[Todd Terry]

I never disagree with John when he disagrees with me (because he is invariably right in the end), but in this case I will a bit…

And in light of (and as tribute to) David Letterman’s retirement I will offer my own Top Ten list.

TOP TEN REASONS I THINK THIS VIDEO WAS 35mm AND NOT 16mm, REVERSAL, OR BETA

10. This was a big-time and big-budget production.

9. 35mm was the norm for higher-end videos then.

8. 16mm would have been an unlikely choice.

7. Reversal stock would have been an unlikely choice, I’ve never known of a production of this scope using reversal film, and it certainly doesn’t look like it.

6. Just because film has high dynamic range doesn’t mean it has to be used, and can easily be crushed in post if that’s the look that is wanted, and this definitely seemed to be a purposeful aesthetic choice.

5. 35mm can have extremely deep depth of field at high f-stops, and especially with the wide lenses that are prevelant in this video.

4. Pharrell Williams doesn’t look a day older today than he did 12 years ago. This has nothing to do with this issue, of course… but I think it’s worth noting. He has undoubtedly made a deal with the devil.

3. It just didn’t have a DigiBeta, Sony HD, or Varicam “look” to me.

2. In 2003 all music videos were destined for standard-def TV, even though there was a little bit of HD production going on then, 4:3 was still the norm. Ergo, with the exceptions of the occasional video that was produced letterboxed, all were produced 4:3, irrespective of the camera format.

AND THE NUMBER ONE REASON I THINK THIS WAS 35mm….

1. I know that it was.

I was curious enough about this to do some sleuthing (ok, I sent one email). On another non-COW cinematographic forum I have a friend, Olivier, who is a fantastic DP living in Ecuador (and he’s a stunningly-good cinematographer). His work is not seen much in the states, but it’s all over national commercial spots in South America, and strangely enough some in Canada. Well Olivier had nothing to do with this production…. but a friend of a friend, Alejandro, was an AC on it. Alejandro doesn’t remember the stock, or the lenses (other than, as expected, they were spherical), but does remember it was an Arriflex shoot, probably Arri 435 as best he can recall. In fact one of his jobs was to take the camera neg to the lab at Labocine Do Brasil after each wrap of the several-day shoot in Rio de Janeiro.

So… now we know.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Just a little nomenclature clarification… what you describe is not a lens breathing. A lens is said to “breathe” when you change the focus (such as in a rack focus) and the entire frame changes in size a tiny bit, that’s the “breathing.” Still camera lenses often breathe, which is irrelevant because when you are shooting stills it doesn’t matter if a lens breathes or not. For motion footage, though, breathing is very distracting, so cine lenses are designed in such a way that breathing is minimized.

Unfortunately, there is really just no such thing as a good true cine zoom that is also cheap. Those two things just don’t go hand in hand, and definitely not in an EF mount. I believe the only true cine zooms with an EF mount will be the ones actually made by Canon, and even their cheapest one still costs a fair bit more than a new Honda Civic. Canon’s really top-end ones are more in the new BMW price range.

I personally use a vintage Russian Foton zoom (in the rare instances that I use a zoom), which I heartily recommend to people all the time. It is one of the few affordable true cine zooms, sharp with great contrast, and they can often be found in the $1000 neighborhood… sometimes even less. Most of them are PL mount though, there’s no such thing as an EF version. There is such a thing as an EF-to-PL converter, but depending on the brand the converter alone is in the $3000-5000 range.

I don’t want to sound like a smartass about it, but my real advice to solving your problem would be “don’t zoom.” Zooms are so overused, especially by people who are just starting out or learning. Watch a current well-shot feature film, and you’ll very likely see no zooms. Zoom shots were big in the 70’s when the lenses first gained prominence, but not so much since then. When I teach workshops I tell people to purposely NOT zoom, unless it is absolutely aesthetically the right choice. Zooms are unnatural. Why? Because a zoom is the only camera move that the human eye cannot reproduce. Our eyes can pan, tilt, dolly, truck, crane, dutch… they can do anything but zoom (unless you are Six Million Dollar Man Steve Austin). Ergo, a zoom is unnatural to the brain. If you want a subject to gradually fill a frame, it’s a much more dynamic choice to dolly in to that subject rather than to zoom in, because the perspectives on all the items in the frame are constantly changing, rather than the flat push-in look of a zoom. I almost always shoot with primes, but sometimes I do mount a zoom on my camera… but that’s just to avoid changing lenses in certain situations. I’ll use the zoom in order to give myself instant focal length choices, not so I can actually zoom during a shot.

Just my two cents. Sorry to get on a soapbox, but overused and unnecessary zooms are probably my biggest pet peeve.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

It’s going to be virtually impossible to say, not knowing any production specs for that specific video, but we can make some educated guesses…

That song is from 2003 (video directed by Chris Robinson), so it was most likely 35mm film. That was well before the development of any of the digital cameras that might likely be used in the same situation today…. long before any of the RED cameras, before the Arri Alexa, even before the Panavision Genesis.

If it was shot electronically, the only real camera contender would have been Sony’s HDW-F900… but I don’t think the F900 was used there, it just doesn’t have that “look.”

So… we can assume it was 35mm film. So… to your question… which camera? No way to tell really… could have been one of the Panavision models, could have been one of the Arris, or even the MovieCam SuperAmerica. It doesn’t really matter because basically a film camera is a film camera and has very little if anything to do with the “look” of an image. That video looks the way it looks because of all ther other cinematographic choices… the particular filmstock that was used, the lenses (my guess is they were Cooke primes, but that’s just a guess, it sort of has the sharp/contrasty Cooke look), and the DP work with the very high-contrast lighting. And of course tons of color grading and finishing work in the post stage.

So, what camera? Impossible to say… if you play detective a bit (meaning Google) you might be able to find some behind-the-scenes footage or stills from the shoot, if any show the camera you’d be able to identify it that way.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

I’m not sure what you mean by “unhinged.” Can you describe that a little further?

If there is a physical problem with the lens, you definitely should get it repaired or replace it (replacement would likely be less expensive). If it is operating properly as designed and you just don’t like the way that it functions and wish it was more like a cine lens… well, there’s not much you can do about that.

I know you know this but it bears mentioning… that’s a fairly-low end inexpensive mass produced DSLR lens. I’m not knocking it (in fact I use the exact same lens sometimes with my T2i). But it is what it is and a $200 DSLR lens is just not going to function like a $20,000 cine zoom… or even a $2,000 one.

Lenses designed for still cameras are what they are… and while you can use them for motion footage, it’s not an ideal situation and it’s just not what they were made to do well. Many of them breathe pretty badly when focusing (which makes no differences for stills but it clearly evident in motion footage), still lenses have “clicks” for the f-stops whereas cine lenses do not and are continuously variable… and one of the most important difference is the focusing. With a still lens you only have to rotate the ring about one-fifth of a barrel turn to go from nearest to infinity, whereas a cine lens’ ring turns almost the entire circumference of the barrel, which allows for precise focus pulling.

Yeah, good cine lenses are not cheap… especially zooms and most especially fast zooms. The two that I want at the top of my wish list (but don’t have yet) are about $45,000 each. Pretty painful.

On the upside, lenses hold their value very well, and the really desirable ones even appreciate. We own tons of gear virtually all of which has sadly (and greatly) depreciated in value. But my set of superspeed primes is actually worth substantially more today than when I first bought them years ago.

The “you get what you pay for” theory doesn’t always apply to everything, but for lenses it usually does.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

[Mark Suszko] ” But where the sheetrock touches the floor, you should de-couple that joint with an elastomeric rubber layer”

Great point Mark makes there.

They actually make these metal strips that you can use to attach sheetrock (they go between the studs and the sheetrock) that acoustically-isolate the sheetrock. And Mark is right, the sheetrock should not actually rest on the floor (which is the way people would usually install it). At minimum chock it up with some shims before you screw it in, then pull the shims out.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Two things about that to remember, neither hard surfaces nor parallel surfaces are not your friends… anything you can do about that to deaden the room will help. If you can stand in the center of the room and clap and not hear the reflection of the clap, that’s a good goal (and easy test).

For the first year I had my company, I was a one-man operation and working out of my house. I was doing tons of VO recording, and my audio booth was literally just my living room… I’d string a long mic cable from my edit suite into the room and that’s where we’d record voiceovers. It sounded surprisingly good. Great even.

I mentioned my surprise to my audio engineer when he was visiting and he said he wasn’t surprised, noting that it was an old house so the walls were likely not perfectly parallel, I had hardwood floors largely covered by an area rug, and a fairly complex ceiling that was divided up into nine squares with very wide crown molding surrounding each square. He told me “You’ve accidently built an almost-perfect audio booth.” Which was true… I’d say almost 20 years later that the audio in our “real” booth now doesn’t sound any better than that did.

So… do whatever you can to incorporate as many soft surfaces as you can… rugs… drapes on windows (glass is super acoustically reflective, of course), items on walls, etc. If since you are sheetrocking there is any way to build out one edge of your new interior walls so that they aren’t perfectly parallel, that will help tons. Even a tiny degree of difference can kill tons of reflections.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

As Mark said, two ways of doing it… rotate the bike, or dolly the camera around it.

But which way was this done? Hmmmmm…. we’ll never know. Nah, actually we do know… in this case the bike rotated. How do we know that? Well Mark said “The look winds up the same”… which is the one tiny issue that I’ll differ with Mark on. The look is not exactly the same, and it’s that difference that lets us know the bike was rotating.

How can you tell? If the bike rotates, the lighting stays fixed in relative position to the camera. If the camera dollys around, the lighting stays fixed in relative position to the bike. In this case, the lighting was fixed to the camera position, ergo we can assume that the bike rotated. Yes, the camera could have been rotating around the bike, but, but that would mean the lighting would have been rigged to rotate around the bike as well, and it would be fairly inconceivable that someone would go to the trouble for such a cumbersome arrangement.

This could have been either motion footage, or a series of stills. I don’t know this for a fact, but I strongly suspect this was shot as individual still frames with a DSLR. It just has that look to me. If that was the case a shot was taken, the bike was rotated a small measured amount, and another was taken, and so on….

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Fairly small space, so one issue would be to prevent as much reflected/bounced light as possible.

If it were me I’d paint all walls (and ceiling, if possible) matte black.

If that’s just too cave-like for your taste, then as dark a gray as you can stand. And make sure it is an absolutely neutral gray, not skewing toward any actual color.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Yeah I figired I would need plenty of light.

Even though we use much lower light levels these days than in years’ past (I pretty much exclusively light with battery LEDs now), I still uaually keep a couple of HMIs on the truck, just in case. Hopefully that will cover us.

Thanks to all for the advice.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Thanks Rick and Gary…

Haven’t used it, but you can rent a Miro pretty cheaply, about $1500 a day (or a little more than $2K for a week), seems pretty straightforward and don’t need a Phantom tech, and it will go more than fast enough for what I need.

I appreciate the backup….

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com