April Showers website a treasure of information

I was looking at some of the films coming to our local film festival, the Nashville Film Festival, (which I won’t be attending much since they scheduled most of it the same week as NAB!) and I came across a film screening this Saturday called April Showers. It’s not a light little comedy but rather a drama about a Columbine-like school shooting. The synopsis from the film’s website:

From writer/director, Andrew Robinson, a survivor of the Columbine High School tragedy, comes April Showers a dramatized retelling of what it was like to be a survivor in the midst of the nation’s largest school shootings. Based largely on actual events, April Showers follows the story of Sean Ryan (Kelly Blatz, Prom Night) as he and fellow survivors attempt to make sense of the horrors they’ve just witnessed and, for Sean, coping with the loss of his friend April (Ellen Woglom, Viva Laughlin).

Besides looking like an important film with very topical subject matter, one other thing that makes this movie worth a blog post are many of the resources available on the film’s official website.

UPDATE A found video from RED’s headquarters?

Whooo Hoooo!!!!! Today I got my first ever “takedown” notice for a blog entry! I guess if you write about and cover any industry that deals in product launches and trade secrets for long enough then you will eventually post something that someone doesn’t like. Usually it’s just an opinion of some software or a certain hardware product but every now and then you might be posting something that really shouldn’t have been posted in the first place. Apparently that’s what happened yesterday when I posted a link to a video that a recent new Twitter follower had posted of an event at RED headquarters. Apparently he wasn’t supposed to be videoing this event as some powers-that-be at RED asked for the video and links to be removed. The video really didn’t show that much especially now that the RED ONE is out in full force in the world. But hey, the last thing I have time to worry about or mess with is some lawyer with too much time on his/her hands harassing me for linking to some other dude’s illegally obtained video. So off the link goes. Of course with the Internet these days, is any video really gone for good?

So I got a new Twitter follower recently and as I was poking around his website and I saw this link to 4 new movies.  One of those links was titled RED HQ. From Nathan’s RED HQ entry:

I got to go “somewhere near LA” and check out the inside of Red’s HQ, where the RED ONE camera was born. They showed us a couple of 4K movies, and offered hands on training with the camera and post software. It was insanely cool. In addition to that, I also went to Mexico, which has some interesting shots. Also check out the still images from the trip Right Here.

Nathan posted a video to some time he spent at RED’s headquarters (or some other very official RED looking event). The camera wanders around and shows RED ONE cameras, parts and pieces, a big projector on some scaffolding as well as what looks to be Red Leader Jim Jannard himself discussing the camera in an informal setting, cigar in hand. I don’t know anything more about the footage than what is on the poster’s website but it was kinda fun to wander around the place. Anyhoo ...

The GT35pro meets the RED camera

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to take part in a RED camera test with my friends at Compass Cinema. We went out to local camera rental house CameraTrux and where they had set-up their RED with an assortment of lenses as said “test away!” Since I’m a post guy I take every opportunity I can to play with cameras and things outside of the edit suite so I took my HV20 and the GT35pro adapter along for the ride. When it wasn’t too annoying I tried to shoot some footage along side the RED to compare and contrast with the footage from the GT35pro. I shot footage of the still life as well as the chain link fence outdoors. It’s funny when you think about a 4K camera with some really great lenses being intercut with an under $1,000 consumer HDV camera and vibrating lens adapter and how it shouldn’t seem possible but they actually go together pretty well with the video compressed down for web viewing. The RED footage is a transcode through Clipfinder to 1080 ProRes and the back-to-back shots have been color corrected with Colorista to make them match better ... except for the fence outside. I couldn’t seem to get those tones to match closer. I need to keep reading Steve’s great book The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction

While they look pretty good here on Vimeo I did a test where I took a similarly dark shot of the still life and the red-berry bush outside and did some grading on the RED raw R3Ds in REDAlert vs. the Canon HDV files in Final Cut Pro ... It’s quite the difference in latitude and what you can do with the image. As was to be expected.

The GT35Pro up in the great cold north

For Christmas 2008 my wife and I packed up the car and drove north to see her family. We ended up with Uncle John in Warkworth, Ontario, spending time on a gorgeous farm in the country. It was the perfect place to keep kicking the tires (see the first post about the GT35pro here and the first footage here) on my Canon HV20 with Greg Tay’s GT35pro adapter. Perfect in the sense that this type of shooting is one of the main reasons I like an affordable 35mm lens adapter for this little consumer camera. When I’m kicking around with the family, on a holiday at the beach or just shooting some random images in the neighborhood the option of getting fantastically shallow depth of field and the unique look of the image projected onto an adapter’s ground glass is very appealing. I don’t want lug thousands of dollars worth of high-end adapter, swing-away matte box, carbon-fiber rail system in their own dedicated pelican case around the country just for my own pleasure. It’s nice to have something that can fit in a travel bag or camera case and still yield results that are look good and are especially impressive to the family. You can easily get that out of most all of the lower cost 35mm lens adapters on the market.

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