For the debut testing of my 35mm DOF adapter, I’m writing up a short 3 or so minute long film called “The Geek Sacrifice.” In my insanely twisted view of the world, the film will be about an obsessed young geek who has devoted all his time into finding the secret on how to take over the world. He has traveled to all four corners of the world gathering holy technical relics. His lab clothing is adorned with ancient integrated circuit jewelry, and his neck is wrapped in necklaces made from network cables. He now must use the relics to release the secret into the holy golden thumbdrive. Watch him as he sets up the ritual fire and reads from the Geek Bible. Will he succeed? Will he gain world domination? Stay tuned for more…
RED Digital Cinema, the makers of the famous RED One digital camcorder, announced back at this year’s NAB show that they intended to make a camcorder named “Scarlet” with 3k resolution using Red’s new 2/3-inch Mysterium X sensor and shooting from 1-120fps for somewhere around the $3000 mark. However, they just recently announced that the Scarlet is in the process of a major design change so everything is up in the air. But, if they keep these basic specs, it will truly make the best camcorder for the price. It’ll blow away much of the competition, and I’d love to get my hands on one when they release it next year. Of course, I could really use one of them fancy Mac Pros with 8 cores to process that kind of HD video.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m planning on using an old Canon FD lens I have for the 35mm depth of field adapter I’m building. However, I’d like to talk a bit more about these lenses, and how they can be quite useful for DOF adapters. Canon FD lenses were mostly built back in the 1970′s before auto-focus and auto-exposure were really developed. So, pretty much every Canon FD lens allows complete manual control over both focus and exposure. This is really nice as newer style lenses with electronic controls can be an issue as you won’t be able to do much without manual control (the camcorder’s lens will be focused on the ground glass, and you should not be adjusting exposure from the camcorder). The other nice thing about these lenses is the fact that they are old and incompatible with current Canon DSLRs which, in combination, keeps the price low when buying them on eBay. I picked up a really nice 50mm f1.4 lens for about $50 this week. Comparable Canon EF lenses are much, much more expensive.
Now, when following Daniel’s 35mm Adapter tutorial, you will need to change a few things. You will need to get a Canon EF to FD adapter to fit on the end of the cheap extension tube. Look for one without the glass element as you won’t be needing that part. You will also need to change the distance between where the ground glass sits in the tube and the edge of the back of the lens. Canon FD lenses have shorter flange focal distances than their Canon EF relatives. You need to set it back 42mm instead of 44mm. Remember to also account for the EF to FD adapter.
So, you’re shooting a futuristic short film, and you want to create balls of plasma to shoot out of a plasma rifle. How do you do it? Most productions nowadays use digital effects to create the plasma ball. But that can be a tough thing to do as a guerrilla filmmaker. So here’s my really simple mechanical solution to this problem: Glowing Night Balls. You get a batch of them, fasten up a small air canon prop that will look like the plasma rifle, and shoot them around. For added visual effects, you can always composite some shots of arcing electricity over the top of the flying night ball to give it that nice scifi look. And the great part of this is that you don’t need to create a digital effect and then have to make it look realistic, which is really the tough part.
Alright, so you’re trying to film a scene that has some depth to it, like a fairly distant background with some stuff in the foreground. However, you really don’t want that background to be shown in the scene as it’s too busy and doesn’t help portray your message. So you try just to focus your digital camcorder on the foreground hoping the background will be blurred out. But, to your horror, you find everything is still in focus even if you zoom in on just the foreground.
This effect is really all to common in lower end digital camcorders (actually even low end prosumer models have issues with this). The problem is caused by the physical size, not pixels, of the CCD chip inside the camcorder. The larger the CCD, the greater your ability to shorten the depth of field which will blur out anything not in focus. This is why in movies you see this great shallow depth of field because either they’re using really expensive, and I mean expensive, digital camcorders or 35mm movie cameras. The 35mm movie cameras obviously use 35mm film which has a much larger surface area that the picture is captured on compared to cheaper digital camcorders’ CCD.
However, there is a fix for this, and it doesn’t even involve ripping apart your $2000 camcorder to replace the CCD. You can build an adapter that allows you to take lenses from 35mm SLR still cameras and attach it to your camcorder. There’s a couple of different styles documented around the internet, but they all are based on this basic principle. You take the 35mm lens, set it the proper distance from a ground glass, and then focus your camcorder onto the picture displayed on the ground glass.
The style I’ll be building is documented at Daniel’s 35mm Adapter site. I’m going for the static version, as my Canon GL2 camcorder isn’t HD. So far, I got an old Canon FD lens, an achromatic lens to allow my camcorder to focus on the ground glass, a Nikon ground glass, and some parts from Daniel’s site to hold it all together. Keep an eye out for further updates on this project as I get the rest of the parts.
Microsoft decided to hire Jerry Seinfeld to do a batch of television commercials for Windows Vista. Here’s the first of the series:
The commercial shows Jerry Seinfeld in a shopping mall going past a “Shoe Circus” and spotting Bill Gates in the store. After meeting with him in the store, they talk about the shoe Gates is trying on and about wearing clothes in the shower. Once done with that, Gates buys the shoes and heads out the store with Seinfeld. Now finally in the parking lot, Seinfeld asks Gates if Microsoft is going to come out with a computer that was like ‘cake.’ Then at the end, the words “The Future” are displayed followed by “Delicious” before the Windows Vista logo.
Now here comes my critique as both a filmmaker and a television commercial producer (and probably quite biased as I’m not a MS fan and a co-owner of an independent shoe store). The commercial has some major issues concerning its message. Seinfeld, being who he is, was used to draw the audience to the plot as he’s well known. Once the audience takes notice, Gates is shown. Gates is synonymous with Microsoft so the audience is expecting a message about something to do with MS. Unfortunately, there’s a long and cumbersome story line to go through before a single thing about computers is even mentioned. This story line about the shoe store and the shoes is drawn on too long making the audience think that somehow their previous assumption was wrong and that this commercial was actually about the shoes. Then as the plot finally gets to talking about computers, nothing is mentioned about any actual product, just Seinfeld’s wish to have computers that are edible. And once his questioned is finally answered, we get to the final few scenes with the Windows Vista logo being shown for only a few seconds. By that point, any person watching this commercial is probably confused as to what the commercial was about.
What needed to be done was to edit the commercial down to at most a one minute slot, removing much of the babel at the shoe store. Also, mentioning a real product instead of a conceptual one may help get a stronger message across. And maybe having a voice over at the end with the words and logo will help garner attention from the part of the audience that may not be visually focused on the TV at the time of airing.