Adobe Photoshop + After Effects + Premiere = FTW
Why would you ever pay for a 35mm Panavision camera package – and then cut corners in your budget for what goes in front of the lens?? Remember: there’s a reason that Locations is the first department hired after accounting on major movies shooting in New York City.
Location is as hard as casting.
First, you are seeing a high resolution camera only sampling about 75% of it’s pixels. That has an affect on the overall “precision” of the picture. Secondly, the anamorphic glass means we have to de-squeeze the picture and stretch it from 1.33 to (essentially) 1.77. Once we do that, we end up with a scope picture that literally takes square pixels from the sensor and makes them oblong rectangles. The combination of less source resolution (4K to 3K) and stretching to fill a 2.40:1 aperture makes for a beautiful texture that goes well beyond the typical lens flares. I think this makes the images more accepting of natural and enhanced vignettes and concentrates focus to the center of the frame as the edges tend to fall off fairly quickly. A simple summation of the look of Haywire is this: optically driven texture.
Kennedy: You never say no. You always give a choice. It’s actually a really interesting rule that I use all the time. It’s not going to do any good to say no if you don’t have a solution. I love the process of trying to figure it out: “OK, what am I going to offer up?” I don’t want to say, “You can’t do this.” If there’s a good reason why we can’t do it, then the problem needs to be solved, so what’s the alternative?
Bevan: And it’ll make the crew smarter, too. Challenging the crew against budgetary constraints is a good thing, actually. All of a sudden their creativity goes off in a different direction, and quite often you get a more interesting result.
Kennedy: Or ask a question rather than saying no. “It doesn’t look like we can do this, but what do you think?” You might get three or four different ideas and often those ideas are better than what you started out with.
I believe ALL professionals need to adopt this approach.
Sorkin: My very first movie was A Few Good Men, which was an adaptation of my play. There was an executive on the movie who gave me a note: “If Tom Cruise and Demi Moore aren’t going to sleep with each other, why is Demi Moore a woman?” I said the obvious answer: Women have purposes other than to sleep with Tom Cruise.
That is hilarious.
Almodovar: When I’m not writing or directing, I’m promoting. This is how I summarize my life. So many of the ideas I have come when I am flying or even in a taxi … when I’m in movement, going from somewhere to somewhere.
Black: That’s the challenge with these real-life stories, which a lot of us have done. Lives aren’t lived by Aristotle’s poetics. They’re not. They’re not necessarily in those acts. So for me, I get all these wonderful, interesting things that I learn about people, and I put them all on note cards. And then I have this very small table in my house and I arrange them into something that fits … I love the constraint of the counter because it makes it so that it will fit into a movie. If you’ve found that spine, hopefully at the end of the day you have a movie instead of just a timeline.
I should try this method.
Gore Verbinski: The biggest difference for me was there are no gifts. In live action, you orchestrate chaos and you’re poised with a butterfly net, and you’re looking for some moment of truth — like something where the actor didn’t anticipate that reaction or something — and you catch it as it’s done. In animation, we have to fabricate that… It’s actually a more pure form of storytelling because you don’t compartmentalize preproduction, production and postproduction the same way. It was the hardest job that I’ve ever done and the most joyous.
Rango was my favorite animation of 2011.
If the fanboys had become like the studio to Lucas, then Lucas, to the fanboys, had become the man who breaks the bad news about adulthood.
But now we’re talking about science rather than emotions, and the Lucas magic is lost.
I still can’t forgive what Mr. Lucas did to recent Blu-ray release of classic Star Wars movies, but I still have high hopes for his creative endeavors like Red Tails.
There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country. What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism.
All your viewers/readers are NOT customers.
Final cut just means that, at a certain point, you have the ability to end the discussion. You have the ability to say: “I understand. I see what you are saying. I don’t think it is a better version of this. This is what I believe in. This is what I want to put my name on.” And there’s nothing that you can put in a contract that’s going to make people like it when you do that. So you haven’t really circumnavigated any of the interpersonal issues with it. You’ve simply just said, “Here’s a contractual understanding of at what point this discussion ends.”
That’s how David Fincher rolls.
