Is shallow depth of field getting used to death?

What was once the Holy Grail, the shallow depth-of-field look that distinguished the “35 film look” from video, getting so overused that it will become passe?

Here’s a rant this week on APhotoEditor, which in turn reposts a piece from 2009 by Mike Jones:

Shallow focus and Rack-Focus is lazy. A ham-fisted and overtly slothful technique with little impetus other than to lead your viewer around by the nose, to force them to look exactly where you want them to look, when you want them to look there. As a tool, like all other cinematic tools at the filmmaker’s disposal, it can and may be very useful. But as a staple and default way to depict moving images it is as articulate as a house brick.

There are some great new camcorders coming out that are not playing to the shalllow-depth crowd. Those include the Canon XF100 and 105, which put out 1080p in a quality 4:2:2 50mbps stream, all with 1/3-inch sensors. There are some filmmakers who are already scoffing at these because they don’t have big sensors.

One obvious place a documentary filmmaker would want deep depth of field provided by such camcorders is in fact-moving action in which an EOS 5D would find focusing problems unless in the hands of a seasoned pro. But even in sit-down shooting setups, cameras with more depth allow for a better look at surroundings, rather than making them blur out. There are times when that can be good.

HD video is here to stay and fully accepted by film audiences, especially in documentary work, and there may be a counter-wave of people shooting to go against the trendy shallow-depth look. The reason: Because what was once a look associated with super-expensive 35mm film cameras is now a look assoiciated with relatively cheap DSLRs. When you see that indy film at the local festival with nothing but blurred background, you’re likely to say, “Oh, that was shot on a 5D” than to say “this must be a highly funded professional production.”

It can be funny how technology meant to do one thing can do another. We’ll see what happens next.

Jones, in his post from last year, notes that the technical challenge of filmmaking back in the day was actually “deep focus,” a look that only came at great expense – to shoot at small apertures with the slow film of that era, lighting had to come to a set by the truckload.

In film, the quest for deep focus led to sets blitzed with light; once everyone was getting that look, others came along and played against the grain: ‘The Godfather” used fewer lights, created shallow depth in many scenes, and was then quickly mimicked in the films of the 1970s. Around it goes. But when video cameras came out, the flat deep-focus look was associated with those who could only afford cheap equipment.

Jones said in his post,

In the 21st century I would attest that Shallow Focus and Rack Focus aesthetics have lost all meaning as useful creative problem solving techniques and instead have become banal, unimaginative staples of cinema. And it prompts us to ask loudly…. “What the hell happened to Deep Focus?”

DSLRs meet BBC broadcast standards (but only kind of), and the upshot of that

This is kind of like the joke where the man says to the doctor, “Doc, it hurts when I do this, what would you suggest?” and the doctor says, “Don’t do that.”

The BBC has exacting standards about the quality of footage it will broadcast, for good reason, but their technical demands also has created a proper British club of filmmakers who can afford expensive equipment. The hoi polloi with these “prosumer” cameras just haven’t cut it. The BBC has required 50mbps quality; HDV and H264, compressed down as they are to about 24Mbps, are on the outside looking in; even the great Sony EX1 at 35Mbps doesn’t technically cut it.

So now comes the news that the BBC is accepting EOS 5D footage, which provides a 38mbps bit rate, but also has well-documented flaws in regard to moire and aliasing.

The HD Magazine article quotes the producers of the drama “Road to Coronation Street” as saying,

“We shot a lot of tests which looked wonderful but the engineers at the BBC were saying that there was aliasing and moiré patterns that would make them fail the use of the camera for HD broadcast.

“However we’d done a lot of independent research and shot more tests and shown them to people. When the tests came back from the BBC they said there was aliasing but they suggested that we shoot more tests in a type of scenario that the production would encounter, like a scene with actors looking backwards and forwards with mid-shots and close ups.

“The head of technology at the BBC, Ian Potts, who was very supportive in our early days saying ‘You have these technical issues that would fail our broadcast tests but it’s very interesting what you’re doing and please do some more tests because we’d love to see what you do’. After seeing the four day’s worth of rushes he was so completely smitten with it and said it was some of the best material they’d ever had, ‘finish the film on it’. It went from nought to 60 in half a second.”

So, basically, it’s a “Don’t do this” scenario. That means avoiding such moire-inducing patterns as checked shirts and window screens, not setting long focus on straight-lined patterns, and keeping everything fairly tightly focused. (Other discussions such as this are common among DSLR users) There are many other technical considerations beyond that, but it’s the simple idea of being aware of the limitations of your equipment.We’ll see whether there’s a more general acceptance of DSLR footage out of this.

‘Cyclocross,’ by Ken Bloomer

CYCLOCROSS by Ken Bloomer from e r t z u i ° film on Vimeo.

Peter Broderick on hybrid distribution: Micro budgets and micro audiences

Peter Broderick has been one of the leading voices in the new approach to distribution, and in Micofilmmaker Magazine he breaks down the approach on how filmmakers with limited resources or a more narrow topic can find small but profitable audiences through “hybrid distribution.”

The piece, by Tony Levelle, really details Broderick’s notion of separating rights and finding the right audience, with the right channel, at the right time.

He says micro-budget filmmakers need to think, instead, about micro audiences and to think of the Internet as a collection of audiences. Some of those audiences are at certain websites, some of them are on mailing lists, some of them are on Facebook, and some of them are on Twitter, and so on.

Here’s one snippet worth considering:

TL: Do you negotiate deals for filmmakers?

PB: There are some situations where I agree to negotiate deals for filmmakers but I am not a rep (distribution representative). I am not the person who goes out and pitches the movie to every distributor in town. I am really a strategist.

I only agree to negotiate a deal if somebody gets an offer from a company that I think is a good company. Then I can be the point person with the distributor, negotiating the deal, because I have had a lot of experience with a lot of companies and a lot of deals.

TL: Should filmmakers try to negotiate these deals themselves?

PB: I do not recommend that filmmakers negotiate deals themselves, because whoever is on the other side is going to have a thousand times more knowledge and experience. I can bring much more knowledge and experience to the negotiation and the filmmaker can end up—hopefully—getting a fair deal, a good deal. If there is no good deal to be had, then I do not recommend that they take it. I think that no deal is better than a bad deal.

The question of whether to go to film festivals is also interesting. Broderick seems to be of a growing number of people who see festivals not as the bottleneck through which one must go to find success, but rather a fun option if you want to go for it, which may yield some positive results.

‘Freakonomics’ will have iTunes release before theatrical – a truly Freakonomic decision

Another sign of the changing landscape in documentary film, and film distribution in general, is that “Freakonomics,” the doc from a best-selling book and using an all-star team of directors, is releasing Friday on iTunes, a month before it hits theaters.

TechDirt reports that our friend Sheri Candler spotted this on the trailer. Techdirt also notes that in “flipping the windows,” there might be some trouble.

The first window, normally, is the theatrical release — and the theaters go absolutely livid if anyone suggests shortening the theatrical release window. Heaven forbid anyone go so far as to suggest something as “radical” as a so-called day and date release, where it’s released in all formats at the same time, and watch the theaters go ballistic and boycott the film, as a startling admission that they don’t think they can compete with home theaters.

Remember, this film is about the against-the-grain theories of economics that shake up the conventional wisdom. There, I said it – is that what they want me to say? Because getting some buzz for making a counterintuitive marketing decision is exactly telling us what the film explores. Bravo!

Testing the 5D’s dynamic range, and assessing the 60D

For technical geeks, the debate rages about the video quality of DSLRs. What seemed gained in sharpness and low-light performance seemed lost in such negative effects as shutter Jell-O, moire and aliasing.

But ProVideo Coalition has done a more definitive test on the Canon EOS 5D Mk II’s dynamic range, the ability to find detail over a number of f-stops.

The testing shows the $2,500 EOS 5D to cover 11 stops of dynamic range. In comparison, the $6,000 Sony EX1 has 10 stops, the $30,000 RED One is said to have 11.3 stops, the $150,000 Sony F23 has 13, and the $70,000 Arri Alexa about 13. Kodak claims 15 stops for its color negative film stock.

These studies only further what we know. That these DSLRs, despite their limitations, have been game-changers that have allowed more people to even think about doing film. Ten years ago, video cameras such as the Canon XL1 had only about 7 stops of dynamic range, which meant you had to light carefully and evenly. You would never have put a subject in front of a black background (such as in the clip at the bottom of this post, from Nathaniel Hansen’s “The Elders”) because the camera would have converted those blacks into noisy artifacts and blown out the whites on the other end. But the gap between video and film has grown so much smaller, newer filmmakers don’t even have to worry about such considerations (and may laugh at older films with very flat lighting).

Meanwhile, the EOS 60D has hit the market at $1,100, filling the gap between Canon’s $1,700 EOS 7D and the $900 T2i.

Philip Bloom posts about the 60D, and the Wired’s Gadget Lab calls the 60D “Frankencam,” cobbled together out of lower- and higher-end stuff:

It’s clearly the season for new camera gear, and today it’s Canon’s turn in the spotlight. Along with a few new lenses comes the EOS 60D, a “replacement” for the two-year-old 50D. Those looking to upgrade from their 50D should look elsewhere, though, perhaps to the 7D, as this new camera is more for consumers than enthusiastic amateurs.

The magnesium body of the 50D is now plastic, and the 60D uses SD-cards instead of Compact Flash. It also gets a slew of gimmicky image processing features (Toy Camera, anyone?) and the obligatory video capabilities.

One 60D feature that is getting praise is the articulating screen.

Coach from Nathaniel Hansen on Vimeo.

Just don’t forget that tape doesn’t suck

Amid all the craziness about DSLRs and shallow depth of field, it’s important to remember that the budget-minded documentary filmmaker can pick up some real deals by going against the grain and picking up a Mini-DV-tape-based camcorder. They’re selling on Amazon for $750 new. Five years ago, this technology would have cost you four to five times that.

The HV40, in our opinion, is a gem. Real 24p, great color, and with a Beachtek adapter, able to do a lot. HV40 users who gain “higher powers” by learning the “cell-phone trick” can control gain and depth-of-field.

Here’s a video plucked off Vimeo to make a simple point:

Canon HV40 footage from Orcun Jenan on Vimeo.

‘Editing is the only aspect of filmmaking that has no similarity to earlier art forms’

There’s a thoughtful post in Mediajock about “iterations,” in which Daniel McGuire examines that word as used by “Speaking in Tongues” editor Ken Schneider.

Schneider uses the word to describe the process not of “revisions,” but of new versions. McGuire says,

An iterative approach to editing allows one to re-order scenes and experiment with different openings and various endings. Luck comes into play, serendipity, when you try butting two shots together that yields an unexpectedly exciting result. The word also connotes the possibility that sheer chance plays a role. Sometimes whole scenes can be re-ordered easily, more often than not a new order requires multiple small tweaks – like when a variable change in a spreadsheet has an unforeseen cascading effect that completely alters the filmmaker’s perception of the material.

McGuire notes that,

Editing is the only aspect of filmmaking that has no similarity to earlier art forms. Writing a screenplay is similar to writing a play. Directing on a set is comparable to directing for the stage.  Editing a film, and in this case, editing a documentary, isn’t like anything else that ever came before in human history. In a sense you are writing, or creating a narrative, a story, but from images and sounds of real events.  You can cut a scene many different ways, and get a completely different effect. But the individual scenes serve a larger narrative that must have coherence. It needs to be more than the sum of its parts. It is also a temporal experience, like music, but with images, like a mosaic that you view one tile at a time. When it is over, you stand back, and see the entire picture as a thing, in your memory.

The final thought is simple, but true especially of skills such as editing: “Whatever your personality as an editor, success will probably come down to what it has always come down to – what carpenters call ‘time on tools’.”

SPEAKING IN TONGUES TRAILER from PatchWorks Films on Vimeo.

Can you have too many facts?

An article in Miller-McCune magazine about the documentary “Bag It,” which tells us what happens to all those plastic bags we either throw away or recycle, has a curious passage worth considering by documentary filmmakers.

Michael Todd writes of Suzan Beraza’s documentary,

Bag It suffers a malady shared by so many well-meaning documentaries — a mission creep that requires just one more fact on top of the heap already making your brain hurt.

Todd continues by praising the light touch the film takes, and notes its audience-choice awards in several Midwestern film festivals. But he also notes there are some good books on the topic as well.

It strikes us that many people are taking the documentary route instead of doing books these days, and really understanding what each offers in strengths is worthwhile. Fact-laden documentaries can suffocate themselves. Books, conversely, can effectively load in all manner of detail but miss the emotion. A magazine article can effectively detail more facts than Morgan Spurlock was able to list in “Supersize Me,” but print can’t quite capture the surreal moment when Spurlock, loaded up with another McDonald’s lunch, vomits out his car window onto the parking lot.

Todd is right – you can have too many facts. Often that seems a function of documentarians wanting to be seen as experts; sometimes it’s that they become so in love with their topic they’re like a dinner guest going on and on about some arcane interest. Balancing facts with action, emotion and story line is what makes for a good documentary.

Trailer: ‘The Big Uneasy’

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