NoFilmSchool » soderbergh

Seen: Che and the Digital Cinema Revolution

Koo — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:00:26 +0000

Interesting look behind the scenes of the first feature(s) shot on RED, Steven Soderbergh’s diptych Che. The Criterion CollectionCriterion Collection version of the film was released last week, and it includes a recounting of the frantic scramble to get the RED cameras ready in time (hint: they weren’t ready, and shooting had to be pushed a week):

Soderbergh also chimes in on the “pissing contest” of increasing resolution, which I’ve also mentioned as overblown after seeing Che projected digitally in 2k at New York’s 1100-seat Ziegfeld theater. And stay tuned for the end of part 4, where Soderbergh — a major DIY filmmaker, who shoots and edits many of his films himself — discusses how the advent of digital editing is affecting films holistically.

[via FreshDV]

Pan and Scan redux

Koo — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:15:35 +0000

Steven Soderbergh called attention to this issue a few months back, but the DGA’s website was in a state of disrepair and his opinion piece couldn’t be properly linked. Also, I don’t have cable, so I didn’t pick up on the issue first hand — that is, until I moved out of my apartment September 1st and, by relying on the kindness of others and couch surfing, began watching movies on cable in wonderful high definition. There’s been just one problem: the movies are crapped. Sorry, I mean cropped.

I thought when HDTV was invented we’d be done with the travesty of pan and scan (cropping the sides of widescreen content and debasing an original, rectangular composition in order to shove it into a more squarish display). Surely the movie consuming, HDTV-owning public is used to the black bars at the top of their TVs that have appeared on widescreen movies for years, and understand it’s supposed to look that way? Apparently not. HBO, AMC, and other HD cable channels have taken to instituting pan and scan again — it’s not as egregious to fit cinemascope content (2.35:1) into a widescreen HDTV (1.78:1) as it was back when we had 4:3 displays, but with the ubiquity of large TVs these days, there’s no need to amputate a film in order to get a slightly higher perceived image size. Even worse, HBO, AMC et. al no longer give you the warning, “the following has been formatted to fit your TV” — they just do it and leave you none the wiser until you notice a shot where a character on the periphery’s face is cut in half, or are generally overcome with an uneasy feeling of framic claustrophobia. Soderbergh goes more in-depth (with more cred) and calls out the channels individually in his opinion piece. Free your HDTV!

Ten films from 2008

Koo — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:03:52 +0000

Film critics are all releasing top 10 lists this week; I’d like to post a different kind of year-end list. Here are ten films I saw in 2008 that I would not have seen yet were I still living in North Carolina. Thanks, New York!

To give some sort of value to this post, I’ve linked some of the titles to articles of interest. In no particular order:

Che
The Wrestler
Medicine for Melancholy
Man on Wire
Rachel Getting Married
Synedoche, New York
Gomorrah
The Class
Wendy and Lucy
Ballast

Of course, movie watchers aren’t confined to New York and LA; someone needs to figure out this geographically-apathetic digital distribution thing.