Pink Motel

Kayleigh

Eating Phoenix Dust

Drag

Meagan

Suzzanne

BTS

Anna

Portrait of Molly Atkinson

shot Molly in 9/02/11

Molly Atkinson

Molly Atkinson f'u pinball

Pinball Molly from Homer Gaijin.

The Universe is Simple Everything has an Exposition

There's a lot of rules about composition but eventually good rules will contradict each other, less is more but sometimes less is actually less. Technical pitfalls are an easy distraction to the real job at hand, telling a story. I have retrained myself to actually stress out more about good staging with exposition through subtext. You can accomplish a lot of narrative using simple objects regardless of technical format. If you have a choice of which minutiae to error on, the side of technical or narrative, train yourself to pay more attention to the narrative. A perfect shot is a dime a dozen in Hollywood. Technical difficulties are easily resolve usually with a manual but growing your personal storytelling instinct goes out window when things go wrong on set. You get your perfect shot but the narrative usually suffers.

4 x 3

16 x 9 1.85

2.39 cinemascope

Jenna Polaroid

The Weight of the Camera

Ingmar Bergman - The Seventh Seal
I love how Bergman gives weight to his camera by either being high tilting down or low tilting up. And when he doesn’t move his camera the character’s weight is on you or you’re falling on the character @ 2:10 he applies this gentle invincible pressure by only being slightly above eyeline to remind you a good picture is subtle it is burdened with gravity, it has substance.

Color Grade in Premiere Pro - Anna Didenko Test

Screen grab from The Girl Who Fell To Earth, shot with my 5dm2 @ nuetral, Nikkor 85mm f1.8 @ f4, color graded in Premiere CS6. Tired of trying to make the round tripping between Premiere Pro CS6 to Davinci Resolve work. XML exports don't work with transitions, scaling and time remapping. The alternative of rendering all of your whole raw clips in ReSolve just to preview color grades in Premiere is very time consuming(same problem in Speedgrade) or baking the the footage effects you did in Premiere before jumping to ReSolve defeats the raw file workflow. Hard drive space becomes a premium in QT or  R3D. A heavy duty workflow like that would make more sense if I had a bigger stronger computer and not working solo, for now I'm gonna stick it out in Premiere. This is a more streamlined workflow to minimize large rendering time. It's a little more technical and as not as slick color grading in Premiere but saves time in the end. If I need to mask any color effects I'll round trip to After Effects at least I know that is seamless for the most part and pre-render is not required. One sad note is that color grading surface controls don't work inside Premiere. Round tripping between Premiere and RedCineX works great. In RedCineX surface controls like Tangent Wave makes it move quickly and I like the better color UIs like vectorscopes and rgb parades than the ones in the R3D raw metadata UI inside Premiere. I hear good things about Colorista plugin for Premiere and it has a masking tool but I want to invest in learning the tools set that's already at my disposal.

I like to grade my footage with more tonal range rather than crunching the blacks and punchy highlights, so keep that in mind.

before - Screen Grab 1080p

after - Screen Grab color 1080p

color grade - view in HD, Premiere Pro 3wayCC and Curves

after - Screen Grab BW 1080p

bw color grade - view in HD, Premiere Pro Channel Mixer and Color Balance

Here's Jack

on the set of Stanley Kubrick's The Shinning... love that camera set up

Black and White grade test

messing around with BW color grade,

warm highlights with blueish shadows using only curves.

bw_curve21

Ang Lee and his take on VFX

Speaks about the VFX backstage at the Oscars and hints about a 2001 Space Odyssey remake.

We are all guilty!

Kevin Spacey talks about Al Pacino's acting technique