Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire winning the Oscar for Cinematography last night is meaningful to me in two nerdy ways.

First, Slumdog was partly shot with a digital cinema camera—the SI 2K Mini from Silicon Imaging. No, not just the game show footage, also some of the wild chases through the slums of Mumbai.

But mostly what I love about Slumdog winning is the clips played all throughout the Academy Awards ceremonies. Of course the awards show highlights only the most emotionally resonant moments of the film (there are so many to choose from, it is a magnificent movie). And those emotional moments, almost without exception, featured key shots captured at 12 frames per second (or less) and double-printed for a staccato, dreamy feel.

That's right, in order to enhance the emotion, director Danny Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle showed less. They showed less and communicated more.

This is a scary time for people who love the way movies look. Technicians are proposing all kinds of ways to shore up what they see as film's deficiencies; 8K cameras, 48 and even 60 fps acquisition, 270 degree shutters, and 120Hz motion smoothing in televisions. People who should know better are being led to believe that more resolution, more funny glasses, and more frames-per-second will make movies better.

Any TV you buy today will probably have that infernal motion smoothing turned on by default, so that you can enjoy your favorite films re-imaged as if they were PBS specials from 1983. Nobody seems to remember that audiences wouldn't accept video frame rates in dramatic narrative entertainment. We didn't want our cinema to look like soap operas before 24p HD cameras, and we don't now.

I've avoided blogging about this issue mostly because I just have so damn much to say about it that I don't know where to start. But Slumdog gave me a simple way in by showing that, in the hands of a gifted filmmaker, half as many frames-per-second can mean double the emotional impact.

Not will, just can. You must have the story to tell, of course. And if you do, guess what the audience doesn't care about? "Judder," flicker, and wagon-wheels going backward. But strangely, they do seem to care that their movies look like movies, not plays.

So television engineers and home theater nerds with nothing better to do, please stop trying to find ways to make movies more like reality. As you can see from this year's cinematography Oscar winner, film is at its best when it is unmistakeably unreal.

Venomocity

Last year I had the great fun of working with the Phoenix-based agency Riester on a series of three anti-smoking spots for the Arizona Bureau of Tobacco Education and Prevention. The finished spots were held up briefly, but finally airing in Arizona. Here are all three—click through to view them in fancy YouTube HD (link is below and to the right of the movie)!

You may notice that some of the footage appears to be hand-cranked. In fact, the entire spot was shot on the Panavision Genesis, a camera that quite prominently lacks a hand crank. So my DP (the brilliant Carlos Veron) and I shot the hand-crank sections at an even 50 fps (the Genesis's max), and then editor Gregory Nussbaum (of Pictures in a Row) and I ran the shots through the very same hand-crank After Effects project that I included in The DV Rebel's Guide.

Of course, some of the hand-cranked shots contain visual effects (supervised by Ryan Tudhope). As I told the crew at the kickoff meeting, it's not a Stu job unless we're doing something annoying with time. Ryan's animators actually worked at 50 fps on the original plate, and then rendered only the frames called for by the hand-crank retiming curve. This allowed them to be as surprised and annoyed by the hand-crank effect as the live action crew!

By shooting at 50 fps, we got smoother 24p results from the hand-crank effect, as it had more frames to pull from. You can do the same if your camera has a 60p or 60i mode (50 for PAL), as most do. All of this is explained in The Guide.

Carlos also shot wide-open much of the time. The combination of Super35 sensor, overcranking, and wide dynamic range (since we'd be shooting outdoors in direct sun) meant that the Genesis was really the only digital camera I felt we could use for this campaign. We almost didn't get one, which would have meant resorting to, gasp, film!

Orphanage colorist Aaron Rhodes graded the spots in Film Master, creating LUTs that the VFX artists used to preview their work with proper color. We used much the same workflow as we did on The Spirit.

These spots have everything I love, performance, cinematography, and a worthwhile message. I'm proud of them and delighted that I can finally share them with you. You can also watch them in their native habitat on the very cool web site developed to anchor the campaign: venomocity.com.

Orphanage Animation Studios

How about some good news? It's business as usual at Orphanage Animation Studios. Led by the singular animation talent Genndy Tartakovsky, OAS is a separate company from The Orphanage, Inc., and is busy working on some amazing stuff.

Thank you all for the amazing comments on The Orphanage's sad announcement. The outpouring of positive feelings is truly overwhelming.

Ten Years of The Orphanage

Today I had the heart-wrenching task of joining my co-founders Scott Stewart and Jonathan Rothbart in announcing that The Orphanage will be suspending operations indefinitely. We started the company ten years ago, tripled in size each year for our first three years, and worked on some of the biggest and best effects movies made. We produced shorts and even features, we spawned a commercial division and an animation company, and we hung out in the halls with Frank Miller, Ethan Hawke, and M.C. Hammer. We did DI before it was called DI, we gave birth to Magic Bullet, and we did really, really good work.

But that's not what matters the most.

It's no accident that our company's name described a place for people, people who may be thrown together, but who ultimately create their own destinies. Scott once described his vision of an orphanage as "a hundred success stories waiting to happen," and that is exactly what came to pass inside our offices. We have had the privilege of working with many "Orphans" over the years, and watching them grow and take on new responsibilities has been the single greatest part of coming to work every day.

A message to the visual effects industry: You will never find a better employee than a former Orphan.

And to the Orphans: It has been a privilege and an honor to work with you.