My term rubbish does not apply to all mini dv i have seen some good pq on films from the format.
GH2 Did Francis Ford Coppola really prefer the Gh2 at the Zacuto shootout
- Thread starter berylium
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JeffHarriger
Active member
I'm always interested in elaborations on peoples' breaking point in this regard, so I can know just how scared I should be for the future of movies as an art form to advance versus an industry/technology to protect. I think "Inland Empire" is a masterpiece of sound and image and a narrative knock out, certainly not to everyone's taste but to have it dismissed after 10 minutes because of "mud" or "color bleeding" scares me to death. What about Pedro Costa's DVX shot "Colossal Youth" or "In Vanda's Room", which were compared visually to Rembrandt and Vermeer? What about the performances in the Duplass Bros. "Puffy Chair"? I hate their visual style, but I'd be a fool to cheat myself out of the twisting and turning mercurial rawness and humor of what the actors are putting across. But forget DV. What about the Italian neo-realist pictures, or stuff shot on that early 35 Lynch referenced. Scratchy prints, a soundtrack full of pops and hiss, bumpy dolly moves, soft images -- some of the greatest works of cinema and you know people are skipping them without a second thought. Anyone here not watch Fellini because he always dubbed in his dialogue in post, often having the actors count numbers out loud on set rather than reading lines for a guide track? I like to think that the point of no return is laziness, where you can tell the filmmakers just don't care, so why should we? And from there, as always, personal tastes apply, but there's a lot of putting the cart before the horse going on. Some people still won't watch black and white and some still don't understand letterboxing. I'd hope these attitudes don't apply to many "DVXusers", but you wonder. At any rate, there won't be a more beautiful movie this year than "Moonrise Kingdom", shot on that hot new technology, 16mm film.
Sun
Carbonite Member
This speaks volume about you.
Avatar was made possible by hangers of servers, some 30,000+ computers processors, teams of programmers and artist. After all that effort Avatar is still not reality photo realistic.
Avatar is beautiful animated and filmed in 3D. Yet all the performances are one dimensional with cliche after cliche. The film was a showcase for the technology, not the story. Its the reason not one cast member won an Oscars but Cameron picked up 9.
This is a great point. The word Magic really means illusion, illusion means deception, the deception is a trick. You can say movie makers are the modern day Illusionist and magicians. Like the Priest class of old, we have the power to inspire and sadden, to fool and delight, to anger and terrify, and to steal from.
To me Hitchcock was a great Magician in this sense who's method/illusions I enjoyed. Movie making is a stage act and nobody cares about the camera use or what school you went to. They only want to see your show reel. They only want to see that magic.
Movies should have been genuine art and rare exceptions are. The majority are formulaic mass produced
forgettable nonsense, that don't stand the test of time. Hollywood are to Films what Ford are to transportation.They started off well but ended up making big ugly stupid expensive piles of cr8p.
Those shed inventors are out there. They can make better cars than Ford without having a 1.2 Billion dollar production plant. You can make better movie than Hollywood, if you perfect your magic act.
If you're going to address my post, quote by quote, why not address the first question, which isn't even a statement? Go ahead and hate on technology, enjoy your s*%tty grain with crappy dynamic range. I'll enjoy and appreciate the technological advancements that will continue to come....even if that includes good, bad, and s*%tty story telling.
And please stop with the automotive "analogies"....they're horrible. If you don't care about the capabilities of cameras, how could you possibly know anything about the cars, let alone the automotive industry.
Grain and dynamic range don't matter as much if you have a good DP on hand. Obviously having a better camera will make a DP's job easier, but you can easily overcome a camera's limitations by compensating with your lighting. Worried about grain? Shoot at zero gain and add light. Have a camera with limited dynamic range? Add light, build your ratios in the frame and create a scene with rich dynamic range.
I can watch a film like Citizen Kane 100 times and will never get bored by it visually, and while they pushed the boundaries of their available tech they were still dealing with "fast" film stocks of ASA 250. And that whole flick is filled with shots from f8 to f16! Gregg Toland would've **** his pants if he could've shot that movie on a DVX100 and tweaked his image in Resolve.
I like technological advances because they do enable you to get great images with less light, but at the end of the day you have to concede that there exist a great number of films that were shot using technology some may consider inferior to today's very sensitive high DR sensors. And they did this without the aid of computer-assisted color grading and noise/grain reduction. Yet we don't begrudge them for this - no, we celebrate the images because good images are just good images regardless of the technology used to arrive at them.
Technology is just a means to an end and ultimately what matters is how the storyteller uses it.
Great, you've over come the limitations of your camera with lighting. That makes a solution provided by a different camera irrelevant? Take the zacuto shootout for example, I am willing to bet that the lighting setup is far more expensive than the GH2 + lens. I didn't realize everyone has an inexhaustible supply of lights, nevermind power. The image you put on the screen does matter, why else are you telling a story on the screen? People made movies cause it was poo pooin' cool to see motion picture! The impression I'm getting with this "story only" argument is that film makers and the audience want only to see Academy Award winning dramas. Ugh.
Perhaps my point is being missed...or it's being dismissed as not relevant (in any case, my argument ends here). Regardless of what a camera is used for....movies, porno, home movies, architecture, products, documentaries, interviews, NASA, astronomy, a piece of paper with lots of circles inside each other, whatever....to discard the advancements of imaging technology because you may not find it applicable or useful is ignorant.
Perhaps my point is being missed...or it's being dismissed as not relevant (in any case, my argument ends here). Regardless of what a camera is used for....movies, porno, home movies, architecture, products, documentaries, interviews, NASA, astronomy, a piece of paper with lots of circles inside each other, whatever....to discard the advancements of imaging technology because you may not find it applicable or useful is ignorant.
Jester2138
Well-known member
b_k said:
Sun said:
Yet it won 9 Oscars and is one of the most successful and widely seen films ever.
Oh, but it was "too technical" and "not artsy" enough for you guys, sorry.
JeffHarriger
Active member
What's funny is that if James Cameron was going to take some dogmatic stance on art where it's Story VS Technology to the death, or whatever the hell trip a lot of people on this thread seem to be on, he'd probably side with Sun (minus the odd car analogies, probably), as would all the heaviest Story Is All That Matters types, which of course ARE the "big movie" guys with unlimited resources (but he wouldn't choose a side, because it's dogmatic and stupid). Cameron really thinks his stories are why the movies are hits. Truth is they're such big hits for many reasons. I know people who cry during that movie, and these are people with literature degrees that I usually talk to about James Joyce and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and what-not. I like the movie, too, but only really from a painterly aspect. Doesn't really move me, and near the end the set pieces don't get me excited in that movies-as-action painting way that "True Lies" or "Titanic" does. Now, I like the PDF150 shot "Inland Empire" for almost EXACTLY the same reasons, but the oblique narrative and those painterly images trigger a more raw emotional response *in me*. Arguing points like these as if it's mathematics is only going to give you a headache, unless you attach a moral superiority to aesthetic preference, then that's the only place where it would really "say a lot about you" (whoever you are, this is addressed generally), and that may well be the case ("every tracking shot is a moral act" Godard said. Just watch Godard for a breakdown of all of this kind of stuff - relationships between text and image and so on - that is also fun and playful and rewarding in some way), but conversation is gonna be rough going with you I bet. I enjoy talking about aesthetics, and good old fashioned late night coffee discussions about the movie that just got out, but this is gettin silly.
Nobody is discarding the advancements of imaging technology. But it's a fact that it is not the most significant portion of filmmaking. Lighting, set design, acting, costume design, wardrobe, writing, CGI, sound recording, foley, musical composition...all of those things matter and tend to get forgotten when tech discussions come up. Let's talk about Avatar since that seems to be the popular topic - I would argue that the camera was the least important piece in what made that movie successful, and that the CGI and art design was the most important.
j1clark@ucsd.edu
Veteran
From what I can find out, Super XX, the film stock used for "Citizen Kane", was rated at the time as ASA 100. In the late 50's early 60's the ASA test method was restructured, and films speeds were boosted by 2x, which would place Super XX at 200, had it still been in manufacture...
That said... Oddly, I've always used 200 for Tri-X which in the post 2x boost ASA/ISO ratings, is rated at 400... I have long suspected the criteria used for a 'lab ISO(formerly ASA)' rating and practical field application may be 2 different things...
But the 'Super XX' of the late 30's was 4x the 'ordinary' film speeds...
One of the leading comments about Super XX was it's 'graininess'... which for the era would map in to 'digital grain'. These days of course 'film grain' has gained a certain sort of aesthetic appreciation, and so it is not considered a negative in the viewing experience it once was.
Legend has it that Orson Welles watched "Stagecoach"(1939) some ungodly number of times... so if one wants to know what film 'taught' Wells, one would look at "Stagecoach".
In addition, he hooked up with Greg Tolland who was a 'deep focus' photographer, hence the need for the 'faster film', for smaller f-stop settings...
j1clark@ucsd.edu
Veteran
The GH-2 clip was shot with a Fujinon 18-85 Zoom. If it is the same one B&H has on their site, you can have that lens for $87K... Maybe B&H could have a promo... buy the Fujinon lens and get a pair of GH-2's for 'free'...
All of the Sonys, Red, and Alexa used the Fujinon lens...
Ablecine has a ARRI Alexa 'starter kit' for $89K...
Sun
Carbonite Member
You mean Technophobe. The human eye based on the Dawes or Rayleigh criterion proves how limited human vision is.The visible light spectrum fills only 0.000018% of the current known spectrum and your talking to me about diode leakage, get a life and stop talking about the dust in the paint.
I've been an automotive mechanic for over fifteen years. I've worked on numerous squish bang engine from all over the world. Your a tool slave.:nads:
JeffHarriger
Active member
Sun - did you ever read Ray Carney's bit about "Why Film Majors Should Be Replaced w/ Auto Mechanics"? You'd dig it. Simple google search should turn it up if you haven't. It's a great piece, and even if I personally think Carney's a super smart blow-hard with some delusions of grandeur and the resultant petulant sad sackery when not enough people are genuflecting before one as one thinks should, I think maybe with the slave terminology and what-have-you that you'd appreciate all of it. (not sure about the emoticons, though)
I'd guess that Toland/Welles would certainly NOT have preferred the DVX plus Resolve on "Kane" (why not give them all of the tech circa 2003 or whenever the dvx came out, including faster film stocks and even more cowardly film investors), but Orson would have liked some of this stuff in latter years as he was constantly running out of money and not one big shot who claimed him as a cinema genius would open their checkbooks.
This thread is more of a laugh riot than even the other ones regarding Zacuto shootouts, but it also makes me want some of Francis' wine more than to watch one of his pictures.
I'd guess that Toland/Welles would certainly NOT have preferred the DVX plus Resolve on "Kane" (why not give them all of the tech circa 2003 or whenever the dvx came out, including faster film stocks and even more cowardly film investors), but Orson would have liked some of this stuff in latter years as he was constantly running out of money and not one big shot who claimed him as a cinema genius would open their checkbooks.
This thread is more of a laugh riot than even the other ones regarding Zacuto shootouts, but it also makes me want some of Francis' wine more than to watch one of his pictures.
j1clark@ucsd.edu
Veteran
From all the Welles films I have seen... if he would have used a DVX100... he would not have whined about 'shallow DoF', and bought some sort of contraption to get that effect... He may have even been pleased not have to buy split diopter lens to get 'from here to eternity' DoF...
My personal favorite of 'made with a DVX100', is "Nine Songs"(2004). It was controversial for the 'unsimulated' sex scenes... and of course critics panned it... but I digress...
JeffHarriger
Active member
Yeah, I've never been so enamored by shallow DOF, either, quiet as it's kept. But if I had the lights and the time and even a split diopter for some De Palma dual plane staging, I'd sure like that 35mm resolution a lot more than the DVX. What good is all the depth if it's smushy (I'm borrowing that word from somewhere in this thread. I now give it back.)? Post-"Trial", "Lady From Shanghai" (I'm not sure of these release dates) though, in the wild man indie days that were all the rest of Orson's days (never stopped making movies, didn't often finish them), he would've embraced this gear for sure.
"Nine Songs" is a kinda cool movie. My favorite DVX are the 2 I keep blathering about: "In Vanda's Room" and "Colossal Youth". Longer, non-traditional narratives, but really lovely. You mentioned Ford earlier, j1clark, and Pedro Costa I think claimed "Colossal Youth" was basically a remake of "Sergeant Rutledge", which makes for a very interesting reading of both! (I love "Rutledge", and am a Ford nut, as far as cards on the table goes.) I vote for more digression.
"Nine Songs" is a kinda cool movie. My favorite DVX are the 2 I keep blathering about: "In Vanda's Room" and "Colossal Youth". Longer, non-traditional narratives, but really lovely. You mentioned Ford earlier, j1clark, and Pedro Costa I think claimed "Colossal Youth" was basically a remake of "Sergeant Rutledge", which makes for a very interesting reading of both! (I love "Rutledge", and am a Ford nut, as far as cards on the table goes.) I vote for more digression.
JeffHarriger
Active member
I bet so, Ian. And you know it was like some special Rumble Fish Private Reserve really good stuff, too. Lucas was there, too, but couldn't handle his high.
Sun
Carbonite Member
Thank you for that. It was a bloody good read.
http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/newsevents/upcomingarch3.shtml
The Herzog interview is incredible as well.
http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/aboutrc/letters101.shtml#wh
Werner Herzog on Film School
"I personally don't believe in the kind of film schools you find all over the world today. I never worked as another filmmaker's assistant and I never had any formal training. My early films come from my very deepest commitment to what I was doing, what I felt I had no choice but to do, and as such they are totally unconnected to what was going on at the film schools - and cinemas - of the time. It's my strong autodidactic streak and my faith in my own work that have kept me going for more than forty years.
