Chalk one up for the silver image

[Mitch Perkins]

I checked this out because I saw the commercial(s) and thought the image quality looked too good for digital -

http://www.ascmag.com/magazine_dynamic/ ... /page1.php

Four months before principal photography commenced, Pope began testing. The cinematographer recalls that he initially suggested shooting digitally, given that the entire picture would be scanned to facilitate the addition of extensive computer-generated (CG) effects and the digital-intermediate (DI) process. The idea was rejected, however, because high-definition video leaves no room for compositional repositioning in post, and Raimi frequently does that to refine shots featuring CG elements. “Sam is big on being able to repo in post,” says Pope. “When you’re dealing with CG characters, the repo room is really important. You can previsualize a sequence all you want, but when you’re operating, framing and following something that isn’t there, there’s a lot of room for the result to be imperfect — you might pan too fast or too slow, or tilt too far or not far enough. Once the final elements are added, Sam often wants to tweak the shot.

“So Sony Imageworks just said ‘no’ to the idea of shooting digitally. As a result, we shot on Super 35mm and did the effects sequences on VistaVision using Greg Beaumont’s Beaucam, just as we did on Spider-Man 2. We went with VistaVision both for the finer grain and for the much larger negative area to repo in post.”

--------------

Not a huge Spidey fan, but these are the guys keeping us all in cartridges, hopefully for a long time to come.

Mitch

[toby_tools]

Thanks Mitch
great article.
Spidey on HD would look like crap. Just like Superman Did.
Just my opinion.
Toby

[Mitch Perkins]

Thanks Mitch
great article.
Spidey on HD would look like crap. Just like Superman Did.
Just my opinion.
Toby

Feel free to elaborate on your opinion.

Not a huge Superman fan either, but I do love the Lynchian mystery films "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive". Multiple viewings are required to put all the pieces in place.

Now, it's not hard to watch these films more than once, because they are visually lush, and push the envelope of ingenuity - MD was the first film in the history of cinema to use dust on the rear element of a partially removed (they called it "whacked"), Panavision lens, I'm betting, and the effect was perfect for the story.

So we went and saw "INLAND EMPIRE".

Well...the "freedom" allowed the director through using a PD150 resulted in a sprawling piece that I haven't the heart to decode - though some of the shots looked pretty good, there's too much that's just ugly to sit for 3 hours in a theater again...maybe when it comes out on DVD, and one can skip certain tiresome bits...first viewing hints at a fairly simple story.

Plus, we do not buy tickets to watch something wherein some of the shots look pretty good, not when the whole thing could be gorgeous with just the usual amount of effort on the part of director, cast and crew (loading the magazine, for example). The touted benefit of forty minute takes did not show up on the screen, IMHO - the acting was no better or worse than that in a traditionally shot story of equal interest.

There were some shots that would have been arresting in their anomalous nature, had they been caught on a format (like 35mm) usually reserved for more disciplined story telling, but as it stood, they simply reminded one of more badly shot home video. Ugh.

Lynch has stated he can never go back to film - to heavy, too "slow". Methinks he is too lazy to do the job right.

Thank goodness we still have Scorcese!

Mitch

[woods01]

That same AC issue has an article on 28 Weeks Later which was shot on
Super 16 (with some VFX 35mm shots). The original was a much hyped
early digital feature (Canon XL-1 I think) so its interesting that went
for film on this instead of HD or a newer digital camera. What was most
intriguing in the article is that they shot day for night, using unfiltered
tungsten film and underexposure to get the effect. I think I'm more
interested to see how that came off than the actual story.

[David M. Leugers]

Lynch has stated he can never go back to film - to heavy, too "slow". Methinks he is too lazy to do the job right.

Me too. Sad for a guy who did what he did to film "Eraserhead" in 35mm. Talk about starving artist... now he wants it fast and easy so he can do it himself. Film will always be a collaborative art form.

OT but I was pretty floored today when my son and his wife requested a "film night" to watch some of my home movies projected on the screen instead of watching a transfer to DVD... they even want me to film and not video tape their annual cook out to raise funds for Cystic Fibrosis. I guess the youngsters get film, afterall. 8)

David M. Leugers

[Mitch Perkins]

Lynch has stated he can never go back to film - to heavy, too "slow". Methinks he is too lazy to do the job right.

Me too. Sad for a guy who did what he did to film "Eraserhead" in 35mm. Talk about starving artist... now he wants it fast and easy so he can do it himself. Film will always be a collaborative art form.

It seems he wants to do it all, and have it all - the money, that is. Indeed, an empire has only one ruler - the emperor himself.

What makes me laugh is he could have done pretty much the same thing with a nice little SRII, and it would have had so much more impact.

There was a trailer before IE for a creepy little indie, shot on film, and the difference was obvious. I do not believe the audience does not notice; they may still pay to see digitally captured stories, but that doesn't mean they don't notice the difference.

OT but I was pretty floored today when my son and his wife requested a "film night" to watch some of my home movies projected on the screen instead of watching a transfer to DVD... they even want me to film and not video tape their annual cook out to raise funds for Cystic Fibrosis. I guess the youngsters get film, afterall. 8)

David M. Leugers

There is simply nothing like the experience of watching projected film, and I say this as one who never even does it anymore! But I remember...

Really OT but we have answered a call from the producers of "The Incredible Hulk" (II or III or whatever), for old picture cars. We own a beautiful blue '79 Grand Prix.

Assuming they don't want to crash it, anybody know how much we should charge for rental?

Mitch

[christoph]

nice article, thing that made me agree the most (under the light of red etc)

"Although the visual-effects work and final filmout were done at 2K, Spider-Man 3 was scanned at 4K for the DI. Pope notes he was very excited to do a 4K scan for Spider-Man 2 (see AC June ’02), but he would have preferred to work in 2K on its sequel. “I’ve found that I actually like 2K scans better. There’s a certain softness to 2K, in addition to softening filters that are not yet available in 4K, that hides a lot of flaws. 4K is so brutally sharp and clear there’s nowhere to hide. Every blemish, every wrinkle, every hour of work into a late night or a long week shows up on the actor’s face, and that’s not what I want to see — especially not in a movie like this, which is set in a made-up wonderland. It’s just too much to fight later on.
“In many ways, cinematography is about deciding what you don’t want to see, and if you don’t have the tools to erase what you don’t want to see later on, you tend to walk away from that tool the next time. Right now we’re doing 2K projection and 2K effects, so why bother to scan at 4K when it’s just too sharp? Honestly, if I’d thought about it more carefully, I would have shot all the actors through a light [Tiffen] Pro-Mist filter or something similar, just to take some of that sharp curse off the back end. I used a little filtration in the shooting, but not nearly enough."

[Angus]

Assuming they don't want to crash it, anybody know how much we should charge for rental?

Mitch

Depends what they want to do with it...how much screen time? Will it be simply parked at the road side and seen in passing or will it feature by having a central character drive it?

Not sure what the going rate is in your neck of the woods but I know people who do earn thousands per film hiring out their cars to TV and film crews.

[Mitch Perkins]

" Honestly, if I’d thought about it more carefully, I would have shot all the actors through a light [Tiffen] Pro-Mist filter or something similar, just to take some of that sharp curse off the back end. I used a little filtration in the shooting, but not nearly enough."

Yeah, we watched MI3 at my folks house last night on me dad's new 16:9 monstro-set. Very cool TV, but Lawrence Fishburne's face looked like a frickin' sea sponge!

I think this resolution fetish is way out of hand, as I said before...then again, I like Super 8...

Mitch

[downix]

Indeed agreed. I dig out the old 8mm projector every once in awhile to show off the home movies. Man I love that.

[thebigidea]

the 40 minute take in Inland Empire is that Laura Dern confession to the strange man in the office that's strewn throughout the whole thing, the first part of the project to be shot and the genesis of all the improvisations around it.

I quite liked it in a theater, when the lights came up a friend sitting across the aisle and I just smiled crazed smiles at each other. At that point my girlfriend had already rushed angrily upstairs to read the blowup of the NYTimes piece to see if some clues were in there.

God it would have been gorgeous on film but i was pretty impressed with the blowup. It only looked especially crappy outdoors in sunlight, he did wonders with the lowlight bits...

I even tried to offer him a huge mess of black and white DS8 for free if he wanted to shoot something cheap just to get some web content at least on film with his touch but he's in love with DV!

[MovieStuff]

I checked this out because I saw the commercial(s) and thought the image quality looked too good for digital -

But since the film is digitized, the image you're looking at is digital. So much for the notion that digital will never reproduce the quality of 35mm film. ;)

Roger

[Mitch Perkins]

the 40 minute take in Inland Empire is that Laura Dern confession to the strange man in the office that's strewn throughout the whole thing,

My recollection is that that scene shows up closer to the end(?)

Rick says the strange man is a rabbit; my tentative take is he's a state psychiatrist who Dern imagines is a casting agent! I think the main idea of the film is how far actors lose themselves in a role, as Lynch puts it, "what goes into a role", which is the actor, their whole selves, and to too far a degree sometimes(?)

In the same (Eye Weekly) article, Lynch says he "conjures" things, ideas, characters etc. (I always figured Mr Eddy represented Lynch in "Lost Highway" - a guy who creates characters and puts them in films filled with sex and death, and kills them off in fun and interesting ways - hence the slomo shot of Arquette's boobies. BTW, I think the clue to LH is in the first two shots of Fred, with the fade to black in between - the first shot is Fred in his cell, the second marks the beginning of his "story du jour", the way he's going to fool himself into believing it "wasn't me" for the day. The clue is that he's got different haircuts in each shot).

...So I think the rabbits represent sort of "blank character templates", or blank canvases, the "lumps of clay" an actor "pulls from a hat", with which to "shape" a believable character for a given role. That's why they seem to have no personalities of their own whilst in their room - all they have to identify them as individuals are the voices of characters from Lynch's last film!

the first part of the project to be shot and the genesis of all the improvisations around it.

Still, I feel the acting in this scene is not particularly standout, and could have been brought out from Dern with ten minute 1000 ft loads just as, if not more, effectively. Then again, I'm not a world-renowned director...

I quite liked it in a theater, when the lights came up a friend sitting across the aisle and I just smiled crazed smiles at each other.

Hee hee! Nice! The reality for me is that theater viewing comes with external influences on the experience of the film - we were lucky enough to be sitting right in front of where two idiots showed up late and decided to whisper through the whole film, and stick their knees into the back of my chair. Plus I kept getting whiffs of stale spaghetti - I look forward to the release of the DVD. ~:?)

God it would have been gorgeous on film but i was pretty impressed with the blowup. It only looked especially crappy outdoors in sunlight, he did wonders with the lowlight bits...

Agreed on all points - to the extent I'm going to do some tests with our VX2000 and our friend's Sony HD cam, in extreme low light (where I felt ID was close to beautiful), and in daylight with a million stops of ND and the camera pushed to it's limits. Then I'm going to start shooting the next feature on all available S8 stocks and DV, doubling up for each scene and using whichever looks best, or both.

I even tried to offer him a huge mess of black and white DS8 for free if he wanted to shoot something cheap just to get some web content at least on film with his touch but he's in love with DV!

We always meant to send Lynch a copy of "Sleep Always", if only to give him a laugh at what pathetic fans we were of his films. I want my brother, who lives in L.A., to place the film on Lynch's doorstep in an unmarked brown envelope. ~:?)

Meanwhile, I hereby officially declare this thread open to OT topics, ranging from picture cars to Spiderman, and everything in between.

Mitch

[Mitch Perkins]

I checked this out because I saw the commercial(s) and thought the image quality looked too good for digital -

But since the film is digitized, the image you're looking at is digital. So much for the notion that digital will never reproduce the quality of 35mm film. ;)

Roger

Silly rabbit, the film-captured image is digitized, not a digitally captured image.

What do you think I do all day with my telecine unit? Obviously I'm perfectly happy with film-captured images subsequently digitized - it's that ~silver halide step~, between reality and the product, that makes all the difference.

What may happen, but hasn't happened yet, and may never happen, is digital capture reproducing the quality of 35mm film capture.

That's okay though, since the difference in look provided by digital capture is just another useful tool in the artist's box of tricks.

Mitch

[Rick Palidwor]

I haven't been piping in here because I am bored of format discussions. Formats are tools which can be used well, or not, and what matters is what is the story unfolding in the frame (and hopefully the format/tool choice was appropriate for the subject).

And I am holding off on the IE discussion until I see it for a third time. It's a brilliant movie and I think I have it figured out.

Rick