F55: Spike Lee's newest film DaSweetBloodOfJesus

The images or the film you mean?

I watched with sound off, but in general it looked pretty good. I didn't like the sodium vapour yellow cast on some of those interiors but overall I think it looked good.
 
Quick notes on the article from the CineAlta magazine for those who don't want to read it but want the skinny:

Film was shot in 4K RAW, on up to 3 F55's at a time and the DP said that several times he hardly needed to use any lighting at all. He liked the built-in ND filters which avoided having to change filter trays.

Output monitoring was done in REC709 and he liked the way it looked just like that. They shot some 4K in 60p, and used AB batteries for the camera and lighting. Teradeck was used for wireless monitoring. They used O'conner hand grips for lots of handheld work on the film.

They shot simultaneous XAVC HD proxy files while shooting RAW, and would burn the proxy files to Blu-Ray discs for viewing them.

Lastly data wrangling from the article was quite insane. They had only one DIT to manage all the multiple backups, copying, verifying, transcoding and applying LUTs for the dailies. (I would have hated to have the stress of his f#$^'n job). Later it appeared they had a separate data wrangler who used a single macbook pro laptop, ATTO Thunderlink Expansion Chassis providing 10Gbe and 8Gb/s fibre channel line speed. USB 3 was used to read the AXSM Sony cards.


ScreenShot2015-01-14at23624PM_zps80678f48.png
 
If they shot 4K RAW why does the trailer look like they shot ITU709?

That grade is really all over the place, shows no continuity at all.
Highlights look awful, shadows lack detail...
 
Ben Scott said:
The trailer made the film look like a student movie with student movie levels of acting in it.
Click to expand...

that was the first thing that came to my mind...

I didn't like that yellowish cast as well, looked like they got the white-balance wrong.

The trailer doesn't motivate me to go to vimeo and stream it right away.
 
(from watching the trailer)

Here is a thing. Sometime the perfect work of Deakins et al kind of doesnt actually look like the real world - more like an extended perfume advert or a shot on old film look.

So I can see there is space for some kind of cranky looks.

Im not sure if the camera looked good, certainly scenes were off or odd others looked great.

I really liked one shot where a chap is sitting talking away from his look space, so wrong it is right.

Clearly the cam is sharp and has reasonable DR, so the rest is down to the film makers to do as they will.

S
 
I just bought the film off Vimeo.
It's a good film. Not the usual Spike Lee film in that it has greater elements of horror,
suspense, and perhaps eroticism. You might think the trailer gives a lot away but for the
most part it doesn't reveal anything to the point of spoiling.

The F55 looked nice. There was a fair bit of diffused filtration used throughout (perhaps glimmer glass)
but the F55 held up well. Filtration ranged from subtle to pretty strong. I thought the highlights were particularly nice though that may have been helped a touch by the filtration. For the most part it looked filmic.

The scenes in the church (some shots in the trailer) were perhaps the most videoish looking.
This is apparently the same church featured in Lee's "Red Hook Summer" shot on the F3 and that film
definitely had a more "REC709 look" to it so perhaps the look was intentional as a recurring setting.

Bear in mind I'm judging quality off a Vimeo download and it was not the best compressed file.

Overall I liked it. Shows a more subversive side to Spike Lee. It sort of reminded me of the kind of film
Japanese director Takashi Miike would do.

Brian
 
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