Meditations on Monochrome

Should we be defaulting to colour? ☛ During the first film on which I worked, I got chatting to an old-timer in the camera department who bemoaned the lack of black-and-white films being shot. “You’ve got to have a reason to shoot in colour,” he argued. I should add that this was in the ’90s […]

PRODUCT REVIEW G-Drive mobile SSD Rugged

As camera resolutions improve and file sizes increase, filmmakers need more and bigger hard drives. But we have a variety of requirements of a device to store our media, for example: It needs to have the capacity to hold a lot of very large files. It needs to have a fast read speed, so […]

“One for Lloyds”?

How many takes to shoot ☛ “One for Lloyds…” is a phrase often heard on movie sets in the UK. It means shooting a second take, even if take one was perfect; y’know, just in case. Lloyds is the centre of the British insurance market – I believe their policies once demanded that a minimum of […]

Does your lens policy need renewing?

Which lens to use? ☛ The internet is full of advice about which lens is the sharpest or the fastest or the best value for money. Less is said, however, about which focal length to use and when; most people simply adjust the zoom until the shot feels right. A valid approach if time is […]

Signal to Noise

How filmmakers throw emphasis on what’s essential ☛ Cinema is one of the most naturalistic of the arts: it’s often shot in the real world and we expect movie characters to behave pretty much as people do in reality. This naturalism can make our stories all the more compelling; the audience love to come out […]

Unleashing the Titan

A sneak peek at Red’s new super-camera ☛ Following the release of Red’s ground-breaking Epic Dragon camera earlier this month, I decided to talk to someone from the company to see if I could get an insight into what might be coming next from this most revolutionary of camera companies. I pitched up at their […]

Snakes, funerals and Clint Eastwood

Deciding on the shape of the frame ☛ Last time I wrote about the shape of movies in terms of story; today I want to discuss a different sort of shape: that of the screen itself. Aspect ratio. Not long ago, Vincent Laforet brought to my attention a very good video examining the history of […]

Anyone for revolution?

Whatever happened to the DSLR Spring? ☛ 1960: a film called Breathless was released that revolutionised cinema. It was shot on 16mm film, a technology previously only used for newsreels. The French New Wave that followed inspired the counter-culture movies of the next decade, and left a mark still visible in the films we make […]

High Frames Drifter

Is the truth any truer at 48 frames per second? ☛ Like virtually everyone else in the film blogosphere, I’ve been to see The Hobbit recently in its High Frame Rate (HFR) presentation and, like everyone else, I feel drawn to offer my assessment of the new technology, especially since it raises some important questions […]

Who shot film?

A day in the death of 35mm ☛ Last month Fujifilm, one of the last two manufacturers of 35mm negative for motion pictures, announced that it would cease production of its film stocks. The move was widely heralded as one of the final nails in the coffin for movies being shot on film. Purists greeted […]