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10-23-2007, 11:55 AM
I cannot believe they would cast Wahlberg in place of Gosling. He was the worst part about The Departed, and Planet of The Apes had better performances from the monkeys. From what I know of the role, it requires someone to actually emote. Too bad -it had the opportunity to be a good drama.
10-23-2007, 12:26 PM
I say wordOriginally Posted by Darwin
10-23-2007, 01:08 PM
Sure, film is dying -- just like all of us are dying...
It's sort of a meaningless point to make, since film is not dead today and it won't be dead tomorrow, nor two or three years from now, and since I make movies in the here and now, not in the future, it's irrelevent whether film will be gone by the next decade. And when it's gone, I'll make movies with whatever is currently being used.
3-strip Technicolor photography was obsolete in 1955, five years after Kodak introduced monopack Eastmancolor. Does history deride those features shot on 3-strip Technicolor in the period from 1950 to 1955 because 3-strip was on its way out? Don't we cherish the movies shot in b&w? Shot in 65mm like "Lawrence of Arabia"? In the long term, there is no real "reward" for being an early adopter.
I was one of the first people to shoot a feature on the F900. So what? It's a minor historical footnote.
If you want this forum to be taken seriously, lay-off on the silly "film is dead" posts, please.
10-23-2007, 01:53 PM
i love you david mullen.
10-23-2007, 01:55 PM
Film is dead. There I said it.(to me, anyway)
10-23-2007, 02:03 PM
I guess the idea David, is that film, or rather 35mm 'film quality', is now accessible to people at a much cheaper rate than before, so the quality of the stories will now start to be that much more important, since one of the features of the notion of a high quality film, the literal image quality, is no longer the obstacle it once was. (not trying to condescend, just reiterating the point)
An industry that makes tripe will only survive as long as everyone is only watching tripe, however, once there is more to watch than tripe, and I'm sure that Red will help many storytellers who simply haven't yet had the chance push their stories to the forefront, and those stories are widely available and accessible (the internet), than the whole art and commerciality of filmmaking may well change. This is the potential possiblilty that Red offers to many filmakers of all ages, especially the young.
And with all due respect, this switch is very different from changing and evolving film stocks, since the factor of price never really changed before. It was always really bloody expensive. So this, simply, is an evolution, and as some call it, a revolution, if we the filmmakers choose to embrace it as such.
The occasional cheer for potential revolution will nary a forum destroy nor make look stupid. It's healthy to debate and scream once in a while. Relax and enjoy.
10-23-2007, 03:55 PM
Why does film have to die for RED to be successful? Why does the death of film have to bring any "cheer" to some people's hearts?
Film is not your enemy. It's not the gatekeeper stopping you from entering the world of moviemaking or having a success in Hollywood. You're free to shoot on the RED camera now so what difference does it make to you if someone else is free to shoot with a film camera?
Celebrate a new technology that enables you to do good work, certainly.
But don't bash an old technology used by cinematic artists that has given us over 100 years of pleasure from watching movies. If any of you listed the greatest all-time cinematic images ever made, the most stirring, inspirational, visually beautiful, whatever, the majority of them would be film images. So even if the medium is passing into history, show a little respect for the old lady.
10-23-2007, 04:02 PM
Red will increase, not reduce, the amount of tripe because the cost of entry gets lowered for everyone, not just the relatively few and far between people w/talent and skill. Will there be some diamonds in the rough out there as well? Of course, just like there are sometimes very good things buried in the mounds of crap on YouTube. The stories might be widely available and accessible, but so are everyone else's so how do you get people to find yours? There are something like 60,000 videos a day uploaded to YouTube. That's a lot of room to get lost in the shuffle.
RED is a piece to the puzzle, but it's not a magic wand. I think in a year or two (after all the initial orders have been filled for a while) it will be interesting to see how many used REDs are on the market. I don't think that pro's who know what they need, and don't need, will be putting their RED's up for sale, but I think a lot of the people whose business model was a wing and a prayer, and a RED might be rethinking their investment.
-A
10-23-2007, 04:11 PM
Well said.
10-23-2007, 04:12 PM
As for the significance of this transition from film to digital origination, it is both fundamental and yet, by its nature of trying to imitate and then replace the standard 35mm format, it is generally going by unnoticed by most people.
This is why I make the comparison between 3-strip Technicolor and monopack Eastmancolor -- very different ways of capturing color information onto film. Yet for most people, color is color.
Look at the transition from analog to digital sound in movie production -- that's a pretty fundamental difference too, yet are sound movies radically different now that all the sound work is done digitally? Do you really think about how some movie from the 1991 was recorded on a Nagra but one from 2001 was recorded on a DAT, and one today is recorded onto a hard drive?
It's what could be thought of as an "invisible" revolution, a fundamental change that is intended to go unnoticed by the moviegoing public. For the most part, the transition to digital cinematography will be similar because the cameras are getting closer and closer to the 35mm gold standard. If all movies tomorrow were only shot on consumer mini-DV, that would be a change that a lot of people would notice. But if all movies tomorrow were shot on the RED camera, I think a lot of audiences would not notice the change. So that's simultaneously significant, revolutionary, yet it's also meant to be a smooth invisible transition that moviegoers aren't supposed to notice.
Sure, the price-to-quality ratio is a major difference that RED is bringing about that separates it from its competitors. And that will have an impact on the industry in various ways.
If film is personally dead to some of you, that's fine with me. I don't have a problem with that. But as far as film in general being dead, that's premature to say the least. I personally shot over 1 million feet of the stuff last year, and I'm just one DP out of thousands. That's a lot of film being shot every day around the world.
Truth is that after a period of shooting a lot of indie features in HD, I've been shooting more film lately and less digital. I'm sure that's a factor of the budgets climbing on my shoots, but from my perspective, it's not a clear-cut case of digital stomping over film as the medium of choice among filmmakers. The transition will be slower than many of you suggest, though it will also not be steady -- there will probably be a rapid switchover in several years when a good tipping-over point is reached.
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