If you’re one of the 23 million who have seen the Top 10 iTunes WTF (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO_3Qgib6RQ) video of Missy Elliot featuring Pharrell Williams, you likely recognize the signature moves and grooves director Dave Meyers lent to the comeback queen’s rap performance. This year Scott Cunningham, his director of photography and long-time producer, is adding his own visual influence to Elliot’s storied career.
Anthony Dod Mantle, ASC, BSC, DFF, director Ron Howard's cinematographer on the 1970s Formula 1 adrenaline film Rush, was charged with creating the arresting visuals for In the Heart of the Sea. The logistics of the film, much of which involved the liberal use of water, were daunting. “Shooting a film outside, in English weather, and trying to break the film down into blocks where I could maintain continuity between exterior tanks, interior tanks and real locations – that was quite a big deal,” Dod Mantle says still with a sense of awe.
Members of Toronto’s motion picture and television production community got a first-hand look at Panasonic’s new 4K Ultra HD digital cinema camera, the VariCam 35, in a special technology demonstration hosted by Sim Digital.
InVisage Technologies has named Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC to the InVisage advisory board. Lubezki is the cinematographer of numerous award-winning films including Gravity (2013) and Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014). Lubezki is the company’s first artistic advisor and will help shape and fine-tune the specifications of upcoming InVisage QuantumFilm camera image sensors for Smart phones and mobile devices.
Warm Springs Productions of Missoula, Montana, currently producing more than 75 hours of programming on various television networks, has just begun shooting the second season of the Fox News Channel docudrama series, Legends and Lies, with a pair of Panasonic VariCam 35 4K camera/recorders.
Fashion video content producer/publisher Adriana Kaegi recently shot extensive 4K coverage of New York Fashion Week. Kaegi is a featured channel partner on AOL.com Style Addytude, with eight million monthly viewers, and her company Addy.media was the first to do live streaming and VOD of the New York, Paris and Milan Fashion Weeks.
Sony today confirmed that filmmaker Woody Allen has chosen Sony CineAlta for his first ever-digital shoot. For this special project, Allen will be shooting with Sony’s CineAlta F65 camera and the film will be mastered in 4K. The F65 has long been the choice among filmmakers around the world, including critically acclaimed cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who will be working with Allen on the currently untitled film.
Ant-Man is a comic-book superhero that uses a special suit to shrink in size while gaining in strength. In the latest Marvel creation for the big screen, Ant-Man’s adventures involve a battle against a foe that uses similar technology for nefarious ends. The project, directed by Peyton Reed and photographed by Russell Carpenter ASC, extends the strong and successful working relationship between Marvel and Codex. Issues of scale and how to convincingly present it to the audience dominated most of the decisions about cinematography and visual effects. For guidance, the filmmakers looked at films with similar characters going all the way back to Darby O’Gill and the Little People, photographed with extensive forced perspective and giant props in 1959 by Winton Hoch ASC.
Two-time Oscar nominee John Mathieson BSC (Gladiator, The Phantom of the Opera, Robin Hood, 47 Ronin) recently completed work on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., an update of the stylish 1960s television series of the same name. Mathieson says that he would have preferred to shoot film, but that the demise of some of the major film laboratories in the U.K. made it impossible. He did shoot a little bit of 16mm film on a wind-up Bolex (processed at Bucks Laboratories) for the opening of the film, to bridge some archival footage from the period with the main storyline. In some ways, the colors and textures of the period production design lent themselves to digital, he says.
The Digital Cinema Society has partnered with DPS Cinema to present an in-depth look at their Enhanced Environments system. The one-day invitation only event brings together for the very first time DPS Cinema’s Enhanced Environments, Panasonic's VariCam 35, and the new Codex Raw Recorder. The event will be held Saturday, August 8th at the DPS Grid @ Los Angeles.
