If I was going to film a short that I’d want people to think was shot on 35mm film, I’d use a $700 camera, a $1,100 adapter and $1,400 worth of fixed lenses.
That is a crop from a frame taken for a test film shot with this system, for more, go over to Mr. Bloom’s blog. Thanks to Matt Davis for the link.
How would you answer those questions?
My friend Suzanne made this video as a test for a future project.
Maybe the last hardware format will be DVD.
According to Variety, instead of sending DVD screeners to TV Academy members, they’ll have exclusive access to a web site where entire seasons will be streamed ‘for consideration.’
I think the age profile of members of the Film Academy will delay the death of DVD screeners for a couple of years.
One day we will buy licenses to watch media on any flat surface we happen to be near.
The BBC’s online TV catchup service has reported how popular they’ve been for the two week Christmas period. From Christmas day, around 1 million people watched a total of over 3.5 million TV shows. The BBC iPlayer features as many shows as the BBC has rights to which are available for streaming for two weeks after broadcast.
Initially the service was set up as a downloading/peer-to-peer software networking system. When the BBC were instructed to make sure that non Windows-based PCs could use the service, they added a streaming service. The ease of watching streamed shows means that streamers outnumbered downloaders by 8 to 1.
The most important statistic is the average time people spent watching: 25 minutes. Up until now, internet video has been associated with 5-10 minute YouTube clips. Once people get comfortable watching for longer, niche broadcasters will step up. They’ll need content that is well produced, written and edited. Good news.
My friend Harriet Earle has uploaded an excerpt from her short film “Ready for Sex.” She wants to see if posting a clip will encourage people to buy the full-length film on DVD via eBay. It shows what goes on behind the scenes when a woman hears that her boyfriend is returning from a trip one day early.
If you know anyone who is attending a hen (bachelorette) party any time soon why not splash out on a DVD gift to take along for the blushing bride?
If you are good at raising money, it is a good time to get into the content creation business. If you aren’t a member of the AMPTP, you could do a lot worse than start checking out who the networks are ‘free’ing over the next weeks.
The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that ABC is only the first of the networks who are starting to terminate development deals in the wake of the WGA strike.
Given that networks will eventually get audiences used to watching TV shows via the internet on their TVs as families and groups, others might as well take advantage. If I ran a TV production company, I would start preparing a few non-network sponsored shows to distribute via the Internet.
Available soon direct to your TV via the internet… from Worldwide Pants, the makers of “Late Night with David Letterman”…
Hear more about this idea from a podcast by Sam and Jim (web or iTunes)
How many internet drama producers does it take to change a light bulb?
I don’t know, but we’re all very excited!
When I saw Transformers in the summer I had a good time. It was funnier than I expected, and my total lack of interest in the franchise up to that point wasn’t a problem. The effects were very good – I liked how grainy some of the shots were. It made the placement of the alien robots look more realistic. During some of the action scenes at the end it was sometimes difficult to follow who was punching who. The 20 metre wide image was too large. I knew that I would have a better chance to see what was going on later.
To provide some in-train entertainment on my trip over to Paris of Christmas, I copied the Transformers DVD onto my iPod. It was good fun still and passed two hours without a problem. During the action scenes there was a little too much detail for me to catch. The 4 cm wide image was too small.
A few days later I showed my father Transformers on my 1.2 metre wide TV. Like the porridge in Goldilocks’ emergency accommodation, the screen size was ‘just right.’
This shows that modern movies are designed for the home. The cinema release promotes the more profitable DVD. The shared experience of watching the film with a large audience made the emotional feedback stronger, but the spectacle worked better at home.
For now I’ll edit for the 20 metre screens…
I see that Persepolis is opening at US cinemas this week. I see that the editor of this animated film is credited as Editor/Compositor. Compositors layer shots so that they combine foregrounds and backgrounds from different sources. This is used in animated and special visual effects shots (the more recent Star Wars trilogy for example).
An interesting job combination. We editors compose by combining shots in the 4th dimension. If we are compositors too, we take shots and combine them in 2 and bit dimensions. It may be that future movies will more often record background (plate) footage so that retakes and alternate line readings can be composed into new shots by compos-editors.
Now, where’s that manual page about difference mattes…
2007 will be marked as the year when the plans of indy studios failed. The majority of films designed for Oscar glory have failed in the U.S. market. Major studios have ‘specialty’ divisions such as Fox Seachlight, Paramount Vantage and Sony Pictures Classics. They hope for reviews and strong word-of-mouth instead of huge advertising budgets to promote their films.
Indie movies, however well reviewed they may be, are not crossing over into the mainstream. “Eastern Promises,” “Talk to Me,” “Lust, Caution,” “Into the Wild,” “Margot at the Wedding,” “A Mighty Heart,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” “Rendition,” “Love in the Time of the Cholera,” “Lions for Lambs” and “In the Valley of Elah” have been well received but not done well at the box office. Others have done better, but not compared to arthouse films from previous years: “The Namesake” – $14 million, “Gone Baby Gone” – $11 million and “The Darjeeling Limited” – $11 million.
Four out of the five best picture nominees from last year could be considered indie films: “Babel” – $34 million, “Little Miss Sunshine” – $60 million, “The Queen” – $56 million, “Letters from Iwo Jima” – $14 million. That’s an average of $41 million per film. It looks like the nominations this year will be for films that few people went to see in the cinema.
I’m not saying that Oscars should only go to movies with mainstream success, it is just that the level of sucess indie movies are managing is much lower than before. This means a reduction in the studio’s return on their investment. That means less risk taking on independent movies.Maybe there’s been too much of a ‘indie movie playbook’ mentality. Studios have been following a simplistic set of rules when greenlighting, making and promoting their films.We might need a new independent mentality that isn’t afraid of striking out into uncharted waters. Independent from the independents!
I may have a camera that can shoot HD, software and a computer that can edit HD, but my SD TV and LD iPod and iTunes is good enough for me.
In an article over at Roughly Drafted, Daniel Eran Dilger argues that Low Definition content will be wildly more popular than HD. LD is what people watch on iPods, what they convert their DVDs to, what whiles away their time on YouTube (and YouPorn).
HD appeals to less people here in the UK. In the US, SD is associated with broadcast TV at a ratio of 4:3. In the UK over 90% of SD broadcast is at 16:9 – widescreen. That means that the vast majority of TVs in the UK are widescreen TVs. The PAL TV standard also has a higher visual resolution (with a lower temporal resolution to make up the difference) than NTSC. It follows that most consumers will not see much difference between a vertical resolution of 525 lines (the 51 remaining lines are used for other stuff) and 720.
Of course as people replace their TVs, they’ll get TVs with chips that can interpret any HD signal. They’ll be scaled onto LCDs and Plasmas of many different resolutions. 95% of the audience won’t see the difference. They certainly won’t see the need to pay extra for HD content when SD is good enough.
720 by 405 24 times a second is enough for almost everyone. The rest aren’t enough to support one HD on shiny discs.
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