- 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!
Updates from August, 2009
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Ed's web picks for June 5th through August 31st
Ed Moore
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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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Ed's web picks for May 29th through May 30th
Ed Moore
- ross:ching » Death Cab for Cutie’s Little Bribes – The concept's a little bit croaky, but the variety of timelapse tricks in this video makes it well worth a watch.
- First sight: Duncan Jones – "So, Ziggy Stardust, Space Oddity – does he share his father's view of all things cosmic?
No: Moon is a million miles from spangled Ziggy spacesuits. It wears its sci-fi geekness loud and proud (Jones wrote his PhD thesis on artificial intelligence)."
Interview with the director of upcoming "indie scifi" Moon with Sam Rockwell which looks fantastic in the trailer. Even more excited about it now I know the director is not only David Bowie's son but has a PhD in AI…
- YouTube – ‘The Man Who Walked Around The World ‘ with Robert Carlisle – Astoundingly well-operating six minute steadicam shot for Johnnie Walker whisky. DoP and operator (a man after my own heart, if insanely better!) is George Richmond, steadicam op on Quantum of Solace, Burn After Reading, Wanted and more.
This is almost certainly a shot where the steadicam operator sits on the back of some sort of vehicle to operate as it's so long and so fast that you'd never be able to keep up if you were walking with the rig.
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Ed's web picks for May 28th
Ed Moore
- Gizmodo – A Rare Tour of IMAX Cameras – IMAX cameras – Wow, this is absolutely fantastic – a rare look inside the IMAX camera department.
"There are 26 IMAX film cameras in the world today. At IMAX HQ, I got to play with 4 of them (and take plenty of photographs for you)."
- Why the second coming of 3D is overrated – "The majority of films conceived in original three-tone Technicolor would be seriously diminished in monochrome, and vice versa. Films by those masters who used CinemaScope creatively are drained of their aesthetic essence when shown on the small screen. [But], no film made in 3D, even those that rely wholly on objects sticking out of the screen into one's face, has lost anything by being shown "flat"."
Interesting piece by Ronald Bergan in the Guardian. He makes a point of saying it's things that make production cheaper, like digital cameras, that make a genuine difference, rather than more expensive, like 3D. I guess the obvious question is what happens when pretty much every little digital camera for indie filmmaking can be cheaply adapted to 3D (RED are in the process of doing this) – if cinema goers start to expect that blockbusters and horror films, both genres I think where the 3D effect does make a substantive difference to the experience, will be in 3d then who knows?
- By Ken Levine: If Aaron Sorkin wrote a show about baseball – More fantastic Ken Levine. I liked Studio 60 but there's no mistaking the Sorkin patter.
- Gizmodo – A Rare Tour of IMAX Cameras – IMAX cameras – Wow, this is absolutely fantastic – a rare look inside the IMAX camera department.
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Ed's web picks for May 27th
Ed Moore
- YouTube – The Vendor Client relationship – in real world situations – Far too familiar.
- Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus trailer: what more needs to be said? – "All the way through the trailer, each one of those magic, sparkling, 60 seconds, you keep seeing tantalising glimpses of aeroplane seats and screaming passengers among the more expected ones of submarines being treated like bath toys and large landmark bridges being at least partially destroyed. And you ask yourself: "Really? One of the sea creatures is going to attack a plane? How?! Bollocks! They can't even vaguely be suggesting they'll do that… "
And in the very last few seconds it is confirmed. With a cry of "HOLY SH…", a giant shark is seen jumping out of the sea – jumping, we guess, somewhere up to 12,000 feet in the air, and threatening to take a bite out of a commercial airliner."
I couldn't be more excited about this film at the moment.
- The Believer – Interview with David Simon – "DS: My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell."
My girlfriend and I are finally getting through The Wire. I can't possibly add to the huge number of reasons why it's consistently called the best TV show ever made, but for me personally the sense of what the creator's saying above sums it up.
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Ed's web picks for May 22nd through May 27th
Ed Moore
- Green…ish? – "On the serious side however. Film sets can sometimes be ecological nightmares. Trucks idling all day long. Half filled plastic water bottles are strewn everywhere. And tons of materials wasted and then discarded … We are more than willing to help out. I believe it was Carmen Diaz who bought a shitload of travel mugs for a production so that people wouldn't waste so many coffee cups.The production I'm on currently gave little out little flasks and then banned plastic water bottles from craft service."
Getting film sets greener: a topic I've been thinking about a lot lately. More to come on this.
- YouTube – David Lynch on Product Placement – Always refreshing when someone doesn't pull any punches…
- Indie Screenings – Going to see The Age of Stupid tonight at Warwick University in one of the many national screenings of it happening this evening as part of the launch of Indie Screenings' distribution model.
What these guys are doing is really exciting and whilst it's as simple as people signing up to host a screening and being sent a DVD, if they can make enough of a fuss about it, the idea might just get across to the audience that there is an alternative to the whole studio/cinema chain model.
- Green…ish? – "On the serious side however. Film sets can sometimes be ecological nightmares. Trucks idling all day long. Half filled plastic water bottles are strewn everywhere. And tons of materials wasted and then discarded … We are more than willing to help out. I believe it was Carmen Diaz who bought a shitload of travel mugs for a production so that people wouldn't waste so many coffee cups.The production I'm on currently gave little out little flasks and then banned plastic water bottles from craft service."
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Ed's web picks for May 21st through May 22nd
Ed Moore
- Rule By Secrecy – "But I don't like the secrecy that develops in TeeVee. The more people who understand this business, the better. Some people like to obfuscate what they do, so that people can't pull back the curtain and go, "Hey, wait a minute… running a show is NOT as hard as performing brain surgery!" Deep down, showrunners know this. They know how capricious this business is. Even the mega-successful ones have the insecurity that one day, their own curtain will be yanked aside and they'll hear someone say, "You're not as talented as we thought you were. Go away."
Another required entry onto your RSS newsreaders; the delightfully written (with loooong posts) blog of Kay Reindl, TV writer and producer from Hollywood.
- By Ken Levine: Ready for some Friday questions? – "And you’ll notice a “day” on 24 usually begins around 8 a.m. That allows them to shoot the daytime scenes in the summer when it stays light until 8 and the nighttime scenes in the winter when shooting can begin as early as 5. Lots of little tricks go into getting the most bang for your production buck."
Ken is a "Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer", and his RSS feed is going straight into my news reader.
- BeachTek XLR audio adaptor for Canon 5D MkII [ProPhoto Coalition.com] – This is really good news – one of the big limiting factors of using the 5D for video work to date has been the 3.5mm minijack which is the only audio input you get. This little box screws onto the bottom of the camera and provides proper balanced audio inputs and a headphone output. There's even 48V phantom power for using a professional shotgun microphone.
I remember having BeachTek boxes on our tiny little cameras like the Canon XM2 when I was at university running the student TV station… takes me right back!
- C-MOCOS – Empowering your Camera Motion Control – Got to be one of the coolest looking motion control rigs going; this was shown at NAB this year. 7 axes and under 14KG without track. Amongst other tricks, you can perform a shot handheld and it will record the exact movement, allowing you to press a button and replicate the exact shot with perfect accuracy. For those unschooled in motion control, that means you can shoot multiple 'passes' of a shot with maybe a slight change like a model wearing a different outfit, and in post production transition between each pass gives the impression that in a single seamless camera movement, the outfits are morphing from one to another.
- Visual Effects For Directors DVD boxset – This looks to be a fantastic resource for directors and DoPs who want to know more about how visual effects works in post production so they can work on set more confidently. It can be terrifying shooting green screen or effects shots without having a clear understanding of what's fine and what's going to screw up the visual effects artists' work.
I already own the camera movement and blocking DVD set that the same guys did and it is absolutely superb. I'll definitely be dropping $329 on this when I'm feeling a bit flush!
- Tracking and Compositing with mocha for Final Cut | Studio Daily – Nice quick demonstration of a $199 planar tracking tool. Planar tracking lets you track 2D planes in 3D space – if you need to replace something in post, like a sign, a numberplate or maybe superimpose graphics onto a computer screen that's in shot (the actual graphics on a screen rarely photograph well), planar tracking works brilliantly. It tracks texture rather than the old 'corner pin' technique, so it doesn't matter if some of the object you're tracking is obscured or goes off screen.
- Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) on Vimeo – Surprising how accurate she is, considering. I find Star Wars pretty tedious going. Requires fanboy chip to be cranked up to 11.
- Rule By Secrecy – "But I don't like the secrecy that develops in TeeVee. The more people who understand this business, the better. Some people like to obfuscate what they do, so that people can't pull back the curtain and go, "Hey, wait a minute… running a show is NOT as hard as performing brain surgery!" Deep down, showrunners know this. They know how capricious this business is. Even the mega-successful ones have the insecurity that one day, their own curtain will be yanked aside and they'll hear someone say, "You're not as talented as we thought you were. Go away."
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Ed's web picks for May 21st
Ed Moore
- 3D Blue Ray Disc Camcorder by Nikola Knezevic | Future Technology – Fantastic design for handheld 3D camcorder. Almost looks like a phaser from the original series of Star Trek. I think 3D has finally reached it's tipping point – if my girlfriend's sister is talking about how cool Coraline in 3D was and not just my fellow cinematechnophile nerds.
- Photos: Bombardier BD-700-1A10 Global Express Aircraft Pictures | Airliners.net – Nice shot of RED founder / owner Jim Jannard's private jet – with an amazing paint job!
- Steadicam operator makes seamless leap from Segway to foot – the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest [YouTube] – Extraordinary bit of operating.