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Soderberg and the iPhone


charles pappas

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AUDIO product.. not Home Electronic item..and Xmas only not the year 2015.. I dont know what the highest selling Home Electronic item of 2015 was, but Im sure it was millions or tens of millions more than record players.. and this is only Amazon sales in the US I presume.. or Florida :).. I know you just want to see me naked on the boulevard of broken dreams .. :)

 

Its like me claiming my yearly income is XXX based on one extraordinary month working 30 days.. ie it would be untrue..

Edited by Robin R Probyn
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Bottom line is that there is no way record players outsold TV's - so the statement cannot be true. It may well be that record players were the number-one seller on Amazon in the home audio field for the Christmas season, but that is a pretty narrow category anyway. What do they define as home audio equipment? Surround sounds and stereo receivers, and record players? If so, I can see it. I can't imagine what else would fall into 'home audio' category. 'home electronics' is a much broader category that covers everything from TV's and PS4's to Amazon Echo's and bedside alarm clocks.

 

Reminds me of the time my book hit #1 on Amazon's best-selling book chart for the middle-grade fantasy category... No way I would have construed that to mean my book was the top selling book of the year, period. It was #1 for about 2 weeks and then fell, and then only #1 is a sub-category of books, not books in general.

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When he says “I’d have to have a pretty good reason not to be thinking about that first" , in regards to the iPhone being first choice on projects, he suggests a complete lack of interest aesthetic, which I find ultimately more telling than the fact that he prefers the workflow of iPhones to cine cameras.

 

The best directors have had a very specific interest in the aesthetic and formal qualities of their stories.

Edited by Maxwell Sims
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  • 2 months later...
  • 2 months later...

I think he's right, millions of images of "crap", taken just to post to online and collect "likes". No composition, not carefully exposed, viewed on a tiny phone screen and if printed, would probably look like crap.

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  • 6 months later...

I was reading this interview:" https://mattmulcahey.wordpress.com/2014/09/22/deep-fried-interview-the-one-i-love-cinematographer-doug-emmett/ " and in it he made this statement:

 

Did your choice of the Red Epic as your camera spring from budgetary considerations or did you need the camera’s 5K capability for the effects work?

Steven Soderbergh had just retired and he donated two Epic cameras to our shoot. He has his own Epics that have his name laser-engraved on the side of them. We were really geeking out over those cameras. They were the cameras he used over the last couple of years to shoot his films so we knew what movies had been shot on them.

So this makes me wonder, do he really use an iPhone to make his movies or is it just a marketing thing?

Edited by Reggie A Brown
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https://www.indiewire.com/2019/02/high-flying-bird-steven-soderbergh-apple-iphone-netflix-1202043102/

 

While I understand his reasoning for wanting a more nimble camera that can squeeze between people, some of his points I question -- like using a wheelchair to follow the actors out of an elevator, down a hall, etc. -- if there's room for a wheelchair, there's room for an ARRI Alexa Mini or a Red Helium, etc. on a Movi.

 

As for the notion that one can't improve on reality, it begs the question of why reality is the highest goal in all types of filmmaking -- certainly it is important in many types of documentary work. But for narrative fiction where the actors are not the real characters and the situations are created, costumes are chosen, etc. I don't see why the lighting has to be completely available or even totally realistic.

 

There was a line by Spock in "Star Trek 6" where he tells the younger Vulcan taught to believe that being logical was the highest goal in life "Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end." Realism is the beginning of thinking about cinematography and lighting in order to tell a story, but it is not the end, it sometimes is not enough simply to capture what is in front of the camera.

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As for the notion that one can't improve on reality, it begs the question of why reality is the highest goal in all types of filmmaking

 

I'm often reminded of Jay Leno on "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" when he's talking about how he loved the movie "Gravity" but how so many people online were complaining the space science was all wrong and he said, "You know, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney aren't astronauts either..."

 

Or when Robert Zemeckis was questioning Dean Cundey about where the light was coming from in the cave in "Back to the Future 2" and he said, "Same place the music is coming from."

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All filmmaking styles are a form of artifice and there's nothing wrong with that -- one can choose Realism or Expressionism, Romanticism, Abstraction, whatever, to tell a fictional story with actors wearing costumes and standing in sets or dressed locations. I just have problems when people say that Realism is always the highest goal in art because it implies that it brings "truth" with it in the telling, and Realism can be used just as easily to tell great lies. We no longer say that realism in painting is the highest goal in that art form, so why do we cling to such simplistic notions regarding realism in cinema?

 

Realism is a great style and often is very effective as a storytelling device, particularly when you are trying to convince an audience of a very implausible situation (like in a superhero movie -- "You Will Believe A Man Can Fly"). Or it can be used for comedic effect, like shooting a vampire story as if it were reality television, ala "What We Do in the Shadows".

 

All cinematographers should learn to master realism, for the same reason George Burns, when asked what was important as an actor, said “Sincerity - if you can fake that, you've got it made.”

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Thank god, Soderbergh is returning to regular digital cameras for the Laundromat, don't remember where but I saw an article the other day where he says the film mixes several aspect ratios, styles, etc. High Flying Bird looks so ugly, I like the film and Soderbergh insists the film couldn't have been made the way it was, at the speed it was (12 days) any other way but it's still so distracting and electronic looking.

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