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James Cameron on China Co-prods
…when you’re sitting here in Beijing and you see how they’re basically skipping the latter part of the 20th century and going straight to the 21st century, with installation of 3D compliant digital theaters in towns that never even had a movie theater before. They’re just skipping film completely. There’s no film in their film business – which is pretty cool.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/james-cameron-avatar-sequel-china-317183
http://dawn.com/2012/04/23/james-cameron-eyes-co-production-projects-in-china/
Quentin Tarantino, RZA and Eli Roth just completed a HK style action movie in China.
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Thanks for those links. Well-researched. As the Chinese Curse says, May you live in Interesting times.
The Film/Digital side gets complex here - the Chinese agreement are only allows 3D (digital) US imports. Also , we mustn't confuse projection with acquisition. Western brains are unaccustomed to dealing with Chinese numbers where everything seems to end in the word billion.
Interesting that interviewee Cameron is referred to as a "futurist." I had the privilege of living and working in Paris with a group led by a noted futurologue whose rigorous and ludique dialectic became honed and practised by us all, often with writers and philosophers as drop-in guests around the long table in our old-style, wood-fired kitchen.
Like him, (and unlike his clients), Cameron is careful about making predictions.
Futurism [futurologie] as I saw it practised in the 80's was a black art. Once a week, the world's newspapers would arrive with a cement-bag weight heavy thump on our doorstep, later to be torn apart and pieces seeming to indicate tendencies stuck to the walls, ads and articles lying on the floor, sorted crazily into themes, video-ed while verbal notes were recorded and paper notes taken. The whole process had to be done quickly, using those valuable first impressions.
That same afternoon, the torn magazines and newspaper debris was once again outside the door in a wheelie-bin and the final draft would be ready for the next conference with industry leaders ready to pay him 10.000,00 francs a day (five times a month's SMIC minimum salary) for any illuminations as to where to invest, develop or close down.
I'm careful about predicting anything.
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Interesting!
Futurist. Once a term applied to people like Ray Bradbury, Buckminster Fuller, Alvin Toffler... the cheap futurism of Popular Science magazine. I haven't heard the term " futurist" for a long time, in this era of reactionaries.
“I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.”
Ray Bradbury
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"it's the only human art form that combines ALL the disciplines of EVERY OTHER art form and science known to man into a new art form. Movies basically combine all of the the arts into one."
How about a heresy then? It's a lesser art form and science than any of the art forms and sciences which constitute it.
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The Third Dimension, Higher Resolution and Higher Frame Rates, Oh My! How Advances in Digital Film Making and Exhibition Are Destined to Radically Alter Your Movie Going Experience
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Good attempt at input from a neuroscientist, though I'd rather learn more about how neurons work rather than his bumbling interpretation of what he's read about how a higher frame rate produces smoother motion..
it removes a great deal of motion-blur, which tends to cause visual stuttering when an object is rapidly moving horizontally across the screen.
That error (or typo, or late-night, neuron-numbing beverage-induced stuff-up) aside, he'd be a great guy to invite over to PV forums for his slant on human visual perception.
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I used Tri-X 16mm 10 years ago (50 ASA B&W reversal) and it seemed I could do no wrong. Made for hi-res telecine. Your reminder has clinched it. I'm ordering some too.[BTW, are you using stills or cine? Not a Красногорск-3 16mm, by chance, with your Zenit? Mine is still in the wrapper it came in!]
Incidentally, fine grain isn't everything. I've borrowed Wim Wenders' Road Movies for a whole month. I can really recommend the grainy, 16mm B&W 1.37:1 Alice in the Cities (1974) Alice in den Städten (original title) for a look at how a good story can take us on a journey.
Wim Wenders is good for a film maker's morale. He masterfully reminds us us how it is easy, (easy!) once you get in the flow. With the right dialogue, commentary and leitmotif, he galvanises a story out of shots the rest of us would shorten, discard or turn into fairly disjointed montage.
Watch just how long he's prepared to track alongside the kid on the bike - and we're with Wenders all the way, looking down each street with the lost girl.
Talk about suspension of disbelief! For the life of me, I cannot imagine any camera-car, any tangle of wires on the floor, the little girl being an actress, lighting. Got me. Hook, line and sinker!
Funny thing, I found myself watching this part of the DVD over & over, then came upon this crit from Cinephile on just that same scene:
the scene is a privileged fragment, as likely to be fondly mis-remembered from the one-time screening, as it is to be stored and posted on a personal website for sharing, or for repeated and loving perusal.
http://cinephile.ca/archives/volume-5-no-2-the-scene/alice-in-the-cities-the-uses-of-disorientation/
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Well, in case you haven't noticed, I'm rekindling a certain flame. Whatever the end format, there will always be a need for film clips seemingly coming from another time: re-constituted wartime newsreel shot in Plus-X 35mm on my Eyemo, pseudo super-8 childhood family shots (shot on 16mm and fuzzed-up in post is the way it's done).
For you survivalists out there B&W stock keeps well and is simple to develop at home. Or in my bunker ;-)
In a race to look like film, film wins. As for digital, this little black duck is going all the way, @rambo - gimme sharp, gimme detail, gimme 60fps and the video of today and tomorrow. I'm using everything that GH2 can do from now on and no looking back.
@pundit Thanks, I've reserved my Blu-Ray copy of City of Life and Death as you suggested. Hopefully will have time to watch it tomorrow.
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In 1996 I took the unusual step of removing the SP Betacam cameras from the TV training room and presented my working news team trainees with the new Sony 3CCD VX1000 semi-professional DV camcorder. I'd decided their white-balances, focusing, stabilising and the weight were all taking up time better spent on on good framing. The DV cam would just temporarily be used temporarily, in full-auto, to give us the break we needed.
Some of them were instantly hooked. Shortly later, one ENG operator asked to borrow the DV for a shoot from within a light plane with tight space problems. Back at the studio he secretly bumped it up to SP tape (anything less was heresy at the station).
Watching it on that evening's news from the M.C. console, the unknowing E.P. remarked, chauvinistically, "Well, ya gotta hand it to Betacam..nothing else could do that.." (suppressed mirth from the gang standing behind ).
It looked like Betacam SP to me, too. That was back then. But now when I look at my SP copy it looks like it was - DV copied to Betacam SP, not unlike amateur footage we broadcast today. Really!
Had it looked like that back then it would have made me want to do an "Amateur Footage" super over the vision, or maybe get the Chyron operator to do the little flashing "REC" at top right to try to distance the Station from embarrassment. :-)
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Good to see some raising side points to the film vs digital "debate". But I still have to wonder, if one declares that "film is dead (or dying)", wouldn't that imply that "filmmaking is dead (or dying)"?
I think we're talking about more than just a shift in aesthetics and the perceptions of a medium. The fact that the technology and medium of film itself has gone though a lot of changes in the last 100+ years is clearly evident in the way that people make films. The classic cases are things like introduction of sound, color and sensitivity in stocks, portability of cameras etc., where all of these things affected many other aspects of production like the way people acted, how scripts were written, how and where sets were constructed (if at all) and even the way the very stories/subjects were dealt with. Maybe this is why I prefer the more ambiguous term 'Cinema' than to 'Film' or 'Filmmaking'. It feels as if were debating the death of woodworking and avoiding discussing whether or not people still use furniture and in what way.
This question is therefore going much deeper than, "will this movie look much better when shot and projected this way..." and more toward the understanding of how electronic media get produced, distributed and consumed nowadays, a continuation of the Gutenberg Galaxy story.
Yes, this is easily getting "off topic", but I feel it needs to be said. It reminds me of what a friend once said about an elite high school in the US that installed a high end digital TV studio in their school around 2000 to teach "state of the art production". She said the administration just complained about the problems of not being able to find/pay teachers who know how to use the equipment, while she tried to get them to understand that the students found it hard to develop good stories/scenarios (for what to actually film!) because they simply lacked life experience. So this "advanced", "elite" (and expensive) "academy" was nothing more than an overpriced, understaffed trade school. My experience with art schools and university "media production" programs has shown similar dilemmas in the widening "content vs form" gap. I could go on but I'm sure some will take to these points.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program...
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has shown similar dilemmas in the widening "content vs form" gap.
It's all the more strange because outside the big budget spectacle world, you'd think it would be a "given" that people going to the trouble and expense of making films would know something that others don't, that they're creating knowledge or forcing a rethinking. Or that they're Lazarus risen from the dead, with a vital piece of information, a rare delight, a moment of intoxication or pure pleasure. Or, at the very least, that they have an original mind and can do something with it, formally -- meaning create and organize material in unusual ways.
Then you go to a low-budget film festival, and see what people are actually doing.... And it's more like American Idol, for people with money.
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wouldn't that imply that "filmmaking is dead (or dying)"?
I'm glad somebody else has been haunted by this, too.
There never has been a time when formats for most genres resembled one another. "Yet", I say to myself, "we just might see high-end digital cameras so affordable they'll just get used everywhere!"
Just lately I'm seeing beautifully shot documentaries and saying to myself, "this looks as good as a movie." ..then , "damn! if documentaries and news items all start to look like movies, how will I let go of my daily thoughts and go on the journey when I watch a narrative movie?
"Are we all so saturated with artificial images, so time-poor, so bamboozled with multi-tasking and complexity that we might just lose the ability to concentrate for a full 100 minutes?"
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If you read the whole article (I know I know.. it was long) you'd see I agree with you. I didn't say film making is dead I said CHEMICAL film making and projection is, and that we need to change the term back to 'motion picture' making or movie making or digital cinema. Take your pick!
I try and approach this all with a Peter Sellers Inspector Clouseau type silliness. I remember attending some screenings at Sundance 11 and everyone everyone everyone was caught up in Canon 7D / 5D fever and the short films looked so poor when they were up on a big screen compared to 1 or 2 GH13 hack productions. Canon was smart and had a HUGE presence at Sundance and I don't think I saw Panny anywhere. I was the lone nut. When I projected some GH13 hack stuff I had done - jaws dropped, people said I lied and that it wasn't gh1 (hacked) footage. I remember trying to talk some friends who were going Canon into using the GH13 but I might as well have been telling fundamentalist Christians to join a group of Satanists. Same with Apple. I edit with mostly with Edius and Sony vegas 11 on Win 7 cause it's faster and real time - that also makes apple snobs make faces. I don't care. I do what Works for me and what I like best and what looks and sounds best. Screw 'industry workflow'.
I jokingly did this little video:
at Sundance 11 where no one even KNEW the GH1 existed. At that point I had really pissed off a lot of Canon 7D / 5D people... those same people are now dumping their 7Ds.
Just waaaaaaait till 3 more days when the Zacuto shootout comes online and shows you how many people picked the GH2 hacked over the big expensive cams. Now mind you I'm no Zacuto fan boy - or any brand fan boy for that matter. I kinda felt they were Canon fan boys as well and never gave the GH13 or GH2 a chance but this year it seems they have about faced.
I pick what works best. I wouldn't go over to the GH2 for a long time until it looked better and then I finally made the jump and if Canon made a better camera I'd go to them I don't have brand fan boyism.
The only thing that has not changed in 10 years is my boom mic - a Sanken CS-3e. It still sounds amazing and still retains its value I could sell it and only loose a hundred or two off of when I bought it new.
Thank god I started this game as a little baby.. it sure has taken long enough for it to catch up to speed to where my mind thought it should be.
When I was 4 or 5 I wanted non linear editing when I had this toy:
Come on who here had this thing? That damn thing made me break into my grandfather's 8mm stash and I started shooting a movie (in camera editing) and then got all my friends together and was ready for my premiere. I projected my film, eagerly waiting to view my masterpiece in front of my fellow 5,6 and 7 year old friends.
All there was was blackness.
After the beating I got - my grandfather told me this strange tale about needing to 'develop' the film and that it took a few days.
5 year old me: "WHAT!? THAT'S RIDICULOUS WHO COULD DEAL WITH THAT!??! THAT NEEDS TO BE FIXED!"
;)
- Blackout
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I did see City of Life and Death when it came out and enjoyed it. Enjoy is probably the wrong word for it!
Another must see war movie, saw this in a new 35mm print a few years ago:
Elem Klimov Come and See
I just saw Wim Wenders new 3D movie "If Buildings could talk" shot at the Rolex Learning Center. It's a fascinating use of steadycam.
http://actu.epfl.ch/news/wim-wenders-puts-3d-wings-on-the-rolex-learning-ce/
Then there are these amazing tracking shots before the invention of Steadycam:
From Cranes are Flying (1962)
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1962-one-scene-the-cranes-are-flying
Mikhail Kalatozov Soy Cuba:
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Filmmakers play by China rulebook Censors ban time travel, ghosts -- and censorship
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118056299?refCatId=19
(although a lot of Hong Kong films shot in China don't follow the rules and aren't historically accurate!)
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Unfortunately, cinema is a rare creature these days. Not only due to production itself but to the audience; over time people has gotten used to not regard "movies" as a thinking medium (rather a product of the "entertainment industry"), mixing it up with television (home) experiences.. Back in the days certain types of shots could not be done or would be considered a harsh transgression because of how the shot would be perceived in the cultural context.. People went to the movies and talked about what they had seen. These days everything is up for grabs. Movies are mimicking home video, television shows / docu-soap aesthetics and vice versa; television shows look like they where produced for the theatre.
And all of this ends up in the gutter; youtube (or similar) where everything is rehashed and reproduced with the same aesthetics as people have seen time and time again, with very little substance.
However; it seems like there is a desire for something else. Moonrise Kingdom is one of the most critically acclaimed cinematography experiences recently; shot on s16mm – highly aestethicized in recognizable Wes Anderson fashion. "What you didn't know you wanted to see". Now this of course caters to the "movie" knowledgeable audience above else, but – could there be room to introduce a counter-movement for the thinking medium once again? I would like to think so. Substance has become a rare commodity.
@Roberto Personally I had no intents of getting into the world of movie-making before I saw the entry of dslr's as film making equipment. That's what made it possible for me to shoot at face value; and to make and end product that for the audience is indestinguishable from old school film; or new school high end digital tools for that matter. I've been familiar with development over the last 15-20 years or so; watching as much as possible (from the whole history of cinema) to keeping tabs of what the up-and coming film-makers where using at the time. Actually; Red got me first excited about the possibilities although the outfit was both too expensive and too large for it to be a viable tool for myself.
It's propably easy for someone like yourself (who seem to have some experience) to dismiss it; but the point is – there has been a genuine shift in terms of what is possible to produce without any notable means whatsoever.. Mind also that we who work or deal with moving images every day get a completely different perception of things.
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Well, I watched City of Life and Death last night. Thanks. I will never forget it.
Of course, there are very good reasons to choose B&W.
But you know any more about how Chuan Lu decided on the colour acquisition ->B&W print process? I've done it myself, but through laziness or wanting to keep a few clips with everything right except the colour (as in out-of-date stock).
In making a film of this calibre, surely the colour ->B&W was a calculated decision. Are there no modern panchromatic stocks with the right qualities? Are B&W labs not keeping up with change? Was it changed at telecine or digitisation?
Are there better, more modern solutions to, say, red filters to darken the sky?
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I understand your take on DSLR perfectly. I have almost followed a similar path myself.
But I remind myself daily that life is short. These new cameras and auto, multi-coated lenses are inspirational to me and I know I'll be able to master the technology in a short time as long as I don't try to make it do what it doesn't want to do.
I'm one who hasn't the time to learn new stuff, (eg software) unless there's a real quantum-leap change as a reward. Likewise, I will continue get that film look using film - and, importantly, I've learned it already, just like I've learned Photoshop.
There, I think I've said it all once again.
My advice to young people spending good, life learning, up-skilling time on DSLR film making is to go for broke on what that technology can really do at its best.
In Paris in the 70's there were a whole lot of romantic, gifted American writers wanting to be a Hemingway from the 30's. The ones I now admire went on to write in new ways.
My Personal-View advice to new film makers is to be bold and capture what you see, for the sake of others who haven't yet noticed. A key part of this is trying to make your captured image look like what you see with your eyes - not what some other acquisition format did before you.
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@Roberto I'm afraid I can't tell you much more about 'City of Life and Death' except that I read it was shot on 35mm color and converted to B&W in post.
When shooting digital stills I always shoot in color (RAW) and after some RAW adjustments in Adobe Lightroom I then use Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro (Photoshop plugin) if I want to covert the shots to B&W.
The beauty of this is I can greatly vary the tonal range of the B&W using the color filters in Silver Efex Pro which makes it possible along with the various B&W film simulation filters to obtain much more control than if I'd shot the original B&W in-camera which effectively just desaturates the color image.
Example No.1 - Color Version
Example No.2 - B&W Version after conversion using Silver Efex Pro
Personally I don't mind either version though the lighting on the face is probably too flat.
This flexibility in post could be one of the reasons 'City of Life and Death' was shot in color in order to allow for more control of the B&W tones in post. To my eye the B&W image quality looks great and I'm not lamenting it wasn't originally shot in B&W .
Another B&W release that was shot in 35mm color and then converted in post was the Coen Bro's 'The Man Who Wasn't There'. My understand was that the films backers were very nervous about committing to B&W and wanted be able to veto the Coen's decision to put it out in B&W and release it in color if they changed their minds. The compromise was to shoot it in color and convert it. In the end the B&W version stood up so well the rest is history.
Another great piece of cinema if you haven't already seen it...
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@Blackout I don't think @Roberto or @jrd and myself necessarily disagree with you. I'm as excited as anyone here about the possibilities of the image quality of the GH2 and other (somewhat) more affordable digital cinema technologies. And I'm also enjoying expanding and developing my filmmaking skills working with the GH2. But I'm also not nostalgic, having never really worked with film (apart from shooting off a few Super 8 rolls over a decade ago), so I don't feel like I'm trying to achieve what film can/could deliver.
@RRRR Agreed. I like the term Cinema, because it implies something thats about an experience... the cinematic experience of being immersed in a (constructed) world. That world, real or not, has to be convincing whether its pure entertainment (blockbuster style) or educational (documentary) or whatever and for me that experience can happen regardless of the medium/format. That is, one can easily be more enthralled watching a 700mb DVD rip of a good film on a laptop with headphones than some Warner Fox sequel of a remake projected in 7K 4D 12.1 surround. I think we know why.
What (I think) we're trying to get at, is there is no "back to...", there is only forward moving change in the practice filmmaking that is more global than only with this or that component. Where this is all going is anybody's guess and I'm not even sure I want to speculate.
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Why Is Hollywood Creating More China-friendly Films? (AUDIO 6:59 minutes)
Some estimates peg 2020 as the year China will overtake the US in box office revenues, and this year, Hollywood films have dominated the Chinese box office. More and more filmmakers have started to make films with a Chinese audience in mind. Stanley Rosen, a political science professor at the University of Southern California and an expert in film in China, has been consulted by scriptwriters and producers about what makes a movie most appealing to a Chinese audience.
China's first Hollywood style English language Buddy Cop Movie starring Kevin Spacey directed by Dayyan Eng:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1032763/
The Oscar-winning film-maker Steven Soderbergh has hinted that he sees his future in television after becoming increasingly disillusioned with cinema audiences' limited appetite for complex narratives and characterisation ... "American movie audiences now just don't seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative — I'm talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities,"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jul/02/steven-soderbergh-small-screen-magic?intcmp=ILCMUSTXT9385
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OK all you - FILM folks - it is out now:
At Skywalker Ranch Francis Ford Coppola picked the hacked GH2 in a blind test as his favorite looking footage - going against ALL the big boys!
My picks were (made a month ago on viewing part 1 - I highly suggest you download and view in 1920 x 1080p part 1 before jumping to part II) THEN come back here if you haven't.
****** THE SPOILERS ******
MY personal picks:
B,A,F,H (best looking)
D,G,E,C (worst looking)
I wrote them down before when part 1 came out. I was pretty sure the GH2 was one of the top 3 but I KNEW almost for certain D was the iphone and G the 7D because they just give themselves away with the artifacts that I was very familiar with that were not present in the other cams.
So if the maker of the Godfather picked the hacked GH2 as his fav... and that this little $800 cam held up against $100,000 cams to a MASTER FILM MAKER...
You think it can't dazzle an average audience viewer? You think we still need film?
- Blackout
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