television to them.

 

Smoking in a cinema..!!! a little bit of a fire hazard no..? .. hope it was out doors..

 

It was not outdoors. Carkmike cinema - decent oldschool cinema with decent projection, low staff, high dollar popcorn.

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Its not, city ordnance - Might be state law now?

 

In all my years of movie-going, I don't ever remember smoking being allowed in a theater. That's really ridiculous.

 

As I write this, DiCaprio & Inarritu are being interviewed on The Today Show. From what I've seen of the film clips - online and elsewhere - the overall picture looks pretty flat, but I guess that's from using mostly natural light. Either way, I'd still like to see it.

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Yeah, weird, Chivo says in the AC article that 13 % was shot on Alexa 65 (which is a ridiculously accurate number to give) but Inarritu just said in a DGA session with Michael Mann that they shot 40 % of the film on this, he also said he wanted to shoot on 65 mm film but says with the conditions, it wasn't the way to go (that + the problems they've had according to the AC article).

 

Some of the takes are so long that their guesses may be different because maybe they used the Alexa 65 for 13% of the set-ups but it accounts for more than a 1/3 of the running time in Inarritu's mind. But I would guess that it's more like a 1/4 of the movie just guessing by the number of close-ups shot handheld on the Alexa-M, which take up a lot more of the overall running time. Either way, it all blends very well and shows you that 3.4K Open Gate Arriraw on the Alexa makes for a great 4K DCP. Besides the wide daytime landscape shots, I think some of the wider dusk shots (like the men with torches crossing the river) were done with the Alexa 65 and those have a nice dimensionality to them.

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Saw this last night. Very technically impressive but the film left me cold (literally) and bored. Sort of like the cinematic equivalent of a Joe Satriani concert. Maybe my attention span is shrinking, but these days I find myself quickly losing interest in a film with dull characters and thin predictable plots, no matter how beautifully crafted they are.

 

Maybe Richard Boddington is on to something - I think I would have enjoyed the film a lot more if there was a dog in it! The extreme wide angle close ups started to really bother me after the first dozen times it was used. I think they were meant to become subliminal over the course of the film and help the audience internalize the extreme mindset of the characters, but I found it increasingly distracting to the point that my mind started to wander off wondering what the close focus on the lens was and how big of a pull it was going to be for the 1st AC when the camera panned off the actor.

 

My favorite shot was the night exterior with all the men carrying torches through the forest, that was wonderful. I found everything else forgettable, I don't see this film being remembered at all in ten years.

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Didn't like the movie, but was really impressed by the photography. The open gate Alexa prores I've seen is a bit fuzzy upscaled to 4k, but even sitting in the front row, I couldn't tell when they switched between 65 and Mini for the most part.

 

In the first shot... how did they hide the operator's footsteps in the water? I have no idea.

 

Does anyone suspect the post work was rather extensive? I saw evidence of power windows a bit and possibly even roto to brighten up faces, but some of the scenes were so high contrast I couldn't believe there was an exposure on the face and the footage was much cleaner than Alexa Mini footage I have seen before and worked with, including open gate. The image was great, I feel like the Alexa is unsurpassed for this kind of thing.

 

Not a fan of the direction or script. The Malick aping was very sub-Malick. Beautiful photography, however. Curious to re-watch The New World, which is a great movie.

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Going back to the previous page -- lighting with practicals in the shot is still lighting. If I decide to turn off the overheads in the room or turn them on, I am making a lighting decision. Besides, whether a practical is in the shot or not is a framing decision. If the shot is lit with a hanging china hat fixture with a bare bulb in it, am I not artificially lighting when that practical is in the shot, but artificially lighting when it is out of the shot? What if it never gets into a shot?

 

Reminds me of a discussion I had with John Toll about the lighting of the Navy ship interiors in "The Thin Red Line" -- there was a nice overhead soft-box style light over an actor in one scene, and I asked Toll about it. He said that all the lights in the set had to be practical fixtures, so that was an overhead practical that he softened with a frame of diffusion under it. I don't think there was ever a wide shot where you saw this practical fixture, so practically-speaking (no pun intended), it wouldn't have mattered if a soft-box had been made and used instead... but this was all in keeping with Malick's idea of no "artificial" lighting being used.

 

Ultimately what matters is the effect and the feeling, does it feel real and motivated? Otherwise, it gets a bit odd to reject any artificial lighting being used when you are shooting actors wearing costumes and standing in sets -- what's "real" at that point? If an actor gets shot in the scene, you don't shoot them for real! So you might insist that the fake blood in the squib be as realistic as possible... but you don't use the actor's real blood.

 

In terms of "The Revenant", as Deakins mentioned on his site, there would have been no reason to light the day exterior scenes in that case, it wouldn't have improved anything. If some of us were working on a low-budget version of this, with a short schedule, there would be many times when we'd have to finish a close-up at night lit for day, or at least light and shoot some daytime inserts after the sun had set, or use some lights to match some bit of sun that had disappeared. We'd try to make it as realistic as we could, but of course it would be a compromise at times.

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Otherwise, it gets a bit odd to reject any artificial lighting being used when you are shooting actors wearing costumes and standing in sets -- what's "real" at that point? If an actor gets shot in the scene, you don't shoot them for real! So you might insist that the fake blood in the squib be as realistic as possible... but you don't use the actor's real blood.

 

 

In a book I'm reading on the making of Back to the Future there's a moment in the cave that Robert Zemeckis was complaining that the lighting was unmotivated and asked Dean Cundey where the light was supposed to be coming from. Dean Cundey replied, "Same place as the music..."

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In a book I'm reading on the making of Back to the Future there's a moment in the cave that Robert Zemeckis was complaining that the lighting was unmotivated and asked Dean Cundey where the light was supposed to be coming from. Dean Cundey replied, "Same place as the music..."

 

Great answer.

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Sometimes the needs of the narrative have to take precedence over what things would be like in reality. So often I've had to do a "moonlit" interior with no practical light sources on, but the director insists on seeing subtle expressions in the actor's performance, in their eyes, or some bit of action happening.

 

But I always resist adding more light to the actor because that can feel unrealistic that the actor walks around in light and is surrounded by blackness, but if I actually light more realistically -- that the moonlight falls into the distance just as brightly as anywhere else, then the director thinks things are overlit, when that's more realistic than only lighting the foreground actors. We've just become conditioned by movies to accept that at night, only the foreground gets lit by "the moon" and the background falls off. I'd almost rather do the reverse, if I could be allowed to play things more in silhouette.

 

But at some point, you have no choice but to add more light or exposure if having the audience see some bit of acting or action trumps realism. If I had more control over the screenplay, maybe I'd find a more logical way to justify more light on the actors but often I'm stuck with what's on the page, where the writer maybe describes a power outage plunging the house into blackness with some characters getting out flashlights, but then you get this whole other scene where there are no flashlights and yet you still need to see what is going on!

 

This is one reason I love the night commando scene in "Sicario" where Deakins doesn't cheat and have shots lit so that the audience can see what is going on in an objective angle, and yet the characters need night vision and infrared goggles to see anything. But you have to have a director agree to an approach like that, where you are limited to the POV shots.

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I saw it today finally (it opened today in Ireland)

The only thing I have to say is that it looks amazing but what I loved the most was the way Alejandro directed it.

 

While I was watching it I knew what Alejandro wanted to show and the reasons why he wanted to show us what we were watching on the screen.

 

I think that it is his most emotional work ever and I am very happy for both, Chivo and Alejandro, because they got to made this powerful experience and it really shows how Alejandro has evolved through the years!

 

I am looking forward to watching it again!

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Maybe I'm jaded but when it was over I felt a bit underwhelmed: A bit too frenetic with the camera and in the in your face wide angle seemed like some handheld DSLR handhold shooting that I've done, and that I've told myself to not do anymore;) Along the same lines: kind of like the Gopro "epidemic" ~ in surfing for instance, the view from inside the tube seems ~ not-so-epic.

 

There was one poignant scene between father and son, and I thought that close-up on DiCaprio was affective but otherwise it all seemed rather like going through the motions; there where no lasting moments (that I felt) of consequences, or rather they seemed to fall through the cracks. Perhaps the working conditions where a bit distracting...

 

Or perhaps the crotchety curmudgeon in me imagines them being "cityslickers" impressed by the grandeur of nature etc. LOL but I do give them credit for trying: I still haven't finished shooting my first 35mm short end LOL

 

Addendum: When I first heard saw that Tarantino was doing another "Western" I was kind of disappointed. But in retrospect it was refreshing to see the restrained and "simple" treatment. Also, the "snow scenes" seemed more beautiful: putting the technicalities between film and digital aside; perhaps it was because the few landscape shots seemed to count for more.

+--

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Robyn, it looks like it is the usual frame on a crane, just by the look of it.

 

Tyler, you're welcome.

 

While watching the video I couldn't stop thinking how much I miss them both, Alejandro and Chivo!!!

 

Have a good day!

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