Musings of Production

I remember the first time I had to make delivery on a film I produced. The blood, sweat and tears that went into production and post finally ended and I breathed a huge sighof relief.

The honeymoon however was short lived as I was handed a list of deliverables by my sales agent. This two page document would rule my life for the next several weeks and cause me to cry out in frustration. It listed items like cue sheet, sync script, and productions stills.

This first short article is an introduction to the concept of deliverables in general and the next section will cover them in depth. Keep in mind this is just a general guide and every agent, distributor, or exhibitor may modify their list to taste.

So onto the basic question of…. What the heck are deliverables anyways? The simplest way to put it is a deliverable something people who get your movie out there need to do their job. It includes marketing, sales, tapes, dubs, mixes, and a plethora of other items that you’ll just hate putting together.

Lets take a small example that most people have in their actor agreements. Before a company will distribute your film you must certify that every human (and sometimes animals) that appear on screen has their own contact granting you rights to do this. You need to know if they are union, non-union, or extras. That guy walking across the sidewalk in the shot you stole downtown that one day? You’ll need a waiver from him, go chase him down! Now most of them won’t require copies of all these contracts and ask you just to sign off on it, but it is not a liability to be taken lightly.

So a deliverable is basically hell for the creative film maker. All that stuff that people said you should do in production but you tried to sneak around? This is where it all comes, sneaks up on you from behind, and steals your wallet.

You MUST have your deliverable in place or no one internationally will buy your film. There aren’t any exceptions to this so prepare thyself accordingly and steel your will. Section two will continue with contracts and the basics of what you should be getting during production.

The long awaited, and often accused of vaporware, digital cinema camera has finally made and appearance. The Ikonoskop DLL camera is a bit of a departure from the current status quo of camera design. This little light and streamlined beast shoots RAW 1080p in full glorious DNG raw straight to solid state memory. That’s right…. full uncompressed raw image stills at 24 frames per second.
Of course to deal with this monstrous amount of data they have created their own solid state memory cartridges. Which upon speaking with them at NAB will run in the same realm as the panasonic p2 cards.

First let’s talk about what I love about the camera:

- I love the form factor with it being light, comfortable to hold, and just a very natural fit from eyepiece to lending.
- I like that it comes with a fast prime and the lensing doesn’t coddle you.
- It has a dip flip switch at the top that flicks left and right. Flick one way and you get a great exposure meter, flip the other way and you get 1 to 1 pixel zoom for focus.
- Long reported battery life. - small but doesn’t feel like a toy

Worries: (This is an alpha model so could change)

- Viewfinder resolution and look leaves a lot to be desired.
- Cabling is done via breakout
- What on earth will we do with so much data for narrative and doc work. Post convert to some JPG2000 codec? One light it then to prorez? It could inundate us in no time at all.
- It is based on the 400 speed Kodak sensor. Are they a year or two late on this? All the new cinema cameras are 800 standard and we’ll quickly all be expected to deliver footage shot on faster chip. I’m sorry you only get an 800 joker… we can’t afford the 4k HMI rental.

If this camera had been out 6 months ago it would be sitting in my bag right now. However, with a late summer / fall release in the works it is going to have a tough time at it’s 7000-10000 USD price range.

We used to hunt for them like the lost child of the camera department. The perfect and unattainable fast lens. Some directors and cinematographers like Kubrik used to attach space satellite lenses to their cameras. That’s how desperate we were for more light sensitivity. Hundreds of pounds of lens just to get that little extra. So were used to lenses that open up to 1.2 or 1.4 and give us that extra stop of light we sometimes desperately needed. They may not look pretty wide open at 1.2 but you could get exposure. Sure the nose was in focus and the eyes weren’t but you could see it!

All this is changing and Lens speed is no longer what we will strive for in our world. Almost every camera shown at NAB 2010 does nor have a slow ASA speed. We are used to cameras which have a maximum speed of 500. Most cameras like the first generation RED rated out at 320 and I know a lot of people that rated them at 240. All of the cameras announced like the Epic from red, the ARRI Alexa, and the Aaton penelope digital start at ASA 800. That means if you rated your RED at 240 you’re getting a huge amount more light in. (for those that don’t understand that’s a lot more than twice the light sensitivity). So this means that were going to stop seeing people expecting us pay huge prices for fast lenses. Fast lenses are difficult to make with quality control worth speaking of and expensive to us because of that. Now i said this is changing and recent cinema lens releases prove companies are thinking this as well.

Take the new Zeiss CP2 compact primes as an example. I handled these lenses at NAB and they are simply gorgeous. Smaller than the giant red primes, a little wide at the front, and very smooth gearing. Unlike the Zeiss superspeeds that most of us are used to which open up to 1.2 most of these only go to a maximum of 2.1 opened up. If you had told me this two years ago I would have said this made them useless for low end production where we are light starved. You want me to shoot a night exterior with only available light and a lens that loses me a stop? Are you crazy? But that was on cameras that did not go cleanly to ISO 2000. Now the cameras pull so much light in at the chip sets that we simply 98% of the time have no need to open up so much. Why spend a fortune on in faster lens when we can just adjust camera sensitivity?

Hark, I hear the cry of many cinematographers saying but what about depth of field! Bah I say! Most of the time on a 35mm style sensor being below 2.8 means half your shots are out of focus and it is a nightmare blown up larger than a couple of feet. I known several film in post that have a huge focus problems from shooting wide open on a large sensor. Step away from the eye piece folks there is no need to shoot everything WTFO (wide the **** open). It is a nasty habit and you should stop it now. So ZEISS feel free to bring us slower beautiful optically gorgeous lenses. I don’t mind if they’re a little slow because if I have to shoot one more scene on a DSLR with a stock lens that has more play in the gears than the city has Starbucks I might be driven mad. Now someday I’ll be able to buy a set of 6 with a case for less than $23-30k.

P.s. I’m not saying fast, super high end lenses won’t have their place. I’d give quite a bit for a set of those stunning Leica cinema lenses I saw the other day. However, if I had that type of money I’d rather buy a house.