Zak Forsman

belongs to a friend of mine. he's a DP and invited me over to have a look. he's only had it a couple days. shot a few clips. plan to do more in a couple weeks after it comes back from a rental.

wait, what's this?!?!?

yeah, GS is the hold-up for both the URSA Mini 4.6K and the Micro Cinema Camera. I hope that (A) they ship soon and GS can be activated in a firmware update, or (B) both cameras' GS issues are so identical that they can be sorted and implemented at the same time.

I'm going to go ahead and say it. This $1,000 camera looks slightly better to me than the URSA Mini 4.6 footage I've been seeing -- in terms of color rendition and motion cadence. That's a matter of taste to be sure but damn it if it doesn't make sacrificing resolution a no-brainer for such a beautiful cinematic image. I have one pre-ordered. Maybe i should sell my Pocket and get two of these.

yeah, all my recent uploads default to 'auto' now. have a Plus account.

done. and i didn't even swear.

there's the disconnect. i'm in a rare place where the file-sharing of my movie helped raise its profile. i think my piracy issues were a benefit in some ways and the loss of potential revenue was negligible. i'm not unhappy that my last film was torrented. but i'm worried about the next one. and the one after that. we're talking about how i make a living after all.

that's right, piracy is not currently an issue for my movie. Down and Dangerous was a micro-budget title released *two years ago* to the day (we opened on Feb 14, 2014). the height of its piracy/file-sharing issues were during the crucial opening quarter. basing your assessment on what is now a library title, doesn't convince me of... i don't know, anything really. and of course it comes with your characteristic and underhanded insults, which you have been weaving into your posts here for years. but i'm not beneath fighting fire with fire so i'll happily do the same and point out that taking shots at people who risk failure is typical behavior for *sideline naysayers* not actively taking their own bumps and bruises in this arena. what you find amongst fellow doers is a sense of empathy and optimism and a more nurturing form of criticism. and here's a big surprise for you! no one knows the flaws of my movie better than me. hell, I'm the jerk who lived and breathed it for two years. more than that, as it's inspired by a brief chapter in my dad's life story. which explains why the title's anagram is D.A.D. i know where I succeeded. I know where i stumbled. and more importantly, I know how to do it better next time. side rant: why people expect filmmakers to emerge fully-formed is beyond me. no one is given an opportunity to grow into better storytellers anymore -- to close that gap between the vision in their heads and their ability to execute it in the real world. it didn't used to be that way. I think it was steven soderbergh who said that he wouldn't have a career if he started out today because no one is forgiven when they fail anymore. i'm familiar with the story behind marianne. they had a tough go of it. piracy hit them harder than it hit me. I got through it relatively unscathed as my movie has grossed four times its meager budget. what worries me is as i embark on larger endeavors with more money at risk, its cast and genre appeal will be stronger, and so will its piracy-appeal. and i'm not experienced enough to know where the tipping point lies, meaning, the point where piracy makes things untenable. I currently feel safe in the micro-budget world because I think we've cracked the nut of making it profitable as well as creatively fulfilling. thank you for pointing out the movie is up on youtube. the uploader applied an aggressive vignette to the whole thing making it pretty much unwatchable. issued a takedown. the slow wheels at youtube will likely have it down in a few days. what follows is usually an angry message from the uploader, pissed at me because youtube closed their account. to your last point... what I believe you are missing is that piracy doesn't only affect existing titles. it greatly reduces the number of low and mid-budget movies that get made in favor of tentpole pictures because they are a riskier, execution-dependent, proposition. if the last 100 hundred years of produced movies had been influenced by piracy the way they are now, that list would look very different. now please excuse me, I have a screenplay rewrite to get back to. it's about a guy who goes out into the streets to pick fights with strangers as a way to punish himself. which means I can chalk up my time here to: "research".

i think it's clear what his intent was. the studio accounting has been painfully slow. all i know at this point is a projection that it has grossed in the neighborhood of high five figures or low six figures internationally so far. domestic is separate from that.

actually, on opening weekend, most of the ticket for major and mini-major studio titles goes to the distributor. the longer a film plays, the more the cut swings in the theater's favor. This is why concessions are priced so high. The theater isn't making much on new titles so they have to make up for it in popcorn sales.

kaylee is officially my favorite person.

good night, brave troll. and it's spelled "genius", genius. The movie was distributed by paramount internationally. that included both those countries and whatever rock you just crawled back under.

around the time of the release of the movie, the total seeds for all the torrents i could find was just over 10,000. i don't know how high it got. The Turkish YouTube upload had just crossed 100,000 views when i discovered it (it had been up for more than a month). A torrent was also likely used to make bootleg Blu-rays that one of my actors found in Hong Kong. ps - fuck you, you belittling asshole.

well, i think you're misinformed about that. just about everything is up there. from Tarkovsky to Dr. Who episodes, from BAFTA award nominees to B-movies. even my own movie was torrented one week before its US release from the VOD broadcast in sweden. and mine is just a $50,000 microbudget crime drama made by a crew of six on an AF100. hell, I've had to submit takedown notices to YouTube because people in Thailand and Turkey posted the entire movie on their channel.

haha, are you crazy? you want to sacrifice everything interesting in the cinema world for huge, safe, superhero movies? because DP is right. it's the big tent pole pictures that stand to survive this. what we'll lose and are already losing are the mid-budget and low budget pictures that were positioned to tell more unique stories from more diverse points of view. If i had to choose, I'd much rather have it the other way around.

thanks kaylee.

hmm... i wonder...

A friendly piece of advice. There are some red flags in your post that experienced editors will be sensitive to. Specifically, the notion of sitting together for the duration of the edit and looking over their shoulder for every creative decision that's made. That's rarely conducive to an editor doing their best work. So, be sure you are looking for a professional editor and not someone to push the buttons for you. It's not the same thing.

yes, that's the main appeal for me. you have the combination of an increased field of view while retaining the compressed space of the longer focal length. a 40mm anamorphic lens has the horizontal field of view of a 20mm spherical lens.

you make the bmpcc sound used here, but have it listed as new on ebay. and for $100 more than you can buy it new... anywhere else. what's going on here?

these are the green reflections I'm talking about. this guy was handholding the filters so it looks even worse here. but my problem was that the color rarely compliments the scene and if the camera is moving, the reflections move in the opposite direction (because science) which is a distraction I don't want in a movie. also, they don't look like flares, they are actual reflections of bright objects elsewhere in the frame. it's not a constant problem, but I like to use a strong backlight in many cases, and if that happens to be a practical in the frame, it becomes a restriction I'm not too keen on. That being said, you'll see in later clips in this same video, it is great at lowering contrast to different degrees.

something to consider, when the URSA Mini 4.6K is released, its 3K anamorphic mode won't be 4:3, rather, it will be 6:5 so that 2x anamorphic lenses desqueeze perfectly to a 2.39:1 aspect ratio.

no sorry. that only comes from shooting wide open (or near wide open). anamorphic lenses stopped down will show bokeh that's been shaped by the blades.

i went a couple rounds with SmallHD, trying to get them to add custom scaling back to their monitors (the DP6 had it) but alas, they never did. Convergent Design has the best implementation for 2x and 1.5x because they will also push in for a center crop of a 2.39:1 aspect ratio. makes the most of the monitor's real estate. I'm sure they'd be pretty open to accommodating a 1.8x setting in one of their updates. They're good at listening to their customer's needs.

I was just relaying that info from the description on Vimeo.