Think it’s difficult to juggle multiple aspects of your photography business? If you want to see an example of a highly motivated creative individual, check out what American filmmaker Shane Carruth has been up to in the film industry.
In 2004, Carruth released the indie sci-fi movie Primer. It had a ridiculously low budget of $7,000, and went on to gross over half a million dollars and gather a large cult following. Read more…
There’s some pretty big news over in the cinema camera world today. RED founder Jim Jannard announced that massive price cuts have been made to the prices of his company’s high-end cinema cameras (which are also used for still photography). Read more…
Don’t worry Canon 5D Mark III shooters: Canon didn’t forget about you after all. Less than a week after announcing a highly-requested firmware update to the Canon 1D X to address AF complaints, Canon has revealed that a similar — but even better — update is also coming to the Canon 5D Mark III.
The upcoming firmware update will not only add support for cross-type AF using lens/extender combos with a max aperture of f/8, it’ll also allow for clean uncompressed HDMI out! Read more…
Lets say you find an imaginative kid, put a pen in one of his hands, put a camera in the other, and ask him to create a movie. What would you get?
That’s the basic idea behind Kid Snippets, a cute and hilarious new web series by BoredShortsTV. For the short above, titled “Salesman”, filmmaker Ryan Haldeman had a couple kids come up with an interaction between a salesman and a customer. He then took the resulting audio, and had actors John and Brett Roberts act it out and mouth the words. What resulted was the humorous sketch seen above. Read more…
If you’re creating a short film that requires a “through the viewfinder” clip, there’s an easier way to create it than pointing your camera through an actual viewfinder (does anyone actually do that?). In the short tutorial above, Luke Neumann of Neumann Films shows how you can simulate the look of a viewfinder by overlaying your footage with some focusing screen images. All the necessary image and audio files are available as a free download. Read more…
One of the notable features of Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film “Children of Men” is Cuaron’s use of long, single-shot sequences, including a complicated urban warfare shot that’s nearly eight minutes long. Refocused Media examined the movie and found that there were 16 shots longer than 45 seconds. The 31-minute compilation video above shows all of the shots in chronological order.
Obviously, you should see the film if you haven’t already. My point in doing this is to demonstrate the effect of a long take in a variety of narrative uses, and to give an idea of what a 45+ second shot looks and feels like when directed by Alfonso Cuaron.
It was also recently revealed that Cuaron’s upcoming film “Gravity” has a 17-minute long opening take, and an average shot length of 45 seconds.
Here’s a helpful video that shows how you can optimize your Canon DSLR for video recording based on Vincent LaForet‘s recommendations. It’s geared towards the 5D Mark II, but is applicable for other video-capable DSLRs as well (e.g. 5D Mark III and 7D). There’s also an article over on LaForet’s blog that explains the reasoning behind the various settings.
Canon’s historic announcement is here, and as most people predicted, it’s geared towards filmmaking rather than photography. The company just unveiled its new C300 cinema camera in an effort to break into a Hollywood digital filmmaking scene that’s dominated by the Arri Alexa and the RED EPIC. While it’s not particularly powerful in any specific category, the new camera comes in EOS or PL lens mounts, shoots 1080p video with a 4K sensor, has dual CF card slots, and offers high quality footage in a relatively small form factor. Read more…
Filmmaker Philip Bloom recently helped Lucasfilm shoot parts of their upcoming film Red Tails. The behind-the-scenes video above gives an interesting glimpse into what it looks like when pretty ordinary DSLR gear meets the big budget world of Hollywood filmmaking. The cameras are hooked up to some pretty serious equipment.
You can check out a trailer for the movie here — Blooms says that a number of his shots can be seen in it, but is keeping mum about which ones.
If you look at the Top 100 Movies chart in the iTunes Store, you might not notice anything out of the ordinary, but one of the movies (#43) is actually a no budget film shot using a single Canon 5D Mark II. For Lovers Only” is a romance filmed by Mark Polish and Michael Polish — known as the Polish brothers — over the course of just 12 days with a single actress (Mark himself played the male lead). The film has already generated over $200,000 in profits after being spread through word of mouth via social networks.
The brothers said that their hotels and some meals were comped; they shot and edited with equipment they already owned; and they don’t consider the few grand worth of meals, taxis and the like to be part of an actual budget. “There was not one dime that came out of our pocket specifically for this movie — besides the food we ate, but we had to eat, anyway,” Michael said.
In the end, Michael and Mark even had to make up some names for the film’s title sequence, which they wanted to stretch out to a reasonable length in order to fit the score that had been written by their friend Kubilay Uner. [#]
This is a great example of how the landscape for movie making, distribution and viewing is rapidly changing, allowing anyone armed with a prosumer DSLR and a whole lot of talent to potentially strike it big.
