Cinematography
Filmmaking - Cinematography
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“Muscle Memory without Emotion”: The Rise of the Action DP
Shifts in technology and global film production over the last several years have greatly impacted action films. Technology like the Canon 5D changed the game. More affordable and smaller HD cameras, as well as cheaper editing systems, have enabled many stunt performers and cinematographers to collaborate on and innovate new images together. This in turn has created a recent hybrid in action movies — the action DP, someone who specializes in shooting action, with a background in cinematography and stunts or action of some sort. I came to shooting action through my own personal background. For me, it was a […]
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Test Footage from the ARRI AMIRA
Last September, ARRI introduced the AMIRA, a relatively inexpensive cousin (at $40,000+) to the manufacturer’s near industry standard, ALEXA. Though the resolution is 2K, the AMIRA shares the same sensor as the ALEXA, so its footage maintains some filmic consistency. Designed for documentary and television work, Cinema 5D notes in their review that the AMIRA may be best suited to small crews with mostly handheld cinematography. And, as suspected, it’s far heavier and larger than its competitors in Canon’s C100/C300/C500 series, or any DSLR. The images nevertheless speak for themselves.
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Watch: David Fincher’s Zodiac and the Art of the Insert
Within David Fincher’s filmography, Zodiac has always struck me as something special, if not anachronistic, for its handling of the police procedural genre. Perhaps it’s because, despite legions of so-called confessors, its true-life case was never closed. Appropriately, the film seems less concerned with tidy plotting than the psychosis — personal, collective and social — such a lingering mystery can create. Still, for all the film’s meta-textual aspirations, Fincher is, at heart, a narrative filmmaker and does relate the necessary details with a compendium of insert shots. They are all spliced together here in this supercut from Josh Forrest.
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“Cinema Needs Good Images”: An Interview with Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC was given the “Pierre Angénieux Excellens in Cinematography” award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It was a fitting tribute to the 83-year-old director of photography, who chronicled the events of the 1956 Hungarian revolution before leaving his country soon afterwards. In 1962 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States, settling in Los Angeles. During the ’70s Zsigmond established himself as one of the world’s great cinematographers, working on Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye, John Boorman’s Deliverance, and Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, […]
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Smartphone Cinematography: Viable Gimmick?
Making its way on the festival circuit since last fall’s Raindance is a film called I Play With The Phrase Each Other, which purports to be the first-ever feature comprised entirely of cell phone calls. It is, rather fittingly, shot on an iPhone and rendered in attractive black-and-white hues that belie its format. In addition to serving as a nice narrative tie-in, the filmmakers choice of camera was also likely dictated by budgetary constraints (or, perhaps as more likely, an Apple tie-in.) Still, it’s remarkable that a lucrative automobile giant like Bentley Motors would shoot their latest ad campaign on a consumer phone like […]
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The Narrative Agent: Camera or Actor?
In conjunction with his workshop tour, commercial director-d.p. Vincent Laforet has been making the publicity rounds, conducting interviews with several outlets, including our own Michael Murie. In the majority of these discussions, Laforet emphasizes the importance and motivation of camera movement. “Generally speaking, in modern cinema,” he told Murie, “you rarely see stationary cameras. Audiences want to see movement, and it’s really important to have dynamic movement to retain people’s attention.” Such a sentiment is more or less ripped straight from the Hollywood rulebook: the more visually dazzling (booming, parallax, etc.) a story can be, the better it is. In the majority of […]
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Here Comes the ARRI AMIRA
ARRI has met with some success in digital filmmaking with their ALEXA camera. As just one indication of their dominance, the ALEXA was used on three-quarters of this year’s Best Picture nominees. It’s been praised for its image quality, ease of use and ruggedness. But it’s not cheap, and it’s not light. ARRI last year announced the AMIRA, and described it as a documentary camera. It’s smaller and lighter than the ALEXA, but if you were hoping for a significantly cheaper camera, you’ll be disappointed; the base AMIRA is $39,999. For those on a budget, renting the camera remains the […]
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The One-Cam: Under the Skin’s Customized CCD Camera
Eventually we’ll stop posting about Under The Skin but today is not that day. Last month, I ran a featurette from A24 about the film’s guerrilla style execution. The production rigged Johansson’s vehicle with eight hidden cameras, recording her improvised interactions with any given passerby in real time and with maximum coverage. Now, we have yet another featurette that gets into the specifications of said cameras, called “One-Cams,” which were developed especially for the occasion. For the van sequences, the VFX studio One of Us rigged a CCD camera (about the size of a GoPro) with anamorphic super 16 lenses. Though the rest of the […]
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4 Observations from a First Time NAB Experience
This was my first year at the gear-head mecca of NAB. It definitely did not disappoint, and I had a blast attending, checking out new gear (which you can see a list of here) and finally meeting some people I’ve only had contact with in the online world. Here are some of my overall impressions about what I saw (or didn’t see) on the showroom floor and the conference itself. Very Few Surprises and Not a Whole Lot of New 4K The #1 question I keep getting asked is, “What was the best thing you saw?” And I really don’t […]
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5 Things I Learned about the Panasonic GH4 at NAB
I have been a big fan of Panasonic’s GH line since the GH2. When the GH3 was announced I was first in the cyber line for pre-orders and same deal when the GH4 went up. This time I opted to get the YAGH Interface Unit package. My thought process was I’d have a “real camera” setup that can handle XLR audio (I hate dealing with a second recorder and syncing audio), I could jam-sync the timecode on multicam shoots, and then I’d be set up to just rent a 4K recorder for high-end jobs that needed 10-bit 422 recording. I […]
