Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Touba was seven years in the making: five of shooting, two of post-production. It grew out of her second documentary — 2008’s Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love — which followed the legendary Senegalese musician before and after 2004’s Egypt album, whose religious themes raised the ire of the country’s religious argument. Her newest film began life on vibrantly grainy 16mm, following an annual Senegal trek undertaken by hundreds to the city of Touba to visit the home of Sheikh Amadou Bamba, founder of the Mouride Brotherhood. Like her last film, Vasarhelyi’s newest focuses on Islam […]

Two weeks ago RED announced that they were suing Sony for patent infringement for technology used in Sony’s PMW-F5, PMW-F55, and F65 cameras. Last week Sony posted a response on their Pro video website. First noting that the F65 has been commercially available for over a year, and that the F5/F55 were announced in October, they go on to say: Sony has now had an opportunity to study Red’s complaint and the asserted patents, and categorically denies Red’s allegations. Sony intends to defend itself vigorously in the Red lawsuit. Sony looks forward to prevailing in court, thus vindicating the Sony […]

The problem with the Oscars is that you spend three hours watching the show and at the end you haven’t learned anything from the winners about how they did what they did. In celebration of the event, and with congratulations to the winners, here’s some interviews with the nominees for Best Cinematography. One of the interesting themes you’ll note in these articles is that the switch from film to digital remains a hot topic: Anna Karenina | Seamus McGarvey “Anna Karenina was filmed with anamorphic lenses, which require slightly more light, and some of the lighting used is older in style, […]

Receiving its world premiere in the 2013 Rotterdam Film Festival’s Tiger Awards Competition, San Francisco-based Visra Vichit-Vadakan’s Karaoke Girl is an evocative character study of a Bangkok working girl, a singer in a nighttime karaoke bar for whom memories of her rural past and dreams of romantic fulfillment form a pulsing lifeline away from an emotionally depleting world. A hybrid documentary/fiction film, Karaoke Girl stars newcomer Sa Sittijun as a character largely based on herself. The documentary sections of the film follow her back to her real hometown, and feature interviews with her real family, while the “fiction” sequences are […]

In yesterday’s article “Canon C100 or C300: Which One to Get?” I wrote about the ability to attach an external recorder to the C100 and record 4:2:2 video, but added: Is 4:2:2 out of the C100 exactly the same as 4:2:2 from the C300? That’s a question I haven’t yet seen a definitive answer to, though a lot of people are assuming it is, or it’s very close. Today, I’m at least a step closer to answering that question. Paul Antico of Anticipate Media, and host of the NeedCreative Podcast, sent me some sample frames taken from Atomos Ninja 2 […]

For many, the release of the Canon C100 has prompted one question: Which one do I get? Or, in other words, is the C300 really worth $9,500 more than the C100? These cameras have the same sensor and very similar bodies, and Canon even includes C-Log on both, but there are a lot of differences. Perhaps the most notable: C300 records internally 4:2:2 MPEG-2, while the C100 records 4:2:0 AVCHD 60p recording (at 720p) is available on the C300 but not the C100 C300 has HD-SDI & Genlock, C100 just has HDMI C100 is smaller There are other differences: The […]

The day Sundance began, Daily Variety’s lead article kicked off with: “In this brave new indie world of VOD, shifting release windows, RED cameras [italics mine] and social media marketing…” I was struck by how little any of this has to do with indie filmmaking alone. As a token of digital revolution, RED cameras are so five years ago. It’s hard to storm the ramparts when last year’s #5 and #7 box office hits were shot with RED Epics (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Amazing Spider-Man). In fact, not only were last year’s #1 and #4 hits filmed with […]

Rear projection, a technique that involves projecting a background image onto a screen behind your actors, is a technique that was popular in the 40s and 50s, particularly for shooting vehicle interiors. It wasn’t perfect; the image can seem washed out compared to the foreground actors making it easy to spot the technique, and rear projection requires a fairly large studio space. Rear projection has been mostly replaced, first by front projection, and by blue- and green-screen techniques. Even low-budget NLEs now include very good green-screen filters that produce excellent results; though it’s your technique when shooting the footage that […]

If you’re shooting a full-length feature, the cost of purchasing, developing and transferring your film to digital can easily be more than the cost of a digital camera. (If your shooting ratio is 4:1, you’d spend over $10,000 for 16mm and $20,000 for 35mm.) And in some cases more than the total budget of your film. It’s no wonder then, that digital cameras have become dominant in indie film production, and that RED, with its head start as an “affordable” digital cinema camera, has become dominant at Sundance. Ted Schilowitz, co-founder of RED Digital Cinema, noted that “there are so […]

In a previous article (An Afternoon Music Video Shoot with the Canon C300) I documented a day shooting scenes for a new music video for the band Air Traffic Controller. The completed video, as well as a making-of piece have now been posted. Director/DP/Editor Rick Macomber explained that he decided to do this video after seeing Dave Munro from ATC perform the song acoustically. Said Rick “I was listening to the lyrics and I knew how close the song was to Dave’s personal life and it touched me. So when he came to me and asked which song I would […]