I was recently persuaded to be “interviewed” on the extremely popular web community Reddit… 12,000 words later, you can read the full lot here. Some great questions!
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Interview with me on Reddit
Ed Moore
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Ed Moore
Finally got around to adding some more recent material to my main website, and moved the whole lot over to http://www.edmooredop.com. If you’re reading this, the RSS feeds got across as well!
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Ed's web picks for June 5th through August 31st
Ed Moore
- 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
- Raising Cain–Steadicam Operator: Larry McConkey – Long discussion with Larry talking about the operating of his brilliant long steadicam shot in Raising Cain
- Behind the scenes of the recording of the Incredibles score – Love this score; fun to see the insane amount of brass needed to get that sound!
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"Chips Away" - National TV ad shoot
Ed Moore
Finally found the time to write this up! This was a TV ad shoot for Chips Away, a national franchise you can call up and have any nasty scratches on your car fixed on your own driveway. The production company was Koala TV, and the director Neil Scholes. Fortunate to have on board increasingly-regular focus puller Jason Cuddy and DIT Tom Mitchell.
The brief was for a very bright, punchy cinematic look, and it seemed like another good opportunity to get the RED camera on board. ¬†It was the first RED experience for the producer and director. ¬†Kit came from Shoot HD, who’ve put together an absolutely cracking package with all the extra bits and pieces that make a huge difference on set. ¬†The kit included a set of 6 Ultra Primes – my first go with these lenses – and amongst other toys, an IDX CamWave wireless HD-SDI link which meant the 17″ Panasonic director/client monitor was physically disconnected from the camera, making moving stuff around a huge amount easier, but benefiting from an uncompressed HD-SDI signal with no noticeable delay.
The Shoot HD kit also came beautifully flightcased, which makes a massive difference to the camera assistants’ quality of life and instantly lets you know that it’s all going to have been extremely well looked after.
As usual I rated the camera at ISO250 for a slightly cleaner image, and used Tiffen IR-cut NDs and a polariser in front of the lens to give a stop for everything of T/2.0 on this extremely sunny day.
For the exteriors I used a couple of 4×4′ frames with half white diffusion to take the edge off the very harsh sun working as a backlight (if you look in the reflection of the car windows you can actually see them – would have been much better to use a single 12×12′ but would have required more crew to rig), and then a 4×4′ silver reflected to bounce the sun back in as an edge light for the closeups.
For the interiors the director was after the feeling of morning sun streaming through the windows, so we used a little fine haze in the air to give the light a touch of volume, and lower the contrast of the scene. ¬†Supplementing the sun (we’d scheduled the shot using my Helios sun calculator to make sure the sun was at the most advantageous position for this scene) were two 2.5KW HMIs with 1/4 CTO to warm them slightly. ¬†All the strong directional light you can see on the back cupboards if from the HMIs. ¬†The sun was coming from a much more acute angle and we had to put in a few nets to take down the hot spots on the windowsill. ¬†Ideally, we’d have boxed out the whole window from the sun, leaving just one side clear where you can see the other house, and just used the HMIs to create the sunlight so we’d have more control, but again it would have taken longer than we had.
For the closeups I put a 4×4′ KinoFlo with daylight tubes and full white diffusion just out of frame. ¬†To hold the detail outside the window I had several stops of ND in and the polariser too to pop the blue skies a little so any artificial light that was to make any difference at all had to basically be on top of the actress.
For the scene at the door, I hid a 1.2 KW HMI inside the hallway to suggest light from the kitchen in the rear backlighting her hair, then bounced a 2.5KW HMI from the kitchen floor up into the kitchen ceiling to brighten up the back of the shot. ¬†For his shot, we faked the same 3/4 backlight the sun had been giving us in the wide shot (which was done at a different location) using a 2.5K and a 4×4 reflector. ¬†For both shots the ‘key’ light on the actors’ faces was just the natural bounce at the location.DIT Tom Mitchell had brought in a full DIT kit from 4K London and was able to cut together a rough version of the ad before we’d barely begun packing up – nice bit of proof for anyone who claims RED takes longer than any other format!
The offline was cut using ProRes files debayered at quarter res to 1024 x 576px, then colourist Simox Cox at Fullrange Films went back to the original r3d raw files in Color for the final grade, which is where the pictures above come from.
Thanks to Tom, we also got some DoP Diary cam stuff going!
And not only *that*, we even took loads of behind the scene stills…
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Coming soon: The making of a national TV ad for Chipsaway
Ed Moore
Really cool shoot today for Chips Away, produced by Koala TV. Got tons of photos, DoP Diary Cam stuff and thoughts so will do a big blog post soon.
Now off for a two day steadicam job. See you soon!
UPDATE: blog post now up.
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Tom Mitchell
how long is soon?
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Ed Moore
Hehe sorry – I’ll make a start this evening.
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Tom Mitchell (DIT)
ah em, poke
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Ed Moore
Ta-da!
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Ed Moore
Overhauled the about page to include a better biography if you’re interested.
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Ed's web picks for May 30th through May 31st
Ed Moore
- Keya’s story: climate change in Bangladesh on Vimeo – This is a brilliant example of why the DSLRs that shoot HD video are an incredibly powerful tool. This little film for Oxfam has the same sort of visual appeal that you would expect from a photojournalist; it's just that it also happens to be moving. And have sound. Plus combined with a fast Canon L series lens, the 5DMkII can capture natural light environments that would look horrific on a RED, even assuming you could deal with the size of a RED package.
- http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/patchmatch.mp4 – Seriously impressive image editing algorithm demo from Princeton University. Seamlessly… well, sort of move stuff instantly that would take hours of Photoshopping at the moment. Will be brilliant for b3ta.com…
- Hitting the Mark…or not – "Some actor walks into frame, you push back in with him, not necessarily matching distances, as he goes to another mark and stops. If he stops 4 inches shy- hit your mark. If he overshoots by 4 inches-hit your mark. The reason? Your position on that mark is the one anchor the AC has in the room that's constant. If he sees you are on your mark, he automatically knows how much the actor is off by and can adjust."
Another great post from Dollygrippery
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Brosnan vs Daniel Craig Bond mashup
Ed Moore
I would normally just put random YouTube videos in the regular web picks dumps, but this one made me choke on my beer it was so good…
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Mark Daniel
Hi,
That is really a choking one, I have enjoyed it too. I have picked this video yesterday. By the way unfortunately yesterday my car have had an accident and its painting got harmed. But thank God, I have found a car paint repair service through online. I must say they have done an excellent job in a cheap rate.Anyway thanks for sharing………
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Abbie Hunt
I would have to say that Daniel Craig is the best James Bond of all times.”`;
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Review: Helios sun path calculator for iPhone (versus sunPATH)
Ed Moore
If you were shooting inside with a single light, you’d be concerned about where it was located and what direction it was pointing in, right? ¬†You wouldn’t just get someone to randomly position and focus it, then work around whatever it gave you. ¬†You want your lighting tools to do the best job they possibly can.
Unless you have a huge budget for serious HMI firepower, shooting day exteriors means you have one lighting unit only – the sun. ¬†And whilst you can’t control where and when it’s going to appear, you can calculate both of those and use that information to your advantage. ¬†A sun position calculator draws on a heady yet ultimately simple bunch of celestial mechanics to figure out the path of the sun through the sky at any given point on the Earth, for any given time.
Using that knowledge, you can perform all sorts of tricks, from the simple to the incredibly helpful:
- Work out sunrise and sunset times for anywhere on the planet on any date
- Work out exactly what compass bearing the sunrise will appear at, for those glorious long lens African savannah shots
- Work out how long the shadow of any given object will be at any time of day
- If your shooting location is surrounded by tall objects like buildings or trees, work out – months or years in advance of the shoot if necessary – the precise time when the sun will clear the top of a building that’s 55 degrees above the horizon from where your subject’s going to be standing
It’s a tool any DoP, gaffer or professional stills photographer needs to have in their arsenal. And thanks to the iPhone, we have a perfect mobile computing platform for the job, and thankfully the guys at Chemical Wedding have stepped up. (More …)
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Language of film sets t-shirts
Ed Moore
The guys at FilmCrewShirts have been doing some sterling work coming up with a whole range of comedy film crew clothing emblazoned with phrases regularly heard on the set. I suggested this one Any other ideas?
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Jason Cuddy
Not bad, although I prefer the range over at http://www.filmmakergear.com/. However it’s a very fine line between wearing a funny in-joke t-shirt and being that unprofessional prat on set though.
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Ed Moore
Agreed, if you were to buy one of these shirts, you’d have to first artificially age it by a dozen years so you’d be able to convey the sense that you were wearing ironically whilst still appreciating – in a sort of older, wiser way – the basic humour involved.
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pablo 2:17 pm on August 5, 2009 Permalink |
hi there! great info, great blog, I´m doing my first ad on red the first days of sptember and i found really helpfull some of the data you posted here, thanks Ed!
Ed Moore 9:13 pm on October 23, 2009 Permalink |
Hey Pablo – no problem, that’s the whole point of this blog! Really glad you got some useful info out of it.