Will The Creator change how blockbusters get filmed?

[IronFilm]

wow, they're filming FOUR HOURS of content per 10hr day (ref: 22 minute in)

That's fast paced. 

Another note: 80 locations in Thailand

31-ish minutes in he highlights how he's very comfortable with ARRI and that's his preference, and he points out how even an ARRI ALEXA Mini package can shrink or grow in size. So it wouldn't be hard to shrink down the ALEXA Mini shooting package to match a similar shooting style as The Creator has. 

Shoot the vast bulk on an ARRI, and mix in a little bit from some other cameras. 

You could do say:

2x shoulder rigs for the ARRI Mini (easy to jump onto a tripod, or easyrig as well). 

1x ARRI Mini full time setup for the steadicam

1x Blackmagic Pocket 6K Pro PL stripped down on a gimbal. 

3x Blackmagic Pocket 6K Pro PL for crash cams etc

1x Blackmagic Pocket 6K Pro PL on a scissor crane (the poor man's technocrane, also, the vastly more portable "technocrane"!):

Oren Soffer mentioned they used this (well, not this particular model! They probably used a much more expensive one). As it is massively more portable than a technocrane, which they couldn't even get into some locations they were shooting on. 

 

[JulioD]

The director Garth Davis is well known for operating on his own films.

The decision was likely made by you know...the director.  And his long time collaborator Greig Fraser ACS ASC who knows a bit about making nice pictures.  Greig had to leave to do Dune and so Oren inherited the choices already made.  Likely he would have known them before committing to replace Greig.

[IronFilm]

1 hour ago, JulioD said:

The decision was likely made by you know...the director.

Exactly, it wasn't a DoP lead decision to use a FX3

[JulioD]

35 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Exactly, it wasn't a DoP lead decision to use a FX3

Err..well maybe it was the director with the original DP?  And Oren signed up for it as a condition of employment.  I’m not sure why you have such a problem with the choice, you keep saying it should have been something else.  There are so many reasons why they made the choice.  You might not agree with why but THEY made the choice and you don’t know all the thinking that went into that choice

[IronFilm]

I'm just pointing out it was a rather unique mix of reasons, such as the director being a major push for it, that the FX3 was chosen. It's certainly not going to be a common decision choice moving forward at all, as still 99% of the time people will prefer other higher end cameras instead. Due to the many downsides of the FX3, and the relatively small costs aspect vs others being rather irrelevant. 

Or to answer the subject title of this thread itself:

"Will The Creator change how blockbusters get filmed?"

No.

[JulioD]

8 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

I'm just pointing out it was a rather unique mix of reasons, such as the director being a major push for it, that the FX3 was chosen. It's certainly not going to be a common decision choice moving forward at all, as still 99% of the time people will prefer other higher end cameras instead. Due to the many downsides of the FX3, and the relatively small costs aspect vs others being rather irrelevant. 

Or to answer the subject title of this thread itself:

"Will The Creator change how blockbusters get filmed?"

No.

The problem is that the question is wrong.  It’s not a blockbuster.  The cost of production was more indie.  I’ve seen numbers like 7 million.  The rest of the headline budget cost was in post.

This is a very specific scenario with a particular methodology of a particular director.  

The real question is, could they have gotten the same results using a more conventional approach.  I think the answer is no.

 

 

 

[MrSMW]

I think the answer is no also. 

Probably only a handful of people in the world, geeks such as ourselves know, and even less, care.

There is a certain kudos to owning/using an FX3 just as there was with the S1H being the first Netflix approved mirrorless camera, but we’d be delusional if we thought by just owning these things, our work would look Exactly The Same.

I doubt if anyone else gives a shit and it seems more a case of because they could. So did.

Goes off to look at prices of used FX3’s just in case…

[kye]

7 hours ago, JulioD said:

The problem is that the question is wrong.  It’s not a blockbuster.  The cost of production was more indie.  I’ve seen numbers like 7 million.  The rest of the headline budget cost was in post.

This is a very specific scenario with a particular methodology of a particular director.  

The real question is, could they have gotten the same results using a more conventional approach.  I think the answer is no.

I disagree - the budget is the budget - it doesn't matter the split between production and post.

If I get my iPhone and walk through a shopping centre and record a 90 minute single take, then go home and spend $50M turning that clip into an action film by replacing everything with VFX, then that's still a blockbuster film, I still filmed it, and the question is relevant.

The answer to the question is no, but that answer has nothing to do with the camera.  This thread discussed the camera used to shoot the film because this forum only ever talks about cameras.  You could start a thread asking if AI will use GMOs to fix poverty in sub-saharan Africa and we would discuss the camera used to shoot AI videos.

[kye]

Interestingly, I watched this video which talks about how "No CGI" normally means "a shitload of invisible CGI".

TLDW; one example shows Tom Cruise repeatedly saying they shot the fighter plan scenes with "no CGI", but the final images only contained planes that were completely added in post or added in post to replace planes that were actually flown.  None of the planes flown in the shoot were visible in the final image.  "No CGI" indeed.  Lots of other examples...

[IronFilm]

14 hours ago, JulioD said:

The problem is that the question is wrong.  It’s not a blockbuster.  The cost of production was more indie.  I’ve seen numbers like 7 million.  The rest of the headline budget cost was in post.

Good point! It makes the question a little flawed perhaps. 

As while the total budget was vaguely within the low to maybe almost average-ish range for blockbuster film, the actual production budget itself (i.e. excluding post-production) was squarely within indie budget filmmaking land. 

14 hours ago, JulioD said:

This is a very specific scenario with a particular methodology of a particular director.  

Exactly! That's very much so what I've been saying all along. 

14 hours ago, JulioD said:

The real question is, could they have gotten the same results using a more conventional approach.  I think the answer is no.

On this point though, we'll disagree. 

Especially if we go with the hybrid approach I suggest above, where the bulk is shot with ALEXA Minis, with BMD Pocket 6K Pros supplementing it. 

What change is really needed here at all? Upgrading a gimbal op to a steadicam op, and getting perhaps maybe one or two more ACs, and maybe another grip. Maybe. 

These are rounding errors in their overall budget. 

If they were shooting super ultra lightweight stripped down, with just Sony mirrorless cameras, relying up Sony's AF without any 1st ACs pulling focus, using the internal 4K 10bit and not external recorders, and not using any video transmitters etc either on their rigs, not using hefty anamorphic lenses, etc etc etc... then I think I agree with you!

There would be a far too big a contrast between the way they shot vs ALEXA Minis. 

But that wasn't the way they did it, if you look at images of how for instance their FX3 shoulder rig was set up, then it isn't much of a leap to how a more minimal ALEXA Mini set up would be. It's not a gigantic leap of galaxy sized proportions, but rather a baby step up. 

[IronFilm]

13 hours ago, MrSMW said:

Probably only a handful of people in the world, geeks such as ourselves know, and even less, care.

There is a certain kudos to owning/using an FX3 just as there was with the S1H being the first Netflix approved mirrorless camera, but we’d be delusional if we thought by just owning these things, our work would look Exactly The Same.

Agreed.

They just had a bit different box capturing the photos and turning it into bits. 

The impression I got is that the way they filmed The Creator wasn't that massively different to how "traditional filmmaking" is done (which covers a very broad scope of productions! Yes, they were at one extreme of it, but they were still well within "traditional filmmaking". For instance, I worked on a micro budget short film shot on an ARRI ALEXA Mini, that the DoP wanted to shoot only at golden hour. So we would split our days to cover both. Was this unusual? Yes, but we still more or less were doing "traditional filmmaking". That's what The Creator also did, they did "traditional filmmaking" but with one or two twists of their own. It wasn't radically different though to the normal way we always do things) 

6 hours ago, kye said:

I disagree - the budget is the budget - it doesn't matter the split between production and post.

If I get my iPhone and walk through a shopping centre and record a 90 minute single take, then go home and spend $50M turning that clip into an action film by replacing everything with VFX, then that's still a blockbuster film, I still filmed it, and the question is relevant.

So if your argument is that we're going to see the split of production vs post budgets shift towards a ratio that's even more heavier towards post?

Not sure if I agree with that. But I reckon as AI and other advances makes post ever more powerful, then we'll certainly see even "more" done in post vs on location on the day itself. (even if the ratio of the budget splits don't drastically shift from what is normal now) 

6 hours ago, kye said:

You could start a thread asking if AI will use GMOs to fix poverty in sub-saharan Africa and we would discuss the camera used to shoot AI videos.

I could talk for hours about using AI and cameras in farming... lots of potential there!

One of my recent uni compsci assignments I was writing about exactly this, using cameras + AI (to filter and interpret the vast amounts of data coming in from the dozens/hundreds of camera feeds) to improve farming efficiencies. 

6 hours ago, kye said:

Interestingly, I watched this video which talks about how "No CGI" normally means "a shitload of invisible CGI".

 

You have good taste Sir in your YT watching, or rather the same as mine! haha

I watched this video last night. Waiting eagerly for Part 2!

Wanted to watch more videos done by "The Movie Rabbit Hole", but surprisingly that's the only video on his channel! He's got over twenty thousand subscribers just on the basis of that one video?? wow 

[kye]

18 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

The impression I got is that the way they filmed The Creator wasn't that massively different to how "traditional filmmaking" is done (which covers a very broad scope of productions! Yes, they were at one extreme of it, but they were still well within "traditional filmmaking". For instance, I worked on a micro budget short film shot on an ARRI ALEXA Mini, that the DoP wanted to shoot only at golden hour. So we would split our days to cover both. Was this unusual? Yes, but we still more or less were doing "traditional filmmaking". That's what The Creator also did, they did "traditional filmmaking" but with one or two twists of their own. It wasn't radically different though to the normal way we always do things) 

I agree - it wasn't that different.

I've spoken at length to a few in PMs about this and I find it a fascinating subject, but I see modern film-making having three pivotal points.  There are probably others, but these are the ones I'm aware of.

1) The French New Wave, which was (how I see it anyway) an exploration of new possibilities of 16mm film that weren't possible with 35mm film.  In many ways they took the traditional "coverage" of Hollywood and radically expanded it to include almost all the techniques used in modern film-making.

2) The DSLR revolution

This is pretty much what this forum is for, and what we talk about.

The tricky thing about this is that it didn't deliver what people thought it would.  They thought it would mean that anyone could film a movie with a camera and no money at all and that there would be another revolution in cinema like the FNW part 2, but this didn't happen.  

What we got instead, and this is my impression, was TikTok, YouTube, influencers, live streaming / Twitch, etc, which are all new forms of film-making (despite how creative or worthwhile you might think they are) because they all involve video recordings made into final products and distributed to an audience.

The promise was real though, and people like Noam Kroll have mapped out a path for up-ending a lot of the traditional processes.  One particular process that he's put forward that I really like, and WOULD change film-making is:

• Come up with a concept for the film, restricted to things you already have access to (cast, locations, etc)
• Cast the film
• Work out half-a-dozen or so sections with major plot points for the film, even in very high-level terms
• Workshop the characters with the actors, develop a concept for the first section
• Shoot the first section, involve lots of improvisation from the cast, potentially not even writing a script beforehand
• Edit the first section, see what worked and what didn't, concentrate on the performances
• Develop/update the concept for the second section
• Shoot and edit that one, once again with improvisation and concentrating on performances

IIRC Noam shot a film like this and ended up giving the two main actors writing credits too.  He mentioned that he made a lot of adjustments to later sections based on what worked and didn't from earlier ones, and I have a vague memory that during some improvisational parts the actors did while on location, he even ended up changing some major plot points to replace them with more interesting ones inspired by the process.

This is the kind of thing that would change the future of film-making.  Not having a new camera body.

3) AI

The third pivotal point I foresee will be AI.  Anyone who has watched any (decent) anime will know that writers in anime have been enjoying the freedom to create worlds without any practical limitation for over a century now.  Up until the last few decades no-one could do that with realistic motion pictures, and right now it's mostly limited to those with huge budgets or with incredible skill and huge amounts of free time.

AI will change that.

The ability to shoot anything you like, however flawed, and just have AI add and remove and bend and change what you shot into whatever your imagination can come up with will be groundbreaking, just like the freedom that anime artists have enjoyed solely until recently.  When AI can create Inception from your iPhone footage, things will be unleashed.

However, much like we saw with the DSLR revolution, there will be other forms of film-making that are invented too, like deep-fakes, alternate histories, and who-knows-what else.

18 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

So if your argument is that we're going to see the split of production vs post budgets shift towards a ratio that's even more heavier towards post? 

No.

18 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

You have good taste Sir in your YT watching, or rather the same as mine! haha

I watch a lot of YT.  Far more than streaming sites.

I do try and include lots of film-making stuff, as well as a great many other interesting and niche things.

The world is a fascinating place!!

[IronFilm]

50 minutes ago, kye said:

• Come up with a concept for the film, restricted to things you already have access to (cast, locations, etc)

Cheapest place to save money in a film! When writing the script. 

50 minutes ago, kye said:

• Workshop the characters with the actors, develop a concept for the first section

Second cheapest: during extensive rehearsals. 

 

51 minutes ago, kye said:

AI will change that.

Yes, the opportunity to easily replace entire backgrounds, or add in whole new objects, all at a massively lower cost  will be a big time change for indies. 

[JulioD]

6 hours ago, IronFilm said:

 

On this point though, we'll disagree. 

Especially if we go with the hybrid approach I suggest above, where the bulk is shot with ALEXA Minis, with BMD Pocket 6K Pros supplementing it. 

What change is really needed here at all? Upgrading a gimbal op to a steadicam op, and getting perhaps maybe one or two more ACs, and maybe another grip. Maybe. 

No.

Full frame Anamorphic on a unique inverted hand held prosumer gimbal?  Not going to happen. None of those cameras do it. The full frame 6K wasn’t dropped till just now.

Alexa mini LF can be made small, but they aren’t THAT small and you still have to power them with some giant umbilical cord and it would never balance with full frame Anamorphics on that gimbal.  Stop saying that it’s the same when it is no where near the same.

 

[IronFilm]

Zero need whatsoever to shoot in LF format!

This film could have been done with normal S35

[kye]

6 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Cheapest place to save money in a film! When writing the script. 

Second cheapest: during extensive rehearsals. 

Yes, the opportunity to easily replace entire backgrounds, or add in whole new objects, all at a massively lower cost  will be a big time change for indies. 

I agree, but would go further and say that not only will AI radically reduce the cost to make a film you could make now, it will also make films possible that really aren't possible (or aren't practically possible) now.

So in that sense it doesn't just reduce costs, it expands the possibilities to be practically infinite.

[JulioD]

6 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Zero need whatsoever to shoot in LF format!

This film could have been done with normal S35

That not your choice my guy. 
 

they wanted to shoot with 135 format anamophic lenses. 
 

It’s like saying Dark Knight could have shot S35 and didn’t need all that imax.  
 

 

[IronFilm]

7 hours ago, JulioD said:

That not your choice my guy. 
 

they wanted to shoot with 135 format anamophic lenses. 
 

It’s like saying Dark Knight could have shot S35 and didn’t need all that imax.  
 

 

I doubt the lens choice drove the camera choice.

It would've been the other way around, the camera choice limited their lens options to that narrow range of lenses to pick from.

[Llaasseerr]

18 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Zero need whatsoever to shoot in LF format!

This film could have been done with normal S35

Yes, the film could have gotten the same 4-perf anamorphic film back and FOV as they got with the final 2.66 crop image on the FX3 if they had used an Alexa Mini with the 4:3 option. Really any old Alexa that shoots 4:3 is designed for traditional 35mm anamorphic lenses for 4-perf film, but a full frame sensor that only shoots 16:9 which is so ubiquitous now is going to give you the same kind of coverage when you crop the sides. With the asterisk that they did in fact create anamorphic 135 masters for some venues.

In the end, the sensor in the FX3 is the only affordable full frame with fast rolling shutter that is very close to the speed of an Alexa and is also able to shoot the full 4-perf anamorphic height, and housed in a compact body.

So then it comes down to the weight of the rig. And I get it if the director is also operating a lot on long shoot days, he would have been extra exhausted at the end of the day with an Alexa Mini rig considering he also mentioned he felt like he was a bit of a wimp.

11 hours ago, JulioD said:

 

they wanted to shoot with 135 format anamophic lenses. 
 

 

I will say that the fact they didn't crop the sides on ingest and instead released a super duper wide 32:9 version in some venues blows my mind, because the first thing the producers will do to save money on vfx is crop into the image to cut down on the "world building".

 

3 hours ago, IronFilm said:

I doubt the lens choice drove the camera choice.

It would've been the other way around, the camera choice limited their lens options to that narrow range of lenses to pick from.

The Kowa anamorphics are famously compact. Back in the 60's Japanese new wave directors were doing extensive handheld anamorphic work in their films while Hollywood only had their huge rigs. So I get why the Kowa lens was chosen. Besides that, they do have a beautiful look.

 

[Clark Nikolai]

On 11/17/2023 at 12:11 AM, kye said:

 

• Come up with a concept for the film, restricted to things you already have access to (cast, locations, etc)

I've heard this called "Availableism". Using what's available to you to determine what's in the story. It's something that has been done since the beginning of cinema really. The advantages over writing whatever then spending money to obtain those things is that it's cheaper. You use what you have around you. The other advantage is that it can be about a certain subculture and made by the people in that subculture giving it an "authenticity" I suppose.

 

On 11/17/2023 at 12:11 AM, kye said:

• Cast the film
• Work out half-a-dozen or so sections with major plot points for the film, even in very high-level terms
• Workshop the characters with the actors, develop a concept for the first section
• Shoot the first section, involve lots of improvisation from the cast, potentially not even writing a script beforehand
• Edit the first section, see what worked and what didn't, concentrate on the performances
• Develop/update the concept for the second section
• Shoot and edit that one, once again with improvisation and concentrating on performances

This is a good approach I've used a lot producing short art videos. In the mid '90s I applied for an arts grant for a feature length video (FLV) to be shot in S-VHS, using this exact method. I had the themes figured out and the cast, who were playing characters based on themselves, a skeleton of a story but no details figured out. This would be done with the workshopping as we went. No script but notes about what would happen in the scene and how it would end. The actors improvising.

Anyway, the arts grant jury were all traditional film people and they thought this approach was sloppy and likely to fail. They were so used to the cost of shooting film determining the level of planning needed (in those days there was a big divide between video art and film art,). I didn't get the grant (But I'm not bitter... Anymore.)

I ended up making it as a short video out of my own pocket a year later having wasted all that time and effort in the application that could have gone into just making the thing a year earlier.