Cinderella Fell

A video directed by Mitchell Riggs, Margaret Bernstein's Cinderella Falling. I DP'ed. We shot with three cameras - all in one day (Nikon D90's). Click through to embiggen.

Cinderella Falling from LifeNow Video on Vimeo.

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Via Bill, monetizing web content.

I so don't agree with writing in post or multi-camera shoots. Multi-camera is great for making TV shows. Writing in post is great for making bad movies.

And although Nikon is talking about manual control for their upcoming cameras, my fear is that we should just shoot with the HVX and Letus this time out and wait for Nikon to do its thing before we use it to shoot a feature.

What Am I Doing?

I have been fighting vicious viruses on my PC and a meltdown on our Mac where it's just refusing to make DVD's. I think I've solved both. We'll see.

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You know, I realized that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. In a week we're going to shoot Clonehunter and I haven't made any storyboards, haven't really figured out how I'm going to shoot, haven't really visualized what we're doing specifically (in most cases) and... I'm OK with that.

My big concern is if we shoot with a D90, how to deal with the ISO and the shutter. It's very difficult. But the D90 will give us at least one more stop of light, which I could appreciate.

Either that or I'm borrowing Blair's light kit with his two 500W lights and blasting some light into each set from the outside.

We should/could do some gags where the light is obscured by gobos (or hands) which go past to indicate buildings going by. That might be cool.

How to deal with the Nikon D90.

Decision Time

We have to start making some hard (as in "absolute", not "difficult") decisions with 0904 Clonehunter. Unfortunately, I've been waiting on Maduka to give me his notes and... he read the wrong version of the script. The QOM has been busy stage managing shows (in addition, apparently she has some sort of day job) so there's no way she's going to give me any notes. I guess I'll just have to make decisions like I'm the... the... director or something.

Egads.

Here's another interesting blog from the "Film Industry Bloggers". It's the "British Film Director" blog. I think the British thing is by and large irrelevant, he lives and works in the U.S., I suppose they just wanted to differentiate him from other directors on the site. He has an interesting $500K budget. That budget is off by two decimal places for us. Yeah, and I don't mean we're working at $50 million...

Lastly, it seems that we're going to have to shoot (at the very least) some exterior night plates in Gowanus Brooklyn. The HVX with the Letus Extreme adapter is too slow (ISO of about 200 maybe?) So I'm going to have to use a Nikon D90. I bought a Nikon 35mm f1.4 lens for it via eBay. And now I need an 85mm lens. Do I:

• Keep searching on eBay for a used Nikon
• Just go and buy a Vivitar f1.4 85mm for $350
• Bite the bullet and get a Zeiss f1.4 85mm for $1033

I've read reviews of the Vivitar and there are actually advantages of it over the Nikon. Some people like its bokeh better. But open all the way it's not as bright as the Nikon, and the whole point of this exercise is to get as much light as possible so we can shoot in an industrial location at night using available light.

I suppose I'm just going to go into Adorama and say "Convince me to spend an extra $650 on a lens." I'm afraid that they will.

Quontract Cuota

Abandoned building in Central Michigan. Isn't it funny that Windsor Ontario is south of Detroit?

I've used up 57% of my allowable image quota on Blogger. It won't be too much longer that I'll just have to move to a new blog account. Or something.

Tomorrow I send out the last (I hope) of the contracts for Alien Uprising.

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Here are some notes on Nikon lenses. I've concluded that we do indeed need to use the Nikon D90 for exteriors in New York in order to shoot with available streetlight. And we need the fastest lenses.

There is some merit to the Vivitar over the Nikon 85mm. But nominally it would be better for us to use the same lens manufacturer just so the color and such tends to match when going from wide to closeup. We think.

Vivitar Series 1 85mm f1.4 $375
Nikon 35mm f1.4 perfect optics and operation $500 store -- $255 cheapest auction. I just got outbid at $358 for one in perfect condition.

Friday

Look. If I lend you my camera, you're gonna have to deal with the fact that I might post some pictures* I find on the P2 card you had in it. ;-)

Zambri.

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You know what's frustrating about "independent film"? It's how dang conservative it is. The irony is that some big-budget major releases** are really quite radical look-wise. Off the top of my head I'm thinking: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or American Beauty or for that matter, 300 and Sin City. 

What's odd about this is that it's actually easier to shoot something which looks like 300 than it is to shoot the average boring two-people-talking-in-a-room movie. But the indies just won't do it. I remember watching that picture and thinking "Wow, people will put up with any look."

(Sound, on the other hand, is not to be messed with. We have a very specific way we want to hear dialog -- close, clear, and in sync*** -- that's the only way.)

So I'm going to start making more whack images. Yup. That's what I'm gonna do. And make a comic book movie. Yeah.

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I just read a screenplay last night which was on InkTip. It's a good screenplay. While reading it I thought -- hmm -- how does this stack up against Save the Cat? So I loaded up the BS2 beat calculater (which is linked in a previous post) and sure enough -- the beats all lined up within one page. Yup.

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I want to direct a remake of Total Recall. If I can't direct the remake of it, can we at least do the mockbuster of it?

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The image size of a 35mm motion picture negative is 18x24mm.

Ken Rockwell's D90 review.

Squirrel Underpants.

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*Yup, makin' a music video and using the playback of timecode on a laptop as a timecode slate. Now THAT'S the way to do it! Sure, I could have lent them a timecode slate but this is so much freakin cooler!

**"Hollywood" doesn't really mean anything and it usually irks me when people complain about it. If you mean the 6 major studios (and there have be 6 practically since the movie biz began, no matter how they gobble one another up or split apart, it keeps equalling 6) then just say the "Big 6". Otherwise, whenever an argument is made which involves "Hollywood" as a bogeyman, they end up throwing some small studios (even the size of Pandora Machine) in with the Big 6 just to make the point.

***Don't talk to me about parts of my movies which are out of sync. I know about it. I don't want to hear about it. There are times when it can be incredibly difficult.