Market for Baraka or Planet Earth-style Docs?

[Tom Lowe]

I've been approached with the idea of shooting a Koyaanisqatsi/Baraka-style non-narrative/documentary about the beauty of the American Southwest.

I've always dreamed of shooting something like Baraka, but I wonder if some of you guys who work in this field might be able to tell me something about the market for this type of project?

What are standard lengths? And who buys this stuff?

The ideas I have now are:

45-minute all timelapse, perhaps shot on a Hasselblad 7K DLSR, so it could go to IMAX if it came out good.

45-minute Baraka-style project mixing timelapse and live-action RED footage. Maybe sell it to Discovery HD or National Geographic HD, a similar HD cable channel? Plus sell DVDs, HD-DVDs, etc.

A full-on 90 minute Baraka-style feature mixing live action and timelapse that could go to film fests or run on cable HD channels as a two-hour special or a 90-minute commercial-free feature.

Can any of you guys give me tips about the potential for selling something like this? What are the markets? How do you get paid?

I figure I can keep the budget pretty low.

[Curran Giddens]

I don't know anything about marketing, but I would buy a DVD, especially if it was in HD.

I love watching that kind of stuff. I bought two copies of Baraka (one is special edition).

[Tom Lowe]

Yeah, that Special Edition is nice. I only wish the behind-the-scenes doc was longer than 13 minutes. I could watch that stuff all day long.

[BASSAM MSSALATIE]

i hope you got lucky in this . but i think those channles have strong accurate policy to deal with them so hope any one expert help you in this ,please update us ..:red_bandana:

[Rudi Herbert]

Tom,

That's what one of those things where, if you can afford to shoot it, especially in super HD, then go ahead and do it and worry about selling it later on. A friend of mine did something very similar, timelapse with a film Mamiya, and ended up selling it several times, one of them for over $200 K as an HD demo to Toshiba. And imagine, he had to scan thousands of frames at 4 K on a Microtek scanner, which if you know them, are very unwieldy and plain tough to work with. That would be hard NOT to sell one way or another really, if only, because of how unique it is.

[BASSAM MSSALATIE]

[QUOTE=Rudi Herbert;120384]Tom,

one of them for over $200 K as an HD demo to ToshibaQUOTE]

:gun: 200k :blush: Woooow .
tell me where can i sell and how please

[Mark Allen]

I think www.ashesandsnow.com is the new paradigm for this kind of movie where you create an event out of it beyond the movie itself. Otherwise, you're just hoping for a sale to imax or specialty DVD.

[BASSAM MSSALATIE]

Ashes and Snow i have seen this movie it is (fisheye training movie) .i don't like it all .:tongue:

[Tim Lüdin]

Hi Tom I must say your timelaps stuff is badass.
I had goosebumps when I first saw your clip posted on REDuser.

So your idea of timelaps footage mixed with RED footge is certainly a good one. I would watch your movie any time.
Just do it. People got to see it to believe it. There's so much crap on TV. Your kinda stuff is food for soul and heart.
Especialy now, with all this talk about globalwarming etc.

Show Doc Producers your real and they will understand what you mean.

Good Luck
Tim

[Tom Lowe]

So what is the length of a one-hour TV show? About 45 minutes? Is that about how long a typical IMAX is?

If each timelapse was average of 10 seconds, that would mean I would have to shoot about 300 timelapses to make a 45-50 minute IMAX. That's a lot of timelapse. :)

Oh, and thanks for the kind words, Timage.

[ChrisLyon]

There would have to be a purpose for the film for me to watch 45 minutes. Especially if it were 45 minutes of just timelapse. I mean I love the red Just as much as the next guy, but there has to be a reason other than "Yeah we just shot this the other day." One of the coolest nature docs I've seen recently was The Man Who Skied Down Everest from 1975 because it had some of the nicest nature footage for the time- but it had a purpose for sticking around to the end.

If I were you, I'd find something interesting to "excuse" the footage. Another near-perfect footage-based documentary I've seen recently is In the Shadow of the Moon. It had all the footage you've seen from the Apollo missions, plus more. The documentary side was just the astronauts talking and telling stories and antics. It made me cry twice.

Check out the trailer: http://www.apple.com/trailers/thinkfilm/intheshadowofthemoon/hd/ All of their footage was rescanned in HD from original NASA reels- and NASA asked if they could have it. Just like Ron Howard did for the Apollo 13 launch recreation. You know you've done something amazing when...

So, in short, don't just shoot some time lapses, concentrate on something like the sky, do some time-lapse, get a really long telephoto and shoot some moon footage (that's something we haven't seen much of). Then interview some astronomers, astrologers, moon researchers, etc. Find a purpose for the film build an auditory story in the interviews, give it a great backdrop of the footage you shoot plus some cool b-roll from the interviews (like tight shots on eyes and the facial features of the people you are interviewing- you could give it a sense of human connection) and get someone like Aaron Marshall to score it who can convey wonder.

I dunno, just my thoughts. Like I said to begin with- footage is great, but footage with a story is better. It doesn't even have to have an extremely intelligent story- just information and wonder for the sky, mooon, stars and beyond.

Or not about the stars at all,other things can be done, of course, but I really liked the footage you shot of the sky. It gave me a feeling of being so small on earth in the expanse of the universe. I know that may sound deep, but it really helped convey the distance and the earth's movement in relation to the rest of our galaxy. Plus I'm a space nut.

[Tom Lowe]

Yeah, I had considered some ideas along those lines. I'm kind of friendly with Carl Sagan's widow Ann Druyan, and I had thought to ask her if I could use some Carl Sagan audio clips about the stars and heavens for my star timelapses. Night timelapse is my favorite.

[Friedrich Moser]

Hi Tom,

really love your TL-footage, too, especially the night stuff. But to get most out of your work, you definitely need to have a story. Something I would love to see at the movies as well as on TV are stories about how nature is fighting back its ground after man has left. I have one beautiful place in mind to tell a variation of this story in Estonia (been there on holidays two years ago, fascinating country, very lovely people and very good beer). This kind of theme would be the exact counterpart of the man-against-nature news and docs we watch everyday. The American South-West would be a pretty good place to tell this story, cause you could go back in time having plenty of archive-material (newspapers, photos, maybe even film stock) with little or no royalties to pay, and, you could confront the expectations of gold-rushers or the like THEN with the actual state of it NOW.

And, well, talking about story-telling: I am worshipping Robert McKee and the one book that changed my film-making: "Story".

The market of Planet Earth-style docs? The most solid one (in the serious strands). If you managed to build up a co-production with Europe, maybe you could count with a budget from $400k upwards, depending on the complexity and beauty of your film.

Cheers, Friedrich

[Thom Steinhoff]

I think you should go for it--but maybe make it a "back burner" project where you shoot some whenever you have time, on vacation, location scouting, as part of another shoot, whenever.

Baraka was amazing--but it was more than just the visuals--it all tied together in a real, human, visceral, experience. Somehow, if I watch it alone, without interruption, by the end the humanity of it almost moves me to tears.

The good thing about things like this is that you can tie it together in one long piece, but also break it up to sell it as stock footage, or use pieces of it in your other movies.

The timelapse stuff you've already shown is really great (btw, did you end up selling that 10 second spot?) and when I saw it--I already was thinking Baraka--just don't forget about the sublime monkey in the sauna type moments or the desparate geisha, or any other of the human type elements that raised Baraka from a cinemography demonstration into a visual experience.

[Michael Schrengohst]

And there is so much timelapse available you could probably
license it for a feature for cheaper than going out on location
for 2 or 3 months.

[Tom Lowe]

If I shot a strictly timelapse 45-minute piece, I would probably try to shoot it on a Hasselblad 39MP 7K camera, so I could potentially sell it to IMAX if it came out good. I doubt there is any 7K timelapse footage around. I'm not even sure it has ever been done! :)

It would also probably take me a year to do it -two summers.

One benefit is that I would be able to spend a lot of time in beautiful outdoor locations!

[Thom Steinhoff]

If I shot a strictly timelapse 45-minute piece, I would probably try to shoot it on a Hasselblad 39MP 7K camera, so I could potentially sell it to IMAX if it came out good.

Don't forget if you want it to be on iMax at 7K then you need a 7K optical printer--of which I'm not sure there are any. If, currently, they top out at 4K, then I think good DSLR would be plenty maybe move up to the 1DS to get the larger sensor and larger color space (I believe) but save your money for where it will be seen.

[Poi Boy]

If I shot a strictly timelapse 45-minute piece, I would probably try to shoot it on a Hasselblad 39MP 7K camera, so I could potentially sell it to IMAX if it came out good. I doubt there is any 7K timelapse footage around. I'm not even sure it has ever been done! :)

It would also probably take me a year to do it -two summers.

One benefit is that I would be able to spend a lot of time in beautiful outdoor locations!

I have a 39 hasselblad but I have never done any time lapse with it...each file even at 8bit is 112megs so you would need a shitload of hard drive space. I just did some quicky test with my red and the timelapse looks pretty damn good and so easy. The hasselblad would probably look amazing but what a lot of work.go for it !
Aloha
-A

[Tom Lowe]

The new Hasselblad H3DII does 7K RAW stills (7200x5400) that are 50MBs a piece, according to the brochure. So a 16GB CF card could hold over 300 frames - enough more most timelapses. Or better yet, they make a tiny 100GB harddrive, which could obviously hold all the shots you need.

The real problem is how do you do post on 7K?? :)

Poi Boy I am very jealous that you have a Hasselblad! How do you do post? Can Photoshop, for example, even handle an image that large? If you use Hasselblad's software, do you know if it can do batch processing?

I think you could turn over a 6K master for the IMAX DMR process. I really don't know much about it, though.

[jbeale]

I know the Gigapxl project uses Photoshop (maybe a custom build of it). They scan a 18" x 9" negative to just over 44000 x 22000 pixels. Yes, that's 44k ! total of 1 giga-pixel per frame.
http://www.gigapxl.org/

[Gavin Greenwalt]

You also might want to check out Sunrise Earth and talk to their producers. If you don't know what it is. It's a Discovery HD program of sunrises. I'm sure you could get some good footage in the area.


The real problem is how do you do post on 7K?? :)

Offline. :D

[Tom Lowe]

Offline, maybe. But what would I do about timecode?

I'd rather have a 6K wavelet solution with a 1K proxy for editing in my NLE. :)

[ChrisLyon]

Why would you need timecode? If you are proxy-editing without sound...

[ChrisLyon]

wow...

(gigapxl)

[Tom Lowe]

So what matches up the 1K proxy downres image files with their 7K master PSD files on the EDL? The name of the file?

I have to admit I have never offlined anything, so I don't know much about it.

[Poi Boy]

The new Hasselblad H3DII does 7K RAW stills (7200x5400) that are 50MBs a piece, according to the brochure. So a 16GB CF card could hold over 300 frames - enough more most timelapses. Or better yet, they make a tiny 100GB harddrive, which could obviously hold all the shots you need.

The real problem is how do you do post on 7K?? :)

Poi Boy I am very jealous that you have a Hasselblad! How do you do post? Can Photoshop, for example, even handle an image that large? If you use Hasselblad's software, do you know if it can do batch processing?

I think you could turn over a 6K master for the IMAX DMR process. I really don't know much about it, though.

you can batch process with the hass software and with photoshop but if you are thinking about a 45 minute project you will have an overwhelming amount of data to manage and manipulate.
I've worked with 2gig files in PS and once created a 6.5 gig file that as I recall required a special extended file format but at those sizes things move pretty slowly. I would really consider using red if the piece is going to be long. If you wanted to get crazy with it maybe do it in 3d.
Aloha
-A

[Petr Dvorak]

hmm, I guess its time for cluster

[Tom Lowe]

you can batch process with the hass software and with photoshop but if you are thinking about a 45 minute project you will have an overwhelming amount of data to manage and manipulate.
I've worked with 2gig files in PS and once created a 6.5 gig file that as I recall required a special extended file format but at those sizes things move pretty slowly. I would really consider using red if the piece is going to be long. If you wanted to get crazy with it maybe do it in 3d.
Aloha
-A

The individual files would only be 50MBs. All I would need to do is run one sequence at a time through PS (300 images). The problem comes when you try to drop a 6K file in your NLE. I guess I could make 1080p proxy files for an offline, but I don't know much about EDLs or how this would work with image sequences.

I don't know how serious I am about doing this, because the amount of work would be HUGE. :)

[planet e]

hi tom: i think you are under-estimating the time and $$...most of these big nature productions have a lot of aerial photography, which isn't cheap to produce, unless you know someone who can help you out with that and is equally committed to the project. even then, there are fuel costs, etc.

i've shot a lot of footage of and around the Four Corners area, and i think it would be a fantastic project. i've been all over some of the lesser-known canyon lands, as well as the more obvious locations. i would be very interested in working on a project like that. but i'm sure it would take a lot of time and money, more than you think.

if you can do the legwork, i'll show up with a pair of REDs and a couple of badass outdoor shooter friends of mine. start here...

http://producers.discovery.com/