An Epic Change

There aren't many times that I'm astonished, but this is one of them. The web-things are all vibrating because James Cameron has just (who knows when "just" was – recently at least) bought 50 Red Epic cameras. Wow, that's true conceptual art. Can you imagine what that really looks like. 50 boxes of $58,000 cameras sitting all in a row. Amazing as a concept, what would it be in reality?

(OK, it's true that Peter Jackson bought 30 Red Epics to shoot the Hobbit with, but maybe both of these together is even more impressive. What do you think?)

So much for the hype and yelling, what's it really mean? Well first it's a validation of the Red concept and the Epic format in particular. This is a camera that shoots 5120x2700 for a 5K format. That's 6 times the area of an HD camera. On top of that the camera body (just the body, so you can triple that for the full effect) weighs 5 pounds. The lens will probably weigh more than the camera. Talk about freedom of movement. And it's got 13 stops of exposure.

OK, just before we hyper-ventilate what's the point? It's the business model guys, it's all new. It's also the workflow, not that it's that new, but that he's committed to it in a really big way. It's the future of making (big) films. It's the future period. Film is dead, tape is dead. Really.

This is real trickle down technology. Ronald Reagan was an economic fool, with the highest deficit, at the time, ever (only supplanted by George W. Bush thanks to years of an unfunded war) and Reagan's trickle down economics was just voodoo (the rich kept all the money). Later Reagan actually raised taxes to try and get out of it – even he knew it was a disaster. However, now, this kind of technology/business trickle down (which actually does benefit all of us by permeating the work process) will change the business landscape of filmmaking at the high end and cascade down the food chain to even our level.

We can also see how this all plays out as a workflow. We shoot at really high resolutions – all digital – edit high (isn't that what the new Final Cut Pro and Thunderbolt really mean – really high data rates, meaning large files, meaning large frame sizes), compress it all down and distribute at smaller resolutions (meaning HD – isn't it amazing that small size now means HD). On the distribution (selling side) we're now looking at radically many different sizes and ways to sell, rent, give away the work. Work high, sell low – but often. Kind of an odd mantra, but there it is. It's seldom you get to stare the future in the face, but here it is.

Oh, look, they've got the rods! I knew I needed the rods.

gunther (4)

Thinking It Through Again

It’s time to come around again with a new re-evaluation of what we make and how we make it, or at least to notice all of those things. We tell stories: strange stories, normal stories, idealistic stories, real stories, feminist stories, ironic post-modern stories, common stories. We tell stories. It doesn’t matter how we put them together, just how people view them later. We’re never really judged by how we make them, just how good, or effective, they are as we watch them. So let’s think a little about the range of the forms of what we make.

There’s still images. It’s hard to tell a story with one photo, so we make a sequence. (How ironic this is. I’m the guy that loves to make posters in Pages. That’s one image to a page. Yes, maybe it’s not a story, but more of a statement. Hmm, I’ll have to think about that more.) How many? Who knows, maybe 10 is the magic number for a sequence – beginning, middle, end, with transitions, and a poignant moment or two, or three. We shoot stills, edit them down, sequence them and put them up on a wall, or in a book, on on a web site or make them into a slide show. It’s Photoshop images dropped into iPhoto, InDesign, iWeb, or Dreamweaver. It’s Keynote or Powerpoint (poor thing). It’s printing out books from iPhoto or Blurb.

Well, with a slide show we also have the option of adding sound and sometimes we do: real sounds, life, people talking, questions and answers, narration, music, sound effects, interviews, reflections, summations. It ends up as a slide presentation or a movie of slides and sounds. We make the audio in GarageBand, SoundTrack, Final Cut Pro, ProTools and drop it into iMovie, with the honestly really great Ken Burns effect of panning, scanning and zooming into and across the images. There’s the more formal Soundslides for a traditional journalism approach, or the sophisticated “key-framed” Final Cut Pro versions. While I love Keynote, it doesn’t do audio well at all, so it’s always silent (for me).

We’ve arrived at movies, made with stills, audio, film, and the stuff we shoot ourselves. It could be in iMovie, but mostly we’re in Final Cut Pro with excursions into Color, Motion, SoundTrack, and AfterEffects. iMovie is better than it was, but not as good as it should be and Final Cut, is, well it’s waiting to change and we’re waiting with it. It’s been a good friend, along with Premiere and Avid (both from long ago), but Final Cut has been there when we really needed it and it came through.

Then there’s sound alone, not lonely, but it can be if it wants to be. We can work for free in Audacity, or slightly free in GarageBand, almost in Logic, but it’s realistically just for music. SoundTrack is helpful, but mostly as a utility and finally ProTools is where we would all want to work in long form multitrack audio.

So that’s a broad range and long list of applications that help us with our work, some a little, some a lot. What I’m always looking for is a button in each of these applications that says “better story” and, no, it’s not really there, simply hoped for; just as there is no button on the piano that says “better music”. It’s all in the skills of the person playing that makes the piano turn out sounds that we love to hear. Alas, there’s no button in our software that gives us a better story. It’s us, thinking it up, working it out, thinking it through that makes the story better – hopefully. We’re the key. So what we need for ourselves is better skills, more experience, and a renewed understanding that we experience and understand the world through stories, not new software at all.

gunther

Let There Be Light, But First Throw Me A Line

So in the beginning it was all about light. That sort of makes it an optical universe doesn’t it? Kind of a what you see is what you get world and what you see really is what gets lit; thereby allowing you to see, or rather, more bluntly, to force you to see what we (filmmakers or gods, remember) want you to see. No, no, look over here, now over there. Movies are all about controlling our vision – in the service of telling the story. We point you to the images to follow, to think about, by lighting them well. We make them pop out from the background to catch and hold our attention.

OK, so how does that happen really? It starts with placing the subject(s), and then placing the camera in relationship to the line. Once we have the line we can start. Line? What’s the line? Oh, that’s the line we make in the air between one subject and another subject, you know, describing the line of action. The line that connects those two elements is important in the decision of where to place the camera. We’re always going to be on one side or the other of that line. Once we pick a side, that’s the side we’re on. We can’t really cross it and make the shots work. We stay on one side or the other. Sometimes in life it’s like that also, you have to pick a side and stay with it. (OK, that’s just silly metaphysics.)

If you have two people in a scene you place them in the set and draw an imaginary line between them, then place the camera on one side of that line. That’s so we can cut back and forth between  shots of the two people and still have them look like they’re talking with each other. No matter where we place the camera, if we’re on the correct side of the line, they still look like they’re talking to each other. We can sell the shot. It works. If we cross to the other side of the line and back again it all falls apart. Now the directions they’re facing when they speak no longer makes sense – we’re crossing the line.

The reality, however, is that line is often quite dynamic. It moves. If it moves we have to move the camera with it (or before it) to stay on the correct side of the line. The two people can circle around each other or walk to different parts of the set, but they’re always connected by the line.

If we watch them change position, we’ve also changed the side of the line we’re on, but once it’s changed we still can’t cross it. We can watch it change (that’s OK and useful), but we can’t hop over it and come back. We can watch the guy on the left walk past the woman on the right and he then becomes the person on the right and she becomes the person on the left. The line has changed (sort of), but we’re still only on one side of it.

With a standard interview often the subject (talent) talks to a person sitting just next to the camera and the camera never actually moves, just zooms in or out a little. This is the easiest setup, and for what I do, the most common. Once you have that subject to subject axis and where the camera is placed in respect to that line, then we can start to light. I usually place the key light (the main source) to shine on the side of the face that's turned away from the camera – the short side. A back light goes on the other side of the talent (opposite side to the key) and hits the back of the head and shoulders, popping the talent out from the darker background. Depending on how much contrast you want you can add a fill light or use a reflector, again on the opposite side from the key, to fill in the shadows and control the contrast range.


It’s easy with two people and harder and harder with more, but more people (more lines) also allows options for selecting different lines – between different people – meaning we could be in different places and have it all work. Here’s our shot, now cut to a different line, on a different side. Wow. This is what a director does, figure out where the lines of action are and where the camera(s) should be placed. (What do we see in the foreground, what do we see in the background?) Again and again. And, yes, directing the actors, let’s not forget that.

Most of the people – audio, lighting, camera operator, and a lot of others – can do their jobs without a director, but placing the camera and directing the talent are all the obligation of the director. You always have to remember everyone on the set can make a movie without you, that’s why other people may have really valuable contributions, if you have time (and the wisdom) to listen to them.

gunther (3)

Hey Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime?

So it’s time for some harsh words. OK, it’s not that harsh, it’s just frank. Yes, that’s it, let’s be frank. Most of what first year film students shoot isn't very good. Ouch, that’s a little harsh. No, no, it’s frank. OK, it’s frank, but really, is that true?

This last year I had the opportunity to look at the footage that first year film students (that’s people shooting on real film) transfered from film into Final Cut Pro on the transfer station. You just sit down at the computer, open the folders and look at all the clips. They’re not good. (Now I have to confess that it's also true that everyone gets better as the semester progresses, and in the end, they can turn out a product they can be proud of – mostly.)

I guess part of this is also a comparison against the footage of the first year video students who shoot with easy to use HD video cameras. They get good footage immediately (it's not them so much as it is the camera), but the footage of the film folks is mostly dark (getting the exposure right means using a light meter correctly), out of focus (it's really dim in a film viewfinder, not at all like looking at the image in a video camera - you would be surprised), and finally and most damning, they’re all the same. What do you mean their all the same?

Well, they’re not exactly all the same footage, but they do have remarkably similar aspects. Lots of shots of trees, women walking in the woods, close ups of people in dorm rooms, shots out the window, women swirling in large skirts, etc. It’s odd, jumping from student to student and seeing very similar kinds of shots. Why is that?

I think it’s because it feels awkward going to public places with a real film camera (like a $6,000 Arri 16mm). It’s a little over the top, at least unusual; people turn around and look. So the result is that film students go to safe places to shoot. Not what you’d expect is it?

The general public is very used to seeing people shoot with video cameras all the time. No one really stops and wonders what you’re doing, they know. Ho-hum. Film cameras, however, are exotic – lots of chrome and black leather with long lenses and a very different profile, not that of a video camera at all. And the sound they make is the sound of a film camera. It’s unique. You know the sound when you hear it, but few people have actually heard it live, just in the movies or on TV. So people stop and look, and listen. If you’re looking for attention, then that’s the way to get it, if not, then you go where no one is around and shoot.

I guess that’s what filmmaking asks of you. Can you shoot where ever you want and not feel self-conscious or awkward. That’s a lot to ask of a first year student, but, I guess, that’s what separates the amateurs from the pros – the ability to do just that.

When I was shooting with my 8x10 view camera, at night, I’d get startled people looking at it and wondering what the heck I was doing, but mostly they kept on walking by. Except for the weirdos. They stop and tell you where they're going, what they’re doing, where they just came from, and that they have a sick dog at home. Stuff like that. Mostly I’d just nod and try and look busy with my light meter or write something in my notebook. It’s hard standing there for 10 or 12 minutes timing an exposure, holding the slider from the sheet film holder in front of the lens when a car goes by, starting and stopping the stopwatch to keep track of the time and also not get distracted by the people standing there telling you their life story, or some story at least as they take another drink from the paper bag.

So, yes, I know how it is to be out with a camera that draws a crowd and still try to get the shot you need. It may be the hardest part of photography and filmmaking, but you go anyway. As a producer or director of your own film if you’re not out there where you think the action is you end up with just generic footage and a weak film. It’s not really showing off using a flashy camera, it’s showing up.

gunther