#comfortably lost

[bogsleep]

[comfortablylostofficial]

Touring the Chilean Atacama Desert

Simultaneously oppressive, terrifying, beautiful and spectacular. Aside from the lush, rugged regions to the south of Santiago, Chile is generally a harsh, barren country. We knew this before we arrived. Karl had spent unknown hours scoring virtual maps marking out potential surf breaks and spots to camp for the night. Despite all this preliminary research and experience in the harsh deserts of…

View On WordPress

[ethan22crane]

What do I want from great sci-fi? Accelerando by Charles Stross

If I have a gripe with many sci-fi books, it is that whilst they may be full of good ideas, these often come and the expense of plotting and style. And with whole new worlds to describe there is the additional problem of too much exposition, and the result is a clunky story.

But in Accelerando, Charles Stross seems to have avoid all of this. How he has managed to is almost unimaginable, given that the story covers the next eight decades of human history, with each new decade signifying some quantum leap in technological development. (The last sci-fi I read which maintained such a consistent expansion of ideas was Alfred Bester's 1960's classic The Stars My Destination.) In Accelerando humans become post-human and resurrect the dead; lobsters upload their minds and fight for their rights as legal entities; a defaulting corporate financial instrument masquerades as a 2 metre slug; brain-enhanced teenagers run a colony responsible for the mining of Jupiter's moons.

And somehow Stross manages to drip-feed all the information the reader needs without the story ever feeling clunky – and for me achieves the aim of all great sci-fi, to implant an idea in the reader's mind of how the world could be, with just enough information that the reader imagines the possible futures for themselves. Ideas ping past that are enough material for a whole novel, but Stross is not content to wring each idea boringly dry, he's too busy moving on to the next one.

At times I had the unusual sensation that whilst I did not understand the meaning of n invented word or concept, I understood enough to not lose the thread of the story. And this was a greater pleasure, that of being comfortably lost. (I like the idea of comfortably lost on long walks.)

I'd like to say I look forward to the sci-fi that Charles Stross writes next – but now that he has covered the future of human history in such an epic manner I'm not sure what he has left to write about.

[firelotusfilm]

Just Don't Call It Film

In the course of the last week, I read two articles that came together in my mind into one discussion; a discussion that I have had with other movie professionals over the last couple of years, and that is the impact of digital on movies.

The two articles are Michael Phillip's Out of the Shadows, Cinematographer's Engage in Debate (http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/movies/138064878.html) and Changing Science of Movie-ology by Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/movies/j-hoberman-talks-about-village-voice-and-film-culture.html).  On the surface, they deal with different topics, the former deals with the standard film vs. digital debate, the latter with the Village Voice dropping the position of film critic and, with it, the long-time person who held that position, J. Hoberman.

Together, though, the two articles combine to deal with what I consider a sea-shift in what I would like to call the Cinema Culture.  That is what will be the focus of this blog.

The digital vs. film argument has been going on for some time, and in an often heated manner.  If you do any research on the issue, it will not be long before you are confronted with test footage of the same scene shot on a digital camera and on a 35mm camera, and, depending on the bias of the author, it will either be meant to show you conclusively that digital is just as good as film, or that it is not.

Inevitably, the same article will bombard you with technical jargon and "specs" to prove its case.

We will have lots of guest blogs here that address the technical aspect of this debate, but for the moment, I want to move beyond that to the impact that digital is having on Cinema Culture.

I was directed to the article on the "death of shadows" from another filmmaking blog - I'm sorry I cannot recall which one here.  In that article, Jeff Cronenweth, the talented cinematographer who shot the last two David Fincher movies, The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, " defied the average moviegoer to detect a loss of detail and atmosphere in either of Fincher's most recent projects."

Cronenweth here slips into an point often heard on set about the "average moviegoer" and what they can and cannot detect.  I would offer that while the average moviegoer may not be able to offer terms such as depth of field or texture or grain, they do know on an intuitive level the difference between different levels of cinematography.  If this were not true, one would need an art history background to get anything from a museum trip; yet this is certainly not the case.

This is not to suggest that DPs (you will forgive me if I now revert to the shorter term for Directors of Photography - not disrespect intended, its just less typing) who shoot on digital are less talented.  I have worked with a number of cinematographers in the last few years who did amazing things with a digital cameras, and they no doubt would have done wonderful things on 35mm. 

I recently worked as post production supervisor on a movie shot on the 7D, certainly not the top-end digital camera,  in Cambodia by a veteran Vietnamese DP, and it looks amazing.  Conversely, did two shorts within the course of a year that shot on anamorphic lenses, superior lenses that add a widescreen quality.  On one movie, they made a huge difference, on the other, none at all, the difference being a reflection of the skill of the respective DPs.  Indeed, on the one that did not look as good, the DP had a much larger crew and equipment package.  Toys are only as good as your skill level at playing with them.

Cronenweth goes on to make this argument:

"there's a naive notion that because digital is faster, it's easier to do and you can settle for available light and it all becomes reality TV. But that's not the case at all. You still have the photographic principles that apply to film across the last century."

Cronenweth is referring to the effort put forth by top DPS.  In doing so, I would argue that he misses a basic component of human nature.

When shooting on 35mm, if you don't have lighting skills, you will get a poor, or in some cases, muddled image.  Veteran 35mm DPs will warn you not to make decisions on lighting based on a monitor.  In digital, this is not the case.  You can, indeed, get an acceptable image using available light, or at least, not much more.

To combat the problem noted above, weaker DPs in the film era used what we used to call "porn lighting".  The idea was to throw as much lighting at the subject as possible to make sure you could see what was happening, which was certainly more important in porn than the quality of cinematography.

Cronenweth may be right in what he says about his efforts, but there is no doubt that  the advent of digital cameras has led to many more movies where the cinematography is what I will now call "sit-com" quality, the modern-day version of porn lighting.  Get the subject lit and make 'em laugh.  If you need to see the difference even between "sit-com" lighting and dramas, just watch an episode of Seinfeld and then an episode of Criminal Minds.  You won't need a degree from NYU to tell the difference.

This drop in quality is discussed in the article on Hoberman, where critic Manohla Dargis says, "These days, by contrast, there seem to be five times the number of movies opening and quickly leaving, and also five times the dreck."

Dargis is talking about major, released movies, mostly done on reasonable budgets.  I see more of the battle in the trenches, on lower budget indies, which has been my  territory for about 25 years.

The "shadows" article begins:

"It's the death of shadows!" a gaffer, i.e., movie-set electrician, said to a friend of mine. He was decrying how the digital filmmaking revolution had compromised the image quality (not to mention his own freelance employment) in feature filmmaking.

Indeed, this is where the two worlds come together.  Although James Cameron proved with movies like Avatar that it is just as possible to run up your budget no matter what cameras you are using, on the micro level, digital has affected movie budgets.

Now, you are talking my language, because as line producer, I am the one responsible for the budget, and I am the one having the discussion about budget often at the fund-raising stage.  The advent of digital cameras has made it possible to make movies for less money, and if it's possible to shoot for less money, that is what investors will want to do.

That drop in budget will not just be reflected in the camera department, or the lighting department.  Once they are spending less on those things, why not spend less on art direction and make-up as well?  Why stop there?  Since it is possible to shoot on digital with less skill, why pay so much for the DP, or the gaffer?  Of course, this works its way down to every level.

You say that one thing should have nothing to do with the other, that investors should understand that the talent required to produce a quality product is still the same.  You are correct, but that is not the reality of the industry.  They can show you movies that are basically shot point-and-click that make money.

Hoberman puts the bigger question into perspective:

Over the past 15 years the photographic basis of the medium has been eroded by digital image making, the traditional delivery system is changing, not just for cinema but for criticism, the audience is dwarfed by the audience for video games, and yet great things continue to be made. 

Even with his optimistic final assessment, one I would agree with (see my reference to Comfortably Lost), and the inevitable truth that technology never goes backwards, the first part of this quote is a matter of fact; the medium has been eroded by digital image making.

Hoberman's second point about the traditional delivery system is also important.  Even those movies shot on film are transferred to digital in post, and, more and more, distributed digitally and not on film reels.  Add to this advance in technology that more of us are watching movies on smaller screens, and the impact on Cinema Culture is devastating.

The hope and likelihood is that digital quality will continue to improve; the fear is that 35mm film will become obsolete.  For all the wonderful things digital can do, something beautiful will be lost if 35 mm becomes obsolete.

Michael Phillips' article on the cinematography debate ends likes this:

As film gives way fully to digital, moviegoers are learning -- however subconsciously -- that filmmaking is as it ever was. Movies can look any way their makers want them to look. The look affects our emotional and intellectual engagement. But I hope digital cameras continue their rapid evolution. It may be Fincher's preferred, sickly, unsettling palette, but even a cinematographer as craftsmanly as Cronenweth sometimes has a hard time preventing the digital image from fuzzing out, or carrying that nearly imperceptible clinical edge. You notice more the second time through with "Dragon Tattoo," although most of the picture does look terrific (whatever one thinks of seeing another version of "Dragon Tattoo").

My fear goes further, that while we subconsciously understand quality, we will subliminally start to accept a lower quality.  As movies become just part of the entertainment spectrum with video games and web series shot for nothing, will the importance of Cinema and it's culture diminish?  Will the NY Times eventually replace it's film critic with a generic entertainment critic that covers all of media, and that does not put one above the others?  Will we accept watching movies on our Wii or tablet as the norm?

It's fine that digital will generate great movies - just don't call it film.