Steve Oakley
DP • Audio Mixer • Colorist • VFX Artist
25+ years experience as DP, editor, colorist and vfx artist.
there might be a nice story here but its buried in truly bad visuals due to DV. in particular the XL was a bad nasty camera - remember soderburghs crash and burn film shot with the same camera ? they are trying Blair Witch film "making". could of went HDV and then if they really wanted to, degraded it like dubbing it to DV or just nesting it thru a SD TL->distribution res. sad so many people worked so hard to do something thats probably pretty good but the images are garbage making this unsellable and unwatchable.
M100 2.6, Avid MC, FCP 3-7, Prem before it was Pro, Smoke, Resolve, FCP X. I use FCP X for rough cutting all the time because it fast, but the Cut panel in Resolve does a lot of what FCP X does, w/o the screaming. FCP X's handling of audio is abysmal to say the least. The #1 thing is simply opening, removing Ch's you don't need on a clip. They are always attached to the V clip. When you export to resolve for grading, they all come back. You then have to play around with moving everything into the right track, deleting the dead audio, again. FCP X also lacks a role AKA wanna be tracks mixer to apply global processing like eq and compression. So that leaves X pretty much dead for any audio mixing because trying to do it clip based is a trip into madness of both kinds. FCP X is a great rough cut tool, but its not for finishing by any stretch.
and what it looks like to be part of the media covering the events.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs4NG_C3I-Q
Early is early. You want people there 15min early, then thats the real call time and you are on the clock at that time. Sorry but that first ine is nonsense.
If you are not the director, dp, art director, producer or client nobody cares about your opinon unless its about something about to fall over
Having worked on shoots with lots of people, or not enough and killing yourself with long days and too much work... me personally, I would of added 2 grips and 2 PA's. One of the things I like to do is while shooting one setup, have the "extra" crew either taking down the previous setup, or setting up the next shot. I agree that with higher ISOs the new good cameras can considerably reduce lighting setups. A couple LED lights - panel, lensed arrays, fresnel can easily run on a single 20A circuit, a vehicle 2kw inverter or even battery power. very liberating to be able to put a couple battery power lights up with a decent hr of run time per battery. I also like using passive lighting control - bounce cards even in the dark can kick just that little bit of light you need to get a face to pop in the shot, or sometimes hanging solids to gets some modeling out of flat light. to do that though, you do need a couple people to work efficiently.
that said I shot this short with 3 person crew of me as dir / dp, a grip / sound person, and set decorator / prop master over a weekend. Got lucky in getting amazing fall colors and real rain that fit the mood perfectly. In fact in the end scene I started to set up a silk & some lights, and had an ephinay : just turn up the ISO on my at the time C100mk1 and found I had the look I wanted with just a little bit of fill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngY7iGbVI-A
They owe me either $900 or a Trioplan 80 from kickstarter. they can pay back the cash or in lenses to those who invested first.