Making mistakes so you don't have to

So here’s the latest batch of dailies, suffering from some sketchy focus, some sketchy low light, but all in all an interesting set, and a nice counterpoint to our last set.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN – WEEK 6 DAILIES from Robin Schmidt on Vimeo.

7d or 5d?

I’ve been getting this a lot recently: ‘Bollocks I’ve bought a 7D, I wish I’d bought a 5D, but it was too expensive and now it’s bothering me because I know the 5D has to be better doesn’t it, but I shoot mainly video so what do I do, what do I do?’

Damn good question. Many people, most eloquently Philip Bloom have tried to rationalise the decision for you in their own way and at least give you a shot of making a decision you’re happy with. I’ve been fortunate to spend a really intense period working with both cameras over the last six months, pouring over the image, analysing how different lenses affect the image, being incredibly self-critical to that end and I now feel qualified to lob my ten cents worth into the mix. Definitely worth reading Bloom’s article about the different cameras because he lays out the technical differences and makes it abundantly clear exactly what you’re getting with the different units.

I won’t be doing that. I’ve nicked his frame size comparison because it gives you a very quick idea of why various cameras perform better.

You’ve probably all seen this comparison a hundred times already but it never gets boring. To imagine I used to be content as a kitten with the 1/2 inch chip in an EX1 (I remember being staggered by how good it looked) is it any wonder that an APS-C sensor can be as beguiling as it is. Bring in the full frame sensor of the 5D or the D3S and suddenly you’re looking at just an absurd leap in the amount of information it’s sucking in.

I bought a 7D, I bought it because it was cheaper, it seemed better set up for video, which was my primary usage and it just seemed the right choice at the time. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, I had a budget for a camera and before I knew it I’d spent four times what I’d budgeted for. Oops. I’ve shot on nothing but the 5D for the last three months, and I now have a conclusion to offer. This is not based on tech specs, or comparison charts, or financial considerations, it’s based purely on an emotional response. The 7D is fantastic and I will never regret purchasing it. I enjoy how rugged it is and, coupled with my Sigma 30mm f1.4 it’s absolute dynamite. There was a short period when I was shooting with the Marvels Cine profile doing backgammon and my short dance film when I shocked myself with how pretty it was. But that’s where it ends, an infatuation. No more than that.

I am completely in love with the 5D. Like I said, it is completely irrational and based on emotion, but that’s just the way it is.

Sony F35

For me, the 5D shits all over the 7D in so many ways it’s not fair to even compare them. I watch my rushes from the 7D and they’ve always ever so slightly worried me. I’m constantly making the frame smaller so they look better and I can kid myself that everything’s okay. (It’s quite possible that I have a sub-par unit, that can happen and I’ve not used enough other 7Ds to be able to make a comparison.) I watch my rushes from the 5D and I giggle. It’s pathetic. I literally giggle and coo at how phenomenal it looks. I blow them up to the full size of my crappy Asus 26 inch monitors and they hold up. I shoot stills on my 7D and they’re very decent indeed. I shoot stills on the 5D and they’re just staggering. My much-maligned 24-70L that doesn’t really seem to work as well as you’d hope on the 7D (especially for video), just seems to be so much more in tune with the sensor and the electronics on the 5D. I’m not a techie and couldn’t give you a specific reason why this is. In Filmmaker Magazine this month Roberto Quezada-Dardon writes an overview of the DSLR landscape with anecdotes from DOP Brian Reynolds stating that the 7D cuts seamlessly with the Sony F35. I’m shocked by that. Genuinely. Much of my 7D footage exhibits very obvious tell-tale blockiness from the H264 codec, blockiness I just don’t see from the 5D. But if Reynolds says so, then who am I to argue?

So, what does this mean? Well, it means this: if you’re dipping a toe get the 550D, now that’s a ridiculous camera for the price and I really like it. Yes it’s a bit plasticky and a bit of a fiddle to operate, but you’d get used to that in a day or two. If you have the money (well if you don’t then steal it) then do yourself a massive favour and get that 5D… at all costs… just get it. It will change your life. But what about the 720 50i on the 7D. I don’t bother with that on Ladies and Gentlemen anymore, I just trust Twixtor to give me a lifelike 50fps on my full frame 1920×1080 5D footage and most of the time it does. For sure, rent a 7D and get hold of some PL mount lenses like the new Zeiss CP2s or even better Cook S4s and you’ll probably have the time of your life but think really hard about what you’re really after. Yes, we suffer from that insane shallow depth of field making focus a real challenge, but the image is just much better on the 5D.

Never forget, DSLR video is, right now, a giant compromise of staggering proportions and it’s a miracle it’s even possible. If you’re going to compromise then start with the absolute best you can lay your hands on. Not only is the 5D blessed with the full frame sensor, it also seems to be much more dialled into the lenses you stick on the front. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret buying my 7D and I know my considerations were seriously motivated by money at the time, but since seeing what the 5D is capable of I just can’t go back.

Pulling focus from Kevin and Chris to Bunny and Fran

A couple of weeks ago we had a complete shocker. Our location was horribly compromised… but it wasn’t horrible. Our problem was that we needed a big open space where we could reveal characters behind other characters and depth is always good in shots to give you a sense of a character’s place in the scene. As a result everything happened on one very slim plane of action and there was no room to show a lively bar, and give a sense of the world around them. Last weekend we reshot the scenes in a new bar and I thought it’d be interesting to post comparative shots to give an idea of why on earth we did it. Obviously with no way of judging performance it’s hard to know which plays better but just judging the shots, which do you prefer?

Vincent Laforet loves his toys. I mean really loves his toys. He even has a section on his site called ‘toys’. You’ll often see him in a steadicam vest or with a 5D attached to a helicopter gunship with another couple of DSLRs daisy chained to a 60ft pendulum swinging over a cliff. No. I exaggerate. Still, he likes to add stuff to his DSLRs. And who wouldn’t? That’s half the fun, and for me it’s been one of the great appeals of this garden shed bodge technology. I must admit, I like my toys too, and have been fortunate to be able to film with huge jib arms, steadicams, gyro-mount helicopters, underwater cameras but sadly not motion control yet. Vincent got a lot of shit for posting pics of his DSLR rigs with billions of parts attached, but I’m not ashamed to admit I knew what they all were and have used them myself. I’ll also say that when you’re shooting high-end work (as the big V tends to do) then all of those bits, every single one of them, is vital to retaining control over what you’re doing, to the satisfaction of very demanding clients. And so, Vincent, this post’s for you, as we put our own little toy rig together to shoot the opening sequence of Ladies and Gentlemen. On Saturday night we took the 5D out into the heart of buzzing Soho at kicking out time attached to a Steadicam Flyer rig. We would have had a full rig, but my operator has literally just sold his. Shame. Anyway, here’s the monster we created. Zacuto rails, Redrock DSLR baseplate, Zeiss ZF 35mm, fully modified by Duclos (you need lenses with stops on the barrel to calibrate the follow focus properly), a wireless transmitter and a Bartek wireless follow focus. We were abused by drunks, interfered with by jobsworth production folk trying to tell us how to do our work, and generally messed about by the public in general, but you kind of have to expect that! We had no lights so it was just au naturel and we’ll have to see how it turns out but all in all, for a complicated sequence, I think it’s worked pretty well.

Toys are supposed to be fun. And this was.

Whoops

I had to wait over a month for my Snapgears to arrive from the US and I was sort of excited to see how they worked out. However, I did have ever so slight misgivings about them. Those misgivings centred around the fact that the snapgears form a complete circle. You get five sizes of gear when you buy them from Indisystem and there’s no flexibility or adjustment to be had from them, just the size and that’s it. With the Redrock gears, they’re very simple, and we use an elastic tie, rather than the screws they come with, simply because it’s a lot faster to attach them and reattach them when you change lens. We had the Snapgears on set this weekend, and almost immediately ran into annoying problems with them. We simply couldn’t work out which gear would fit our lens choice and even when we found one that was close, it wasn’t close enough and the magnets didn’t hold it in place. So, instead of saving us time they actually slowed us down. We went back to the Redrock gears, little piece of elastic, swift on, swift off and that worked just fine. Zacuto have their Zipgears but according to our friend at the Editman, Shoot35’s solution is very nice indeed and a lot cheaper. I have a lot of time for Shoot35, they’re a small company but they make nice, affordable products. Still, I’ve bought a follow focus from Redrock, it comes with gears, they work, easy. I got suckered by the gimmick of the Snapgears and I’m not sure I’ll use them again. I’m an idiot. But we knew that already.

So, today’s the day. We’re going to be broadcasting from the set live, pretty much all day today. Updates on what we’re going to be doing and when will appear on this site, so keep checking back for the link to the uStream content which will be posted here as soon as we’re up and running. Big day. 45 setups. Didn’t get to bed till half three last night. Ouch.

Ustream link: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ladies-and-gentlemen-live

Live Streaming by Ustream.TV
We will be going live at around 11am BST.

So, finally, my Snapgears have arrived from Indisystem. Being a dirty limey it’s taken over a month. Brian Valente at Redrock Micro kindly sent over a matte box for our shoot. Unfortunately we’ve nearly finished shooting and it still hasn’t turned up yet, just goes to show you really can’t ever tell how long things are going to take to arrive from the States! First impressions of the Snapgears are that they’re massive, chunky, solid bits of kit. The big selling point is the fact that you literally just snap them together and damn do they work well. I get nervous with magnets around the camera but I’m assured they’re safe. You simply snap them apart, put them vaguely around the lens and the magnets do the rest. Now it’s not like we lose a lot of time fannying about with lens gears, but personally I hate them. The snapgears feel really solid but they’re only designed to fit a very specific size of lens, we’ll have to see whether their design is ultimately flawed. Right now we attach our Redrock lens gears with a bit of elastic from the Rode mic cage I bought simply because we find it quicker than attaching with the screws they come with. We pretty much use the same lens gear for every single lens and the system’s pretty fast. The snapgears are designed to be very fast indeed. We’ll be testing them out this weekend. Which reminds me, we’re going to be live live live live live…. crikey… on sunday. We’ll be posting a timetable of likely events and when we’ll be talking live, and probably getting everything wrong technically, but it’s a first, and, well it should be interesting, and we’ll try and make it a bit of an event. You’ll be able to ask me questions, ask the producers, the writer and the actors questions as well. If that ain’t value for money I don’t what is. Aight.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN – WEEK 4/5 DAILIES from Robin Schmidt on Vimeo.

Only two days’ worth in actual fact as we cancelled two of them, and one day was almost completely written off. Only a few more days actually left now and my love affair with the 5D has grown to new levels. Filth.

One site I’ve been reading avidly since I was alerted to it a couple of months ago by one of the readers of this site is NoFilmSchool. Ryan Koo who runs it seems to be pretty much an American version of me (possibly a bit nerdier…, is that possible!?) but very smart and I suggest you check him out. Mike Jones wrote a guest blog piece about why short films are an anachronism for the 21st century filmmaker and, as someone working damn hard to build a solid drama reel with not one, not two, but seven drama projects ongoing in various stages of production his article makes interesting reading. My own take on short films is that they’re simply not relevant to me. I have no enthusiasm for trotting round the festival circuit, most film people who aren’t directors, or responsible for the actual work, bore me rigid and I’m horrid at networking. I really can’t be arsed and I just don’t see how playing that kind of game is going to make me stand out. I don’t watch short films, and I don’t enjoy making them. Ladies and Gentlemen, being a long-form project has been amazingly good fun, tough but very rewarding and it will be far more important on my CV than ten short films would. In terms of demonstrating an ability to tell a story that 60min window gives me room to create distinct arcs, changes of pace, mood and most importantly it allows me to let me my voice come through. I am actually prepping a short film for production towards the end of the year which we’ll shoot on the Alexa and which will probably come in at around 20mins. I’m throwing the kitchen sink at it, creating a piece that will complement the rest of my drama reel and be by far the most cinematic of my current lineup. That’s exciting.

What’s your take on short films, and can you persuade me to watch more of them? The best short film I’ve ever seen involved no dialogue and was only two and a half minutes long. It won Virgin Media Shorts a couple of years ago and was directed by a couple of fairly prominent UK music video directors. It’s called the Black Hole. Have a watch. Great short film, but does it tell you anything about what these guys would do with a feature film? No.

The Black Hole from Napoleon Ryan on Vimeo.

Things picking up

Word. I’m still not online at home and getting really narked about the whole situation, but trying to steal internet time where I can. We had a shocking day’s shooting on Ladies and Gentlemen the other week but this past weekend we pulled it out of our asses and had probably the best day of the shoot. We’re also going to be doing what I believe is a world first, broadcasting live from the set on Sunday via UStream. You’ll be able to tune in and find out exactly how we’re working with the DSLRs, ask questions and watch interviews with the writer, the producers, and my good self. The broadcast will be archived on UStream but this will be the first time this has ever been done and I’m kind of excited to see how it will turn out. Spread the word and tune in. Also, more writeups around on Photocinenews, involving a little more about the whole process of doing this project. The dailies from this past weekend’s shooting will be up online in the next 24 hours too.

PEF Pledges: City Year from Buzz Films on Vimeo.

My new production company Buzz Films, fronted by Jan Bednarz, shot this pledge film for PEF, a charitable private equity foundation with a remit to assistn charities, in this case helping young people in London. Neil Gordon of Get Gold Films shot this promo on the 7D with Zeiss ZFs. I contributed a couple of days shooting on my own rig, but the most important part of all of this is the role of what we do in helping young people get a second chance and have opportunities that ordinarily would be denied them. Jan has been working with charities for many years now and has taught me about the importance of giving a little bit back once in a while. For all the glitz and showbiz of much of the work I do, it’s good to take the time to do something a bit more holistic, worthwhile and relevant. Filmmaking can unite people and we should never forget that. And yeah, it looks damn nice too.

Feeder – Tracing Lines – my second best ever vid from Robin Schmidt on Vimeo.

Before launching into the how of this video, it’s worth doing a little backstory into the why. The music video industry in the UK is so utterly hideous. It’s like this: there’s no money for the work, it’s insanely competitive, there are a lot of incredibly talented people, and the commissioning process is a total c***. Then there are the expectations. ‘Sorry we have no money but would you please completely f*&k yourself to get this video made to the same standard as one costing ten times as much, in one week please. No pressure. Oh yes, if we don’t like it, we won’t pay you and you’ll never be commissioned by us again. Oh, and if you do a good job that we like we will of course go to a different director next time as we won’t want the next one to look anything like this one. You do understand don’t you? By the way, we loved your treatment but have given it to a different director to make as we liked a video he did for another artist and think he’d do a better job, good luck with everything.’ Music videos are a great way to learn your trade as an aspiring director because they place restrictions on you going so far beyond the normal call of duty that if you can survive (or even thrive) you know you’re in very good shape. The whole industry is full of bullshit, bullshitters, haters, morons, players, idiots, hangers on, cretins, users, abusers, f&*^wits, risk-averse, safe-playing cockends and I hate it. Producers in particular are forced into raping talent and crew to make budgets work and burn most of the relationships they have in the process. Stay away!

I didn’t. When I started out I was really lucky in finding a commissioner who believed in me and would pick me preferentially over other directors because he trusted me. But, in my defence, I’d earned it. Videos like Undercut’s ‘A bit of education’ nearly killed me, but they earned me awards nominations (didn’t win any though, did I!?) and I built a career on the hard work. This same commissioner helped launch Feeder, a pretty prominent UK rock band, back in the day and I always said I’d take shitty budget jobs for this commissioner if he got me a Feeder gig. As it happens, at the time of this video, Feeder had just changed management and hired my commissioner who promptly got me to pitch on ‘Tracing Lines’.

Three other directors had already pitched on the song and he didn’t like any of the ideas. What I didn’t know was that one of those directors had already gone into preproduction and been involved in long discussions with the lead singer Grant. More on that later. Feeder are a three piece rock band and tend to look a bit miserable in their videos so I wanted to do something that was stripped down, back to performance, but with a twist. When building your career as a music video director, performance setups are your stock in trade and it’s pretty hard these days to find anything new to do. I’d seen a video where a guy layered up lots of different takes of the same material over each other, which he called motion cubism and thought it might be fun to extend that idea. In a nutshell the idea was this: three EX1s shooting simultaneously against green screen, one from the front, one from the left, one from the right, would capture head on and profile shots in different sizes (wide, mid, cu etc). Those 2D flat layers would then be put together in After Effects like those big cardboard cutouts you see in malls in the shape of a big cross (except these would be way more complex). Then the plan was to fly the virtual camera in AE around the shots, seeing pretty much every take at the same time, to create a fluid, dynamic, impossible video that did its best not to get boring. As the camera approached I’d dissolve to the mid shot and then to the CU so we always had a decent resolution version of the person to look at. I shot each band member individually trying to capture a sense of fun more than anything else, and really the shoot day was pretty relaxed. For the first time ever I think you see Grant smile in a video, and many of the comments on Youtube said just that, so at least I achieved something of what I was after!

That just left the post. And then I stopped sleeping.

Assembling the grand 3D model of the band, placing them in space, and layering up all the different takes so they sat in the right place was actually kind of fun, but bear in mind that every single layer had to be keyed before I could see how they all fit together. Keying is incredibly hard. If you think you can just shoot against green, apply a filter and hey presto it’s gone, then you are sadly mistaken. One of the biggest issues is spill (where the green light from the screen is reflected in lighter areas like skin, or a cymbal) and there’s nothing worse than green tinged skin, or fringing so I deliberately made the video black and white to avoid that issue. If you’re working on one shot at a time then fine, take the time to tweak the settings, but when you have over a thousand shots then it gets a little nauseating. The band also have quite a lot of chrome on their instruments. Grant’s guitar is a beautiful old Fender Jazzmaster, but that chrome is hideous for reflecting the green. So we used Keylight, picked the colour, then pretty much left it like that, with a few master tweaks.There were between 60 and 100 layers going on at any given time. Yes, you can precomp to a certain extent but when you’re constantly dissolving between layers as you fly around, you actually need to have them all there ready to look at and decide which one you want. I’ve included a grab of my AE timeline just to give you an idea.

Labelling is of course incredibly important but honestly, after a couple of hours it’s excruciatingly difficult to tell between L, R, F on a shot that’s, in every other way, completely identical. I was assembling this all on my old G5 Quad, a computer I won’t have a single bad word said against as it was the best I’ve ever had. But this was a step too far. Even using proxies, even with all resolution set to the lowest possible level, it would still take twenty minutes to RAM preview a four second clip. When you’re dealing with complex animation involving lots of layers you need to be able to tweak the moves quickly, see how they’re working, tweak again, move on. I believe in giving myself a challenge, and I knew how to do this, but doing it at this speed was agonising. Which brings me back to the bullshit of the industry. This was a music video for Feeder, a known band, that would get seen. Do a good job on this and I’d be able to pitch on bigger budget videos etc. This was a potential career maker. That meant pressure, big big big pressure. So, I agonised over every shot, every transition, every little tweak of the camera. Killer. I didn’t sleep at all for two weeks. After Effects is fantastic, but actually for doing this kind of incredibly precise camera work it’s a bit of a shit and I kept cocking up my camera moves by just a tiny fraction, pacing and banking being essential parts of the process and fixing those kind of problems when you’re staring at draft resolution proxies that give you nothing but gigantic pixels, is a real challenge. Put simply, this was just too ambitious for the equipment I was using.

The final piece of the puzzle was the chorus work and I actually handed the motion graphics over to my friend Andy Needham, a graphic designer who did a great job with all the red patterns. I should also mention that I did a full grade on the video, making it really contrasty, spending a day and a half on it, and doing the right work on every single shot, but when we assembled the video it looked utterly shit, so we went back to the lightly desaturated look I’d initially done when assembling all the layers. Arse. Those kind of decisions really kill you when you’re chronically sleep-deprived.

I’m really pleased with the video, it got a great big writeup in promo news, and I was intimately involved in so much of making it happen on my own. However, when the song was released nobody saw it. The director who was initially pencilled to make the video got the hump in a massive way and started slagging me off to people around the industry. The video didn’t get me any more work. I did do some bigger budget videos after that, but the experience basically taught me that you can work as hard as you like in music videos and it really means f&*k all at the end of the day. The artist gets all the recognition, the label doesn’t care about you and you’re back to square one. Yes, they can be fun, but I’d much rather take that credit myself and enjoy some steady upwards in my career so I walked away from music videos to make drama and that’s where you’ll find me now. Much happier!

PUPPETS

So, in a shameless bid to make more people aware of my previous work and not just my adventures in DSLR land, I’m going to do a serious of in-depth writeups of some of my old projects, the good and the bad, to hopefully give you all an insight into some of the ridiculous problems I’ve come up against in the course of shooting music videos and other bits. You can find all my work on the regular website at elskid.com so if there’s anything there that you have a particular hankering to see posted then get in touch and I’ll do just that. I’ve done post heavy jobs, jobs with helicopters, jobs with high speed cameras, jobs with puppets,  and jobs where everything went wrong. You never stop learning. First up my vid for Feeder’s Tracing Lines, a head mangler of epic proportions.

I’m shooting on Canon L primes at the moment, beautiful lenses, but not cinema lenses at all. We struggle with the focus rings, they all have completely different characteristics and of course there’s no iris ring. A friend of mine has a set of Zeiss ZFs, cine modded by Duclos, so they’ve had the iris clicks taken out, a lens gear pressed on, and an 80mm step up ring attached. They’re absolutely lovely but they do breathe a bit and they still suffer from the same short focus throw as other stills lenses (though it is definitely better than on the L primes). The Zeiss CP2s are aimed at us filmmaking DSLR users. They come with interchangeable mounts and don’t require any mod to your camera to fit them. Good news. They’re proper cinema lenses, no breathing, damped iris rings, nice long focus throw and a pretty uniform size and weight. They’re a tad under £3k each to buy, so not cheap, but you’re going to be renting these bad boys anyway, absolutely no point buying them. Interestingly, a set a of RED primes, like the ones I shot with on tuesday, are £3k each. Unfortunately they’re the only PL mount primes you can’t fit on a modified 7D. Shame! I’ve not had a chance to try out the CP2s yet but Snehal Patel has and he’s written a little blog piece about them accompanied by a few pics. The lenses do seem a little slow to me but the proof is in the pudding as they say, so definitely one of those where it’s worth renting them out for a job and making a judgement. The glass itself is sure to be every bit as good as you’d expect with Zeiss products.

So, I posted about my experiences with BT a week or so ago, a company whose brainlessness seems to know no bounds. The problem is basically that I moved house over a month ago, expecting to be able to take my fibre optic services from Virgin Media along with me. The problem with this whole thing is that no-one can tell you ahead of schedule whether they can even install what you need at your address. They assure you they can, but, as it turns out, in this case they couldn’t. Now, every time you need to book an engineer you normally have to wait ten days for the next available booking. Virgin gave up the chase, told me I should try and find another supplier as they wouldn’t be able to help. So much for loyalty. I then rang BT who I’d been with a couple of years ago and whose service is actually decent but they really are a bunch of mindless incompetent morons who make so many mistakes you’d think they were being run by baboons… well actually… The problem with BT is that they do not admit to making mistakes. This winds me up something rotten. I ordered my internet and tv package online and received a confirmation email that the engineer would turn up on a certain date. So far so good. Did he turn up? No. I then spent three hours on the phone to BT demanding to know why the guy hadn’t turned up and why they’d sent me an email telling me he would, requiring me to turn down work to stay at home, twiddling my thumbs, watching birds fly into walls. They told me that, because I’d ordered online it was possible that I’d made a mistake filling in the form. Right. Does that sound right to you? Surely you don’t take a website live until you have failsafes to avoid people making exactly that kind of mistake. He also called me ignorant, but we won’t get on to that now. I recorded the entire conversation, because I hate morons who deny accountability. I then spent another two hours complaining to the relevant department, demanding compensation for the time that I wasted trying to get it sorted out. They went away and thought about it then called me back twenty minutes later, saying they might be able to offer something by way of compensation. I know what that means, that means £10 off my next bill (I’ve been in big fights with these stupid monkeys before). They offered to arrange everything right there over the phone for me. Now I should mention here that the reason I ordered online in the first place was because it saved me £125. Talking to these guys over the phone, were they able to give me that discount now? No, of course not. When you order online you receive a confirmation email to tell you when the engineer will come. When you order over the phone you receive a confirmation email to you when the engineer will come. When I put it to the guy that if the first email I received could turn out to be a complete lie, then how could I trust the second email not to be a complete lie. He had no answer. Anyway, I went ahead and began ordering the services and was halfway through the whole mess when I was cut off. Now bear in mind that they called me, they had my number. Did they call back to pick up where they’d left off? No, of course not. I’ve spent a fortune on my mobile over the last six weeks simply because I didn’t have a landline and you know what they’ve cocked up so many times I just couldn’t be bothered or even trust them to get it right this time. Not one little bit.

So I moved on to Talk Talk. Talk Talk were very nice, arranged everything for me, and told me when my engineer would come, as well as sending me a text to tell me all the details. Then all the bumpf turns up and it’s labelled to the wrong address and they’ve got my name wrong. Ace! I actually had to rearrange my appointment to accommodate the shoot for ‘Real Enough’ but we rearranged for the ninth. So far so good. Of course, the engineer turned up on the 6th according to the original appointment and I wasn’t there. I spoke to the guy and he said the new appointment would still be honoured. Yes, I sat there all yesterday and waited for a Talk Talk engineer to turn up. What do you think the outcome was? Cue the music and yet another angry phone call to a call centre moron to try and find out what had happened. Oh, sorry sir, we’re incompetent toe rags with no accountability and we don’t give a shit about our customers. The only thing I can do is to rearrange your appointment for the 19th. Like I said, every time there’s a mistake it’s another two weeks. This shit makes me so angry because, as a freelancer I have to turn down work to be available for this idiots to not come and do their job. I also rely heavily on my phone and internet to do business and have spent a small fortune bridging the gap while I’ve not had the services I needed. It will have been six weeks. I hate incompetence, but I really hate people who refuse to admit they have made a mistake and refuse to offer to do anything about it. In most business if you make a mistake you do your damndest to try and make up for that mistake. These fuckers don’t give a shit. I recorded my conversation with the monkey at BT and there are some fabulously juicy bits in it, particularly where he called me ignorant. What should I do with it?

So there we go, I surf the internet using a dongle. People send me their work to have a look at and I can’t because I just can’t actually download it. I can barely blog as doing my research is nearly impossible. I apologise. I was supposed to be back online properly a month ago, but it’s going to be another week and a half. Wankers.

On a separate note I rented a monitor off Decode broadcast hire a month ago, having to pay a £250 deposit which I was assured would be back in my account four days after it was returned. I’ve chased these guys for three weeks, and they never ever get back to me. Never. Finally I managed to speak to someone yesterday who told me he would have to call me back. He didn’t call me back. Eventually I managed to get hold of him late in the day and he informed me that the money would only reach my account on the 13th. No apology. Just, oh yeah, nothing I can do. I don’t mind if people make mistakes, but ignoring my phone calls for three weeks, refusing to try and find out what has happened, then not even bothering to apologise, shifting the blame to the accounts, that shit bothers me immensely. These guys make the mistake of thinking I’m a moron. Believe me, I’m capable of some spectacular moronity but in general I have a very capable brain, one that’s become extremely adept at sniffing out bullshit. So, consider yourselves blacklisted Decode. If I need an example of companies whose working practices I don’t like, then you’ll be it. Along with BT. Nice one.

I’m normally really tolerant, I just put up with stuff but recently these people have got up my nose so badly and I’m seriously out of pocket as a result. That’s just not fair and I’m going after them. If you let them get away with it then you’re just perpetuating the issues that will continue to plague the normal consumer. Fight back. I’m going to. Oh, I’ll probably receive all sorts of complaints now, but I don’t really care.

A good friend of mine and fellow director/finalist in the Bahamas film challenge wrote a script for a twenty minute short film. He shot three days of it, then, for various reasons, the shoot went pretty badly sour. This can happen for all sorts of reasons, clashes of egos, tough shooting circumstances, disproportionate levels of commitment from the various echelons of the production edifice, as well as just plain stupidity. As a result of probably all of these the poor guy found himself having to step down as director of the film he’d written and produced just so he could get it finished. Can you even begin to imagine how that must feel? Low budget is all about passion and commitment, even more so when you’re funding it yourself and the stakes are personally very high. So I found myself in the very odd position of being asked to come in for a day to direct the remaining scenes of the film, a pretty big chunk as it turned out. I’ve done this once before, coming in to direct a music video for another director who had to pull out at the last minute. Strangely, it’s actually quite liberating as you have no time to stress over whether your preparation’s any good, you just have to get on with it. On this job though it was quite a strange one as I had no idea what had been shot, nor how so I was really flying a little blind, trying to execute the other director’s shotlist, while altering it and evolving it to suit the location and the script as I saw it.

We shot on RED which as actually really fun as I’ve been doing non-stop DSLR of late and having a bigger, more stable camera, with PL lenses and four times the resolution was actually very rewarding. I’ve become so accustomed to calling my lens choices for the 5D that I just walked in and started calling the lenses yesterday as normal getting all of the wrong. The RED just shoots a much narrower frame than the 5D so where I’d normally use a 35mm we desperately needed an 18mm. Very strange. Even at 4k we struggled to get wide enough and were constantly having to come up with novel ways of shooting masters – but I love that. We started with a horrid piece of green screen work, hanging a sheet and just having to live with wrinkles, shadows and all that difficult, messy stuff that comes with low budget green screen. Never underestimate how hard it is to light for keying, horrid stuff. You stand there, blocking action with the actors, crucially aware of the fact that you don’t move the camera, you literally move the action itself, rotating the actors to shoot OTS when your first shot was headon so you can keep the screen behind the actors. It gets very disorientating very quickly.

We hammered through something like 55 setups yesterday and our DOP Marco Marco did a great job with minimal lighting to keep the aesthetic that had been achieved in the previous days of production (see stills below). We also had an incredible South African focus puller who was an absolute ninja, easily one of the best I’ve ever worked with. That just gives you so much confidence to try difficult shots and, more importantly, get them right pretty much first time.

What was particularly great was our location, a house that is thick in the middle of being completely refurbished so we benefitted from exposed brickwork, joists, pipes and all sorts of incredible textures from wood to concrete to galvanised metal. This makes such a huge difference and some of the frames we found were absolutely gorgeous. After having an awful awful weekend on Ladies and Gentlemen it’s nice to get back on the horse, get stuck into narrative work and, even though it was a 20 hour day all in, we hammered through a mighty number of setups and kept a really great pace throughout the day. Nice.

Reference still from the first few days on Real Enough

Fancy some daft pics of an odd camera you’ll never be able to buy? Then look no further. This is just a concept but it promises a glimpse into the future, twenty years to be precise. Don’t go selling your 5D just yet though.

It’s really easy to get lost in the excitement of shooting on DSLRs. They genuinely do make your work look the business. Many photographers have made the move sideways into video and many videographers are regularly turning out production that really looks fantastic. In the old universe you had to earn the right to be given a budget that would open up the world of 16mm or 35mm to you. DSLRs have removed that barrier. Phil Bloom began championing DOF adaptors, using stills lenses and a massive nozzle on the camera to give digital a more filmic look. It was a brave new world, but then the 5D came along, and, well we all know what happened next. So, now we have a film-look tool in the hands of, well absolutely anyone. The 550d and GH1 are both very very affordable and means we will see a generation of filmmakers who have felt no need to go to filmschool and have simply just got on with it. I am one of those filmmakers. My 5D was actually the PD150. We used to work so hard to get filmic results on that camera and you know what, we actually didn’t do a terrible job. See here for the first piece of work I ever made. The point is this, the point of differentiation between you and the next schmuck with a DSLR is your ability to tell a story. Never has it been more important to hit the books, learn your craft, develop your own style and stay ahead of the game. I’m currently in the middle of a huge learning spurt, developing my own style for drama and refining my directing style to suit the rigors of fiction work. I love it. I am fully aware that I need to make a huge and meaningful transition from being a jack of all trades, highly competent production bod, into being a refined single-discipline master and the present period is my best chance of achieving that. I’ve made it my mission to learn as much as I can about all aspects of production from the producers role, to post, to art direction, and clearly to the camera team, but my aptitude in those other disciplines has seen me get slack on directing. Now, I’m tightening up and trying to pass on what I’m learning to you, because I do feel the world we inhabit is in danger of being saturated with competent DSLR shooters, all of whom have a gorgeous showreel, thanks to lenses and large sensors, and if you want to stand out, then possessing the rare and difficult skills of top notch directing are more important than they’ve ever been.

My series of blogs with Photocinenews will be covering much of my thinking about directing drama, but if there’s one single rule that I would advise anyone directing to keep firmly planted in their minds, that is to ‘listen to the niggle.’ The niggle is that little voice in your head that isn’t quite happy with stuff. On set you’ll find yourself under pressure from everyone, from the 1st AD anxious to press on with the schedule, to the DOP who’s shot something lovely and doesn’t see why you’d change it. However much pressure you find yourself under listen to that niggle and stick your hand up. Flag it, get it out in the open, don’t bury it in the name of being a goody guy, or finishing on time. You have to say something. These things always come back to bite you on the ass so you must always be prepared to be unpopular. How you service the niggle is up to you but if you’re handling your on set duties correctly then people will listen to you and trust that you, and only you, know what’s best for the production. I cannot stress this enough. I’ve worked really hard to learn everyone else’s jobs, from the focus puller, to the gaffer, to the wardrobe department, to the art director, so that I can have meaningful and informed conversations with them on set. I think that really helps when it comes to dealing with niggles. If those guys trust you then they will go to hell for you to satisfy that niggle. Ultimately the buck stops with you, and no matter what else you learn, trusting your instincts, listening to the niggle when everyone else is done, wants to go home, thought it was right, is the absolute number 1 rule of directing. Don’t stop learning, be better, be more competitive, work harder, with DSLRs there has never been a better opportunity to make an impact. Yowzah.

Oh, and have I mastered this yet? No. I’m way better now than I used to be but there’s a big pussy inside of me that just lets things go and I hate it. Now, I just say what’s bothering me and deal with the consequences when they come. Working better… ish!

'Jim Jannard's hot' - 'Nah, I fancy Philip Bloom' - 'Tart.'

I hate trawling the internet for rumours because most of the time they’re absolute bollocks and other people spend enough time talking about them. In the wake of Jim Jannard’s brilliant rant (which you really need to read, by the way) we now have a rumour about a non line skipping 4k sensor skunkworks camera from Canon. Sounds great. Would we buy it though? If, like me, you’ve invested heavily in peripherals for your 7D/5D etc. then the ability to tease more shelf-life out of your investments would be appealing indeed. However, my biggest problem with all and every single one of these new development hybrid cameras is that they will necessarily cost at least three times as much as a 7d. That’s just simple economics. The pure and brilliant joy of the current crop is the cost of entry. Stick it on a tripod and you can’t go wrong. Turning a stills camera into a video camera hybrid will put all these manufacturers products into a whole different category and they’re going to have to be very very good because with an elevated price comes elevated expectation. Right no they occupy their own very distinct and unique category, defined by aesthetics, driven by price. Compare it to the Smart car. Brilliant in its own category, crap when they brought out the PlusFour. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to see a 5D with SDI out, a 4k non line-skipping image. But everything else, well I wouldn’t change it. Keep the price low, keep the consumers buying the camera, but just make it better within its own category. I’ve been asked if I know anything about the new camera in my new capacity as a ‘Convergence Pro Envoy’ for Canon. The answer is absolutely not. I wish. I’ve said it many many times, I’m a director. I’m so lucky that DSLRs have given me a chance to really explore the photographic aspect of my work in a really hands on way, improving me as a director and giving me opportunities I wouldn’t have had before. I’m working on building a relationship with Canon so that I’ll be able to look at impending technology early but right now your guess is as good as mine.

PS – on the Jim Jannard rant, I actually support the guy for having the balls to come out and say what he thinks. There’s no doubt he’s under pressure to deliver more than ever, but he only has himself to blame for rewriting the way we think about low budget high definition cameras. I personally can’t wait to shoot on the Alexa (is it just me or have cameras become really really really really ugly of late?) and have just decided on it for a short film I’m directing in November. Good times!

More dailies from Ladies and Gentlemen, shot on the delicious 5D. I know we all get highly moist about the shallow depth of field and throwing on the 85mm with its fantasy-like bokeh is endlessly rewarding but for me, one of the real joys of the 5D is the way you can make a wider shot look so rich and inviting. That’s where digital cameras normally fall down. We are suffering from little moments of moiré here and there with the line-skipping but for the most part the 35mm is the lens that I enjoy throwing on the most because it’s always so unexpected how good it looks. The 50mm is fabulous as well, and is our go-to lens for singles and OTS shots, while we tend to skip out the 85mm on the whole and jump to the 100mm for closeups. This is mainly because the close focus on the 85mm is pretty terrible, somewhere around a metre and you just can’t shoot a worthwhile closeup with it. Where we do use it is for creating a really intimate moment where the background dissolves into fantasy as the bokeh on that lens is out of this world.

As always, the writeups are on Photocinenews.com and I’ve written a whole bunch of wider filmmaking pieces about working with actors, developing the script, shooting on a budget and more that will go up over the next few weeks. Enjoy.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN – Week 3 Dailies from Robin Schmidt on Vimeo.