March 26, 2023
You can read this, if you like, as either a retrospective on the BVE show in London, or an anticipation of next month’s NAB show in Las Vegas. It’s certainly a record of what we saw at BVE, and what we might hope to see in Nevada, because most overwhelmingly, this year’s trade show season seems so far to have been a welcome return to sanity. […]
The British Society of Cinematographers’ expo, which took place this past weekend, is not traditionally a place of headline releases and crowds of enthusiastic camera people baying for a sight of the latest toy. Is it a relatively small show. Previously, it’s been confined to a stage or two at either Pinewood or Leavesden, but was ejected this year, presumably by the brisk business going on at U.K. studios, to the Battersea Evolution exhibition facility in central London. Reaching beyond its scale, though, the event has long maintained an audience at the higher end of the U.K.’s somewhat polarised film industry, in which the expensive and the less-expensive are separated by a rather under-represented middle ground. […]
The world of stop-motion animation is, given the labor-intensive production process, one suited to only the most dedicated practitioners. On Aardman Animations‘ Shaun the Sheep, co-directors Mark Burton and Richard Starzak shared the workload, combining Burton’s background in comedy writing and Starzak’s experience in animation on Aardman’s previous productions. He accepts freely that “Animation has been what I’ve wanted to do all my life, ever since I was a child. I got into it 30 years ago and it’s always been my thing.” As with many specialists in the field, Starzak “wasn’t qualified as such. I did a fine art degree, but I discovered animation while I was doing that degree. I started to look for work, and Aardman seemed like a good bet.” […]
With three previous collaborations with the director to his credit, Dariusz Wolski, ASC, has enjoyed considerable success working alongside Ridley Scott. Fresh from three consecutive Scott films, including 2012’s Prometheus, The Counselor in 2013 and biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings in 2014, Wolski’s own production history boasts all four extant films in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, plus the visual treats Alice in Wonderland and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Born in Poland in 1956, Wolski’s earliest credits are on music video in the late 1980s, moving swiftly on to features including The Crow, Crimson Tide and Dark City during the 1990s. […]
It’s difficult to introduce the director of Alien, Blade Runner, and Prometheus, at least in the context of a science fiction such as The Martian, without the risk of history influencing the debate. Nonetheless, it remains true that Ridley Scott was in the process of “prepping a film that I’m doing now in Sydney which is fundamentally Prometheus 2” when he was approached about The Martian. Twentieth Century Fox, he recalled, referred to Drew Goddard‘s screenplay and insisted that “you need to read it, because we need to do it now… we started”, said Scott, “and that was exactly thirteen months ago.” […]
An educational background in fine art doesn’t directly suggest a career in visual effects. Andrew Whitehurst recalls with a smile that “If I’d been asked what I’d end up doing, I wouldn’t have said VFX”. Combine the arts with “an interest in the moving image [and] an interest in computers”, though, and the stage is set for a career that has so far included work in the effects departments of Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, two Harry Potter installments, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, among many others. Most recently, Whitehurst’s work on Alex Garland‘s film Ex Machina has displayed a level of complexity and elegance that suggest something of a return to those fine-art beginnings. […]
Every year, NAB is the principal place we expect to see new releases – so much so, in fact, that there are often so many new things that their individual impact is obscured. As a result, every year, there’s always the tantalizing possibility that someone will release something interesting at IBC.
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We’re used to the idea that looking into a sunset on TV doesn’t make us squint as it does in reality. The pictures we view for fun are graded, of course, but they’re also forced into a narrow range by technical necessity. The brightest stars of the silver screen are, after all, just light falling upon a diffuse white surface, and we’ve become so used to it that the world of cinema doesn’t look as dull to us as perhaps it should.
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Training in the commercial arts is a notoriously difficult thing to evaluate. In a field where the success of results are – at least in a purely artistic sense – entirely a matter of opinion, the only realistic way to evaluate the qualifications of a practitioner is his or her experience. Of course, there’s always the financial imperative to fall back on; training in most cases is calculated to increase the trainee’s employability, but the considerations are frequently much the same. Prospective trainees in any creative field will be looking for independent, objective assurance that the tutors on a course have the requisite level of expertise. […]
Let’s start with a fact: a Sony F35 recently sold on eBay for around one-fortieth of its 2008 release value, which is a depreciation rate only a tax accountant could possibly love. […]