Bias in the Negative

An interesting article in the Washington Post explores how we’re seeing dark skin in movies more accurately—and beautifully—than ever before.

As “12 Years a Slave” director Steve McQueen said in Toronto after the film’s premiere there, “I remember growing up and seeing Sidney Poitier sweating next to Rod Steiger in ‘In the Heat of the Night,’ and obviously [that was because] it’s very hot in the South. But also he was sweating because he had tons of light thrown on him, because the film stock wasn’t sensitive enough for black skin.”

I saw 12 Years a Slave at the Mill Valley Film Festival, with McQueen in attendance, and it was a profound experience. Everything about the film is superb, including (35mm film) cinematography by Sean Bobbitt(Shame, The Place Beyond the Pines) and color by Tom Poole(Drive, The Grey) at Company 3.

The movie left me with a deep sense of how recent my country’s terrible history of slavery truly is. This article brings that reality home in an unexpected way, by pointing out that it’s only in this decade that we’ve even been able to properly present African American skin in a movie theater.

We are a fledgling civilization, still figuring out the most basic stuff.

M is for Marmalade—Watch and Vote!

Warning! This is a horror short. It’s all scary and stuff. If you are my mom, don’t watch.

I did the color grading for this creepy, wonderful horror short by Gus Krieger. It’s an entry in the ABC’s of Death 2 search for the 26th director competition—if Gus wins, his short will be included in the feature film, a sequel to the orginal ABC’s of Death.

The winner is chosen by Facebook “Likes” (because what could be more horrific than that?), so head on over and put a thumb on it!

Further warning: Gus has given me the OK to write about the process of coloring his film, so watch for that in coming weeks.

Update

on 2013-11-01 05:21 by Stu

Here’s the post on the color grading process!

Creative Cloud? Give Me a Cloud That Can Cook

I’ve got some time on my hands. Twenty-five hours and seven minutes, to be exact.

I’m working on a new short film that I can’t wait to share with you. But I have to wait, because it’s rendering. This thousands-of-frames-long Adobe After Effects project is rendering really, really fast. But also really, really slow. And so I’m waiting for it to finish rendering on one blazing fast (but agonizingly slow) computer.

When I wrote about the After Effects ray-tracing renderer (which this project doesn’t use, by the way), I think I buried perhaps the most important point way at the bottom:

Along with CS6, Adobe unveiled Creative Cloud, which includes subscription pricing for the Creative Suite applications. But is that really what After Effects power-users need from “the cloud?” What if that subscription also gave me access to a cloud-based render farm that is constantly Backblaze-syncing with my work directories and is ready to instantaneously render my 1,000-frame animation on 1,000 virtual machines at the push of a button?

Then what if Adobe removed the button?

It used to be my dream that After Effects would speculatively render my work in the background, using every ounce of my computer’s processing power. Now I want the same thing, but with Adobe supplying the processors. That would be worth a subscription fee.

The “big iron” days are over. Simplicity is the new powerful. Fast is the new good. The computer is the new hardest working guy in the room. Except it’s no longer in the room.

What I want from my Creative Cloud subscription is access to an infinite render farm that I only pay for when I need it. Adobe needs to productize what my friends at Atomic Fiction have built for themselves—an infinitely scalable, virtual render farm—that they’ve never seen with their own eyes.

What I meant by “removing the button” is that Creative Cloud should be like Tony Stark’s Jarvis. “I rendered those 3,000 frames for you sir, would you like to take a look?” This isn’t new technology I’m talking about—it’s simply smart use of existing technology. Which, by the way, is actually what Adobe’s good at.

I’m not a Creative Cloud hater, and quite frankly I find the backlash against it tiresome and paranoid. But Adobe did themselves no favors by launching their cloud initiative first as a new way of paying, without simultaneously offering new functionality made possible only by a massively distributed architecture.

Want to win the hearts, minds, and wallets of your customers Adobe? Make Creative Cloud not just mandatory, but indispensable. And maybe give it a British accent.

I’ll be waiting.

Taking The Movies Out of The Movies

The Hollywood Reporter, in an article called IBC Wrap: “We Would Be Fools if We Didn’t Learn From ‘The Hobbit’”:

Audience reaction to Hollywood’s first high frame rate movie, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was decidedly mixed, but frame rates—along with higher resolution, laser light, immersive sound and second screen experiences were very much on the minds of digital cinema leaders last week at the International Broadcasters Convention.

Audiences didn’t like it, so let’s keep talking about it, and other crap that isn’t movies.

“The audience response might have been mixed, but there were many examples of audience numbers increasing because of the technology, and we could charge a premium for the experience,” [Phil Clapp, president of the International Union of Cinemas] said.

So apparently, what we’d be “fools if we didn’t learn from The Hobbit” is that we can charge more money for stuff people don’t actually like.

Exhibitors, here’s how to take more of my money: build more theaters like the ArcLight, where they show movies—just regular movies—and show them well, and charge me whatever you want for tickets.

ARRI Amira

ARRI knows how to make the perfect camera for right now, instead of an imperfect camera for the future.

No one should care about the “in-camera grading.” But everyone should care about 200 fps of “ALEXA image quality” on a camera designed to be used by humans.

The fervor over the Arri Amira should be a wakeup for real ergo in equipment. No more little boxes. No more cages. Design it in.

— Paul Schneider (@lettershome) September 15, 2013

Yep.