lucasw's Journal: 911 Media Opening Screening Night April

911 Media Arts Center

High Dynamic Range

One thing really struck me: even something shot with a $2K 3CCD camera will look like crap if the lighting isn't there. Video cameras are especially poor with dynamic range on skin tones, though perhaps this is not completely true: skin tones are more important subjectively than any other part of the image in most cases so I would scrutinize the quality there to a greater degree. Some kind of rear or side highlight is essential in every shot, or the actors' faces will look like a pink-orange mush with no detail at all. The other day I taped a friend's band with a five-year-old 8mm video camera, and the light was so good that most the video looks better than a lot of the prosumer DV stuff I've seen.

Lighting is everything (repeat five-hundred times). Pacing and audio are pretty important too, though...

However, I recall a video from the Bumbershoot One-Reel film festival that was really dark and murky, but the acting and rest of the presentation was so good that it really worked in a kind of cinema verite way.

(Are there any 12-16-bits per channel video cameras yet? The standard formats may not support that presently, but a standard 8-bit format could be converted in post production)

The Works

There were too many videos this night to go over them all or remember titles or other details.

One video approached a professional quality (a humorous piece involving a skinny caucasian guy is interviewing for the position of Yakuza g-man), but the people behind it looked like they had spent the money and afforded it quite easily. Well and good, but it's always more impressive (especially at this venue) to see something cool done with essentially no expenditure by young non-professionals- see next paragraph.

A couple videos came from a crew that did a take on "Night of the Living Dead" and some kind of videogame-esque action shooter (thought that one suffered from very slow camerawork and editting unbefitting an action piece). It seemed like the stuff I used to do way back when- emphasis on having fun with little self-conscious "We are independent film makers, and are extremely hip with black spiked hair and thick black square framed glasses" (see the director portrayed in Mulholland Drive- guys that look exactly like that and try to make movies are a dime a dozen).

One video started out as a light piece about a guy making himself a drink and then getting quite drunk- and turning dark as the patheticness of drinking alone and falling down drunk sinks in. But the best part was the exquisite sound- ice cubes clinking into a metal bowl on a wooden table, water glub-glubbing into a blender, etc. It was entirely unintentional (the people who had made it barely acknowledged this observation when I mentioned it later), but the most of the other works all paled aurally (is that right?) in comparison. Next time I do something, I may try out doing the foley thing and inserting sound effects afterwards, though that may be difficult if the natural audio is still necessary.