tech kills the creative

[Isaac Brody]

This topic seems to crop up pretty often. One of my favorite quotes is by Orson Welles.

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."

I try to remind myself of that every time there's a piece of gear coming out.

 

[Joel Kaye]

I think young guys have alot of creativity and can problem solve situations that arent necessarily "text book"
where as alot of the older guys (no one here of course)

Eh, I think it's just individuals. I know a 50something guy with 20+ years ac'ing and he knows a lot of inexpensive crafty ways to solve problems. He warmed up to RED with SLR lenses right away and will dive into any interesting little indie project.

OTOH I shot with a young guy who just got out of film school and is a film snob and does everything old school (like they taught him in school). Actually, I personally know more young snobs that will only shoot on projects with bigger budgets. They're not motivated to tell stories... something else drives them but I can't tell what.

All I know is the best thing I did in the past year was start taking acting classes. It really brings me back to playing around and being creative. That spills back into everything else - directing, writing, shooting, editing and understanding what other movies are doing.

 

[Joel Kaye]

Yeah but I've never seen good greenscreen (or even barely usable greenscreen footage) off of a DV camera.

Check out the short Duality.
http://www.spike.com/video/duality/1011883

All greenscreen, Canon GL1's and done 7 years ago.

If you're a really good compositor you can pull a good key from DV footage. A mediocre compositor will have trouble with RED.

Never underestimate talent and craft.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Check out the short Duality.
http://www.spike.com/video/duality/1011883

All greenscreen, Canon GL1's and done 7 years ago.

You and I obviously have different definitions of good green screen footage. They are blurring the living hell out of those edges (and it's visible from sub-SD net comrpession). Not criticizing just saying... that's what you have to do and they did it. (Or roto everything). And they're wearing BLACK ROBES on a green screen. You could luma key that sucker. I would have even recommended they shoot on a white screen and just 'go all the way' with that approach. Probably would have gotten even cleaner results.

You get one of two kinds of keys out of DV: Crispy or Fuzzy.

BTW I agree with you. Youngsters (such as myself) tend to be more likely to get locked into textbook approaches than the older wiser compatriots. Knowing what you can get away with takes experience. Probably a bit of a bell curve. At some point you have enough tricks that you don't really need to learn any more.

It's rare that someone has time to make a mistake. So I can see why people are warry to try something new if they have an approach that might burn them. Especially if the percieved improvement is marginal.

 

[Joel Kaye]

You and I obviously have different definitions of good green screen footage.

Maybe, but they ended up meeting Lucas and getting a meetings with every major studio and got their foot in the industry out of nowhere with no previous experience (they were martial artists).

So the point is... it's more about creativity than technology if you want to get noticed.

Also - there is a double resolution version of that short (2 cameras put together side by side) and it looks pretty damn good. As good as a lot of stuff going on television at the time they did it.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Well that's a pretty well done short. Especially with their available resources. Still doesn't make DV an acceptable format to shoot greenscreen if you want a really nice outcome.

Shooting Vistavision style and getting almost 4:2:2 color gets you within spitting range of 4:4:4 recording if you don't have hair or lace to worry about.

But worrying about the technology in this case is the difference between spending a week sweating bullets to get every last pixel of detail out and going home early on day one with a superior result. I would prefer to shoot on the better camera and be done in 1/10th the time.

EDIT: here is another story:

Rauri shot his short on Anamorphic 35mm. He also got noticed. Not saying tech had anything to do with it. But the end result looked great. Getting the same quality of imagery would have been far far far more difficult/impossible with a 4:1:1 single chip CMOS DV camera.

People make engaging radio plays with no camera at all. A good story is a good story. But a great image is also a great image. If you want a great image you need tech. We're visual people. We like pretty things. All of these debates always devolve into "it's all about the story". And that's true. But that doesn't mean we can't tack on some fantastic visuals.