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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

This is bad cinematography (but please tell me why)

"Written directed shot and edited by"

Is what's wrong.

That said, I reserve judgement until I see the whole thing. Perhaps it really works in context, or the story does blow away any technical issues.
 
Whoa! This is a friend of mine's ULTRA LOW budget movie. Shot on an EX-1 (good guess) straight to SxS cards. SO 4:2:0 and with no lights, no LETUS, no MB even. Just straight out of the box on cheap sticks.

TOTAL budget I think was $75,000 including a Theresa Russell cameo... that said.

PLAYED TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL

RECEIVED RAVE REVIEWS. Variety , LA Times. etc etc. here are a couple
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/mov...ival-premiere-movies-showtimes-rid-of-me.html
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117945070/

SUBMARINE (Winter's Bone) has been repping the film and sold it to PHASE FOUR for Theatrical Distribution. (not sure about advance, but it got a theatrical)

Indeed, it has EX-1 out of the box written all over it... But this proves one thing... STORY IS KING - and can render camera choice irrelevant.
 
Tim Whitcomb said:
...But this proves one thing... STORY IS KING - and can render camera choice irrelevant.
Click to expand...

why was it either/or? $75000 is way enough money to make that look better in 2011. maybe it was a look he wanted, cant fathom why, but then i haven't seen the film!

Story is king, cinematography is Queen.




sound is jester.
 
Tim Whitcomb said:
But this proves one thing... STORY IS KING - and can render camera choice irrelevant.
Click to expand...
The question of the original message was "this is bad cinematography... please tell me why." Story was not part of the original question.

The recent success of Paranormal Activity prove that films can be extremely successful with crap cameras and bad photography. But I think the chances of coming up with an idea that transcends all aspects of good technical work -- lighting, sound, editing, sharpness, and so on -- are extremely slim.

I also say that this film could be improved substantially by decent color correction, and I noted before that I've seen features that were far worse.
 
I wouldn't necessarily call "Paranormal Activity"'s camera work bad. The key there was that the camera work perfectly served the story and the sense of cinema verite that made the story "work." Just as someone noted above, the look simply needs to serve the story, it just so happens that a lot of stories are best served by beautiful classic "filmic" imagery (and why the RED is so popular :-))
 
Brian Kaufman said:
I wouldn't necessarily call "Paranormal Activity"'s camera work bad.
Click to expand...
I didn't say "camera work." I said crap cameras, meaning low-end industrial cameras. And bad photography, meaning, lotsa clipped whites, inconsistent levels, very noisy lowlights, tons of 2:3 pulldown problems, smearing, shutter lag, you name it. In fact, in the original Paranormal Activity, 90% of the cuts between shots I looked at had interlace issues (overlapping fields), indicating a bad ingest. It didn't matter from a business standpoint: it made $280 million worldwide.

I think you can shoot a movie in such a way to look like "found footage" and not have it look quite this bad. Cloverfield is a good example where I think they pulled it off better photographically.
 
Gunleik Groven said:
Ouch... Putting my head on a stick here, but...

I think that was in many ways refrshing to see!
Seems like they have chosen a tool and played along with its aesthetics.

I have some not so nice thoughts, especially as to interior ligting and lack of priority in those images. And I think it is hard to say how it all really works in such a short-cut rapid trailer.
But all in all I really love a real video-deep-focus @ 30fps, look over a lot of the pretentious film-look crap see...
And thus I don't see it as bad photography...

I am amongst those who do not at all think 24/25 fps and shallow DOF is defining as to film-look. They're just words in a cinmatographic vocabulary.

But it doesn't look like film. Refreshingly enough - these days - it doesn't pretend to do so either.

Kinda liked that a lot!


Just sayin!
Click to expand...

Me too. This is an obvious choice the director made. Dogma95- inspired.... maybe.... sort of. I can see why he would make this choice... the entire digital industry wanting one thing and him going for the complete opposite. I like it a lot.
 
Love This Discussion! Very Informative! Would be interested to see what people think about "Catfish".
I personally think that film did not put that much effort into the Cinematography at all, it is a Documentary.
But it kept me engaged and was some what interesting.

Love both sides of this discussion, I think every one has very valid points.
 
What I originally meant by "bad", in regards to the Rid of Me trailer, was that it looked staged. It gave you the sensation that there were actors, a set, a camera operator, etc.

It seemed to not complete the first demand of any non-documentary movie: to allow you to believe that it is real.

Most cinematography issues I see discussed on this forum are addressing higher-order demands (aesthetics, techniques, etc.)
 
Charlie Bucket said:
What I originally meant by "bad", in regards to the Rid of Me trailer, was that it looked staged. It gave you the sensation that there were actors, a set, a camera operator, etc.

It seemed to not complete the first demand of any non-documentary movie: to allow you to believe that it is real.

Most cinematography issues I see discussed on this forum are addressing higher-order demands (aesthetics, techniques, etc.)
Click to expand...

Thats it, thats completely and utterly it. hit the nail on the head there.

catfish was good, but it was a totally convincing looking documentary. if narratively its supposed to be shot with a video camera then the video sheen, 30fps, 360 shutter no lights etc is brilliant. if its supposed to be an invisible camera then using dodgy video settings, poor lighting and a shaky camera BREAKS THE FOURTH WALL and at worst interferes with the suspension of disbelief.

equally annoying is when films have clips of things supposed to be shot on a phone, or a handycam and they have been shot with a RED. it just screams.
 
Good points. I haven't seen Cloverfield in years, but it didn't work as well for me story-wise, and story is still king. A lot of nauseating shaky-cam, which can be a bit problem int he theatre.. i understand the "why" of it, but it meant my poor wife didn't get to watch it (motion sick).
 
...another example of poor choice of footage is when you see a scene shot with something like a Red One and then in another scene when people are watching "news coverage" or something similar, the image they view on their monitor is the same as what we saw when the scene played out... talk about breaking a fourth wall.
 
I did not find this trailer one bit emotionally intriguing or otherwise interesting. (And I expect the rest of the film to be precisely like it is in the trailer, in this case)
It just inspires me to keep exploring and still not go into the 'realistic yet so obviously staged' look that so many seems to prefer in the regions I'm from (Scandinavia)

Thanks to this great forum discussion it at least managed to give the world something of worth :)
 
thanks for posting the link to that film, it just reminded me that I need to hire an art director for my next gig...
 
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