GH1, Script Supervision, Drunkeness

It surprises me how well the GH1, which we're using, does in these tests by Zacuto. It's almost always the worst of the cameras it tests against. But it's also the cheapest. And it's the only one with working autofocus in "movie" mode.

Yup, the camera crushes those blacks. But the fact is that everyone loves the look of crushed blacks.

There are them what think you should shoot very low-contrast and create the "film look" in post. But working in a real production environment, where we're trying to get feature films to meet deadlines on no money, you gotta take shortcuts. Sure, if we were shooting commercials and had a professional colorist work on the 30 seconds of finished picture, we might want to shoot low-contrast with lots of latitude. But we ain't got the luxury of time nor money. We have to deliver at least 84 minutes and we have to do it in only a few months -- including mixing, color correction, visual effects, and titles. So the camera getting us a whole bunch of the way there helps a whole lot.
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One of our upcoming pictures, for which I do not yet have a script, Alien Revenge, somehow got posted somewhere and I get all kinds of resumes and headshots and so-forth for it. Today I got a resume for a script supervisor. She was in LA. All I could think was, a real script supervisor would go stark raving mad working for us. I imagine this sort of conversation would occur:

Drew comes back onto set with two actors, camera slung over shoulder.

Script Supervisor
Where were you?

Drew
Oh, we were just outside.

Script Supervisor
Were you... shooting?

Drew
Oh yeah. We got a couple scenes MOS. You shoulda been there, it was beautiful.

Script Supervisor
I'm sure it was beautiful.

Drew
I just figured we'd go ahead and shoot it even if it wasn't on the schedule today.

Script Supervisor
What scenes?

Drew
Uh. Most of scene 74. Then scenes 83 through 88 - we did those as a series. Oh, right, we got the sound guy over and we shot 101. But we changed the dialog.

Script Supervisor
When were you going to tell me?

Drew
Uh. I'm telling you now. Tell the editor we got most of 74 and then 83 through 88 today. And 101.

Script Supervisor
It's not even call time yet.

Drew
Well those guys all showed up early so I figured...

Script Supervisor
I'm notating in my report that you are drunk.

Drew
Make sure you note that it's the French vodka. The stuff is cheap but pretty good.