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Fellow film tech nerds, if you can't get enough of the ol' Vitrum Cepa this holiday season, settle in for a LONG #NerdyFilmTechStuff post on the lighting rigs we built for the heightened, theatrical, impressionistic lighthouse effect in @RianJohnson's #GlassOnion.
The effect was not merely a random/offhanded thing that we just set spinning and allowed to hit the set whenever chance determined -- rather, every time it occurs, it's pointedly designed to look a certain way and to happen with precise timing to punctuate the drama of the scene. 
We wanted distinct hard edges to the sweep of the light. Even though the edges of the beam of a real lighthouse would be blurry, we wanted very crisp leading and trailing edges...
Reposting here a #NerdyFilmTechStuff thread that was buried in replies. It's about how the stage line is a guiding principle, not an inflexible mandate.
It was originally a reply to someone asking if the cut between these two shots breaks the stage line rule.
It was originally a reply to someone asking if the cut between these two shots breaks the stage line rule.
The stageline is a thumbnail for understanding, not an ironclad law to slavishly follow. One must understand screen direction to know how to break the rule, like a poet has to know grammar before creatively breaking its rules or a cubist painter has to know classical painting.
This scene is a good case in point why understanding the stageline rule is more important than mindlessly following it. The “rule” is actually just a mental shortcut to remember to keep an audience oriented. So they don’t get jolted out of the story...
A #NerdyFilmTechStuff rant:
While we obsess over counting camera photosites, professional imaging is sinking into the quagmire predicted by Goodheart's Law.
While we obsess over counting camera photosites, professional imaging is sinking into the quagmire predicted by Goodheart's Law.
If our intent in demanding more K's (4K, 6K, 8K) is to safeguard resolving power, we're undermining our own intent by evaluating cameras by a metric that’s just a count of circuits across the sensor's surface that ignores their size, precision, technology, sensitivity, quality...
…and even ignores whether the camera is actually recording them (like, if it's brazenly throwing away data in a compression algorithm). And ignores other relevant components like whether the optics in front of the sensor can even resolve the tiny size of individual photosites.
#NerdyFilmTechStuff thread:
I made a graphic about the color rendering in #KnivesOut, to show how pure photometric data from the camera can be translated for display with more complexity and nuance than is often used with generic methods.
The graphic compares:
I made a graphic about the color rendering in #KnivesOut, to show how pure photometric data from the camera can be translated for display with more complexity and nuance than is often used with generic methods.
The graphic compares:
1. Uninterpreted scene data from the camera, not prepped for display.
2. Off-the-shelf (manufacturer bundled) transformation to prepare data to be viewed.
3. #KnivesOut color rendering. (Not a shot-specific color “correction” but the core transformation for the whole project.).
2. Off-the-shelf (manufacturer bundled) transformation to prepare data to be viewed.
3. #KnivesOut color rendering. (Not a shot-specific color “correction” but the core transformation for the whole project.).
Note in the 3D graphs that the off-the-shelf method is more blunt/simple in how it differs from the source data: largely just a uniform rectilinear expansion. Whereas the #KnivesOut method differs from both in more unintuitive, idiosyncratic, nuanced ways:
yedlin.net/KnivesOut_Colo…
yedlin.net/KnivesOut_Colo…
