03.27.13 |
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A super cut of Steven Soderbergh’s work as cinematographer throughout his films. Almost everyone knows Soderbergh as the indie breakthrough that’s made many very well constructed films of the past two decades, from Traffic to the Oceans Eleven series. Yet many forget he often serves as DP on his own films under a Peter Andrews pseudonym. There’s a certain aesthetic look of his that has slightly changed over the years; in more recent years he has favored very shallow focus, tighter closeups and less camera movement.
03.08.13 |
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Really gorgeous ten minute supercut of some of the best Steadicam shots over the past forty years. As expected, Scorcese and Kubrick films are well represented here.
02.19.13 |
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I’m not a filmmaker, nor do I have any intention of starting down that path, but I found these series of videos from lightsfilmschool.com pretty fascinating. The first video breaks down the 180 degree rule, a key guideline with two character film scenes. The second looks at various distances to shoot characters, introducing some terminology and motivations behind each distance.
02.18.13 |
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Great series of images from Bond’s latest spawned from this Reddit thread. I’m rooting for Deakins, the look of that film honestly is at least half the reason I’d place it in my top five Bond films of all time.
01.25.13 |
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Film Crit Hulk:
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BUT IN ALL THE PRESS THAT HE GOT TO DO FOR THE FILM, THERE WAS SOMEONE HE REFERENCED TIME AND TIME AGAIN, AND INSTANTLY HULK SAW THE ENTIRE THROUGHLINE.
HOOPER IS OBSESSED WITH KUBRICK.
AND THEN IT ALL MADE SENSE…
HOOPER DOESN’T KNOW FUCK ALL ABOUT WHAT KUBRICK WAS ACTUALLY DOING.
01.22.13 |
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Really solid, deep analysis of PT Anderson by Kevin B. Lee over at BFI. You can see a steady change in Anderson’s direction: early works (e.g. Hard Eight, Boogie Nights) tend to be far more kinetic and Scorcese-like, while later films (There Will Be Blood) use the Steadicam in a more restrained fashion.
01.20.13 |
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Cool breakdown at BoxOfficeQuant by stat major Edmund Helmer on what colors dominate modern film trailers.
10.02.12 |
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A great image collection of the Wong Kar-Wai great has been compiled over at The Criterion Collection‘s site. Can DP Chrisopher Doyle do no wrong?
09.10.12 |
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Excellent extended interview between Indiewire‘s Peter Labuza and Michael Slovis, director of photography for Breaking Bad. The show is already very cinematic with a film-like look, but this little exchange was a surprise:
[Show creator Vince Gilligan] said, “If you want to know where I’m coming from, and where my sensibilities lie, you should watch ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,'” which I’m incredibly familiar with and love as well.
Vince loves that movie so much that he and I, between seasons three and four, made a pitch to Sony and AMC to shoot the series in widescreen like a Leone movie, in 2.35 or what would be called Cinemascope. We wanted to do the whole series in that size frame. The two of us were arguing, saying, “If you want to be noticed, if you want people to see what’s going on, we’ll be the first! Everybody will see!” But they didn’t let us do it.
Breaking Bad in 2.35? The implications of that on TV would have been huge.
09.04.12 |
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David Fincher, interviewed by Art of the Title:
I was eight years old and I saw a documentary on the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid…It showed the entire company with all these rental horses and moving trailers to shoot a scene on top of a train. They would hire somebody who looked like Robert Redford to jump onto the train. It never occurred to me that there were hours between each of these shots. The actual circus of it was invisible, as it should be, but in seeing that I became obsessed with the idea of “How?” It was the ultimate magic trick. The notion that 24 still photographs are shown in such quick succession that movement is imparted from it — wow! And I thought that there would never be anything that would be as interesting as that to do with the rest of my life.
Read the whole interview, it’s great. Art of the Title also delivers their usual top notch video excerpts alongside the article text.