Film Production Writer Worth Watching

Charles Haine

There are a lot of sources out there about filmmaking equipment, technique, processes, etc.  Some are very good, some are slightly veiled product plugs and many are mediocre. I wanted to point out an excellent new resource on the No Film School site, Charles Haine. 

Here are a few sample articles:

Sony Takes Aim at RED with X-OCN

Casio Thinks Outside The Frame with New 360° Camera

NVIDIA Goes for Live Streaming VR with the Quadro P6000

To Be A Great Cinematographer, You've Got To Be An Inventor (I make a guest appearance with a photo of me gleefully operating a Mole Richardson Carbon Arc lamp in the article.  The only time my name will appear on the same page as Gregg Toland and Vittorio Storaro, for that I will be eternally grateful.)

Blackmagic Brings DIY Tech into Camera Control With New Arduino Shield 3G-SDI

Here Are the Cameras Used By the 2016 Best Cinematography Emmy Nominees

What's the ISO of Your Eye?

He is a reliable resource, with an encyclopedic knowledge of technology, technique, history and creativity.  I initially met him in a Cinematography class that he taught at Los Angeles City College. He was always pushing his students, many people will remember the RED vs. 35mm shoot-out  we did under his direction way back 2008. Yep, he had a City College class doing that, back then.

Besides being a teacher, he's an excellent cinematographer, colorist and also co-founded Dirty Robber Production and Coyote Post in LA. Since that class I've worked with him and am happy to call him a friend.  I do not know where he gets the energy to do everything he does and still stay on top of what's going on out there in the bigger world of technology and equipment. I'd expect an eclectic stream of information from him.

Mole Richardson  Carbon Arc Putting Me in a Happy Place

Old Friends

Yesterday I also got to spend time with some old friends....

Lighting Education-Mole Richardson

I have been lucky enough to have spent quite a bit of time at Mole Richardson, assisting at lighting classes and helping light special events such as film and camera tests, ASC/SOC events, etc.  Larry Parker has been doing an amazing job at educating film students as to how to properly do power distribution and pretty much all elements of lighting a motion picture, all for free, for years.   And the Mole Richardson lights are real things of beauty: built to last three lifetimes.  There is a whole generation of skilled electricians and gaffers out there who have cut their teeth at the Mole Stage.

They have now started to share some of that knowledge online:



I can't wait for the video on operating a carbon arc, my favorite lamp.

Old and New

My New Year's resolution is to spend less time running to keep up with technology and finding more time to creatively explore the technologies to which I already have access.  Speaking of old technology, I finally got to operate a carbon arc lamp recently (thank you, Corwin Nunes at Mole Richardson).  The light that they generate is incredible.  It wraps around faces beautifully and creates incredible eye highlights, little teeny diamonds.   No creepy HMI spectral discontinuities, just pure lighting goodness.  Sigh. 

I also got to go to screen dailies for a project that I worked on that was shot in 35mm on the new Fuji Vivid Eterna 500.  It is a quite nice stock. It's color reproduction struck me as a little more subdued than with the Vision 3, with very subtle flesh tone gradations, especially to black.  Word that I heard is that Fuji is committed to film (it is a very small part of their overall business) for the long-term.  It's nice to remind yourself of the subtle joys of "analog" now and then.

Next week I will be color grading my first 5D Mark II project (the same camera that took this still).  I'm very curious as to how well it will hold up.

Molepar Love

I bought a couple of Molepars on Satan eBay. They arrived rusted and damaged. I should know better, the one camera angle that something isn't photographed from is the one angle that you really need to see. So, my OCD kicked in and I sanded them down and refurbished them. Fortunately, they were pretty cheap.

Molepars are one of those lights that I think everyone who owns any lights at all should have, especially low-budget filmmakers. They kick out one heck of a lot of light for a 1K (Par 64 globes) and are light, compact and incredibly flexible. Need to light up a building or trees at night? How about a fixture to give a decent-sized room your base exposure (by bouncing off the ceiling or a bounce)? They are great for any application where you just need a lot of light and want to plug into a household circuit (2 units per 20 amp circuit). The key to using them, as with any other fixture, is how you control the light. You can also use a variety of globes in them, from extra narrow to wide beam as well as daylight balanced dichroic.

They are also not expensive units. I have seen them new online for about $350/unit (without globes). And a rental will run about $14/day. They will also last a lifetime because they are made by Mole Richardson. The one unit I bought dates from the mid-1960's (number 493) and now looks/functions like new (and when I got it, it looked like it had been used as a rental for 40 years). The paint color is Mole Maroon and is available directly from Mole Richardson as an air dried spray paint. They also sell individual parts for all of their lamps at a reasonable cost.