Anil Rao

Interesting and bang on...
 
Lynda Obst: Hollywood’s completely broken
 
When you stopped buying DVDs and started streaming on Netflix,
Hollywood's economics changed.
So did the movies
 
I was driving west in a classically horrible L.A. morning commute on my way to Peter Chernin’s new office in Santa Monica, thinking about our regular lunches back when he ran the studio and I worked as a producer there in the nineties. Peter, who is now building his own media empire at Fox and had been president of News Corp. for over a decade, was clearly the perfect person to ask what had turned the Old Abnormal into the New Abnormal. First of all, he was incredibly smart about the business. But more important, I now realized that during those lunches, he was the first to warn me that the proverbial “light ahead” was an oncoming train. It was way before things turned obviously grim. Since I was reliably churning out pictures then, I didn’t take his gloomy talk about piracy seriously. I just went around saying, “The landlord has the blues,” and blithely fell into the future.
 
Peter wasn’t exactly having a hard time making the transition. Once he decided in 2009 to leave the number-two job overseeing the News Corp. media empire, he became the biggest producer at Fox (one of the biggest anywhere), with guaranteed pictures and huge potential profit participation. His first picture was the tentpole smash Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and he already had three television shows on the air. More recently, he released the smash Identity Thief, with Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman.
 
The long drive got me thinking about the contrast between the struggling Old Abnormal producers (and writers) and the soaring New ones like Peter. It was discussed at a fancy-pants dinner party I went to a week before. “They’re completely broke,” said a studio head, when asked by me (of course) about how different things were these days. He spoke about famous players who regularly came to him begging for favors—a picture, a handout, anything. “Why?” his very East Coast guest asked incredulously.
 
I recalled his exact words as I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic. “They have extremely high overheads,” he said to his guest with me listening in. “They have multiple houses, wives, and families to support. They’ve made movies for years, they were on top of the world and had no reason to think it would end. And then suddenly it did. They’ve gone through whatever savings they had. They can’t sell their real estate. Their overhead is as astronomical as their fees used to be. They’ve taken out loans, so they’re highly leveraged. It’s a tragedy.”
His natty guest looked unsympathetic, so I tried to bridge the worlds between us. “Okay,” I said, “the Sudan is a tragedy. This is just sad.”
 
I understood that it was hard to sympathize with broke producers when so many families were being tossed onto their lawns by bailed-out banks that had bullied them into bullshit mortgages. Meanwhile, New Abnormal producers like Peter were  thriving, easily finding supersized tentpoles with the “preawareness” that was so craved by the New Abnormal, like his hit film Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
That is because those films were so well suited to their sensibilities and ambitions. But Peter was more than just a successful model of a New Abnormal producer. He had green-lit the two biggest movies of all time when he was head of Fox during the Old Abnormal.
 
Peter had earned his top-down as well as bottom-up perspective on the business by working his way up through publishing, then TV, to eventually run both Fox Broadcasting Company and Twentieth Century Fox Film. He became Rupert Murdoch’s number two, overseeing the whole Fox empire, and shareholders clamored for the board to name him Murdoch’s successor. But this was a job designated by Murdoch to go to an actual heir, so Peter left to become a producer. He knew the business, as Joni Mitchell’s great old tune said it, “from both sides now.” More important, he was gifted with a brain both creative and financial in equal measure.
 
Peter’s offices are as close to the water as you can get without falling in. He came into the lobby to greet me, always personable, never grandiose, but still a bit larger than life. He is the humblest of moguls, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a strong ego— just not a damaged one. We sat in his Santa Monica office with huge plate-glass windows overlooking the Pacific, where he happily relayed that he rarely crossed the 405 East-West divide. When I asked for his help in getting to the bottom of all this, I was reminded of how tough-minded he is. Even though we are old friends (we went to high school together), he had no problem challenging my buried premises. Maybe they weren’t very buried.
 
“So how did we get here,” I asked, “where things are so different from when we started? What happened?”
I leaned back a little on Peter’s comfortable couch, and he sat forward to say, “People will look back and say that probably, from a financial point of view, 1995 through 2005 was the golden age of this generation of the movie business. You had big growth internationally, and you had big growth with DVDs.” He paused to allow a gallows laugh. “That golden age appears to be over.”
It was good we both could keep our sense of humor, the only way to survive the industry’s crazy carousel of wild ups and low downs. And this very carousel and its need for constant— bordering on psychotic—optimism to keep your projects going made it hard for a person like me to find a steady perch from which to see what was really going on.
 
Peter, however, had one. He seemed to be saying that the DVD market was critical to the life and death of the Old Abnormal. I knew the DVD profits were key, but it seemed to me like a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. “Why did those little silver discs go to the heart of the business?” I asked. “There have to be other key revenue streams.”
 
“Let me give you the simplest math,” he replied. “The simple, simple, simple math.”
 
Good, I thought. Because my friends and I are not so great at math. I can guesstimate the budget of a big movie to within a hundred thousand dollars by reading the script, but I can’t add the columns therein. “The movie business,” Peter said, “the historical studio business, if you put all the studios together, runs at about a ten percent profit margin. For every billion dollars in revenue, they make a hundred million dollars in profits. That’s the business, right?” I nodded, the good student, excited that someone was finally going to explain this to me.
 
“The DVD business represented fifty percent of their profits,” he went on. “Fifty percent. The decline of that business means their entire profit could come down between forty and fifty percent for new movies.”
 
For those of you like me who are not good at math, let me make Peter’s statement even simpler. If a studio’s margin of profit was only 10 percent in the Old Abnormal, now with the collapsing DVD market that profit margin was hovering around 6 percent. The loss of profit on those little silver discs had nearly halved our profit margin.
 
This was, literally, a Great Contraction. Something drastic had happened to our industry, and this was it. Surely there were other factors: Young males were disappearing into video games; there were hundreds of home entertainment choices available for nesting families; the Net. But slicing a huge chunk of reliable profits right out of the bottom line forever?
 
This was mind-boggling to me, and I’ve been in the business for thirty years. Peter continued as I absorbed the depths and roots of what I was starting to think of as the Great Contraction. “Which means if nothing else changed, they would all be losing money. That’s how serious the DVD downturn is. At best, it could cut their profit in half for new movies.”
 
I’d never heard it put so starkly; I’d only seen the bloody results of the starkness. The epic Writers Guild strike of 1988 was about the writers trying to get a piece of home viewing profits. It shut down the town for eight months, and estimates of what it cost the Los Angeles economy run between $500 million and $1 billion. They held out as long as they could, until all parties had bled out as if they’d been struck by Ebola. And still the writers got no piece of those golden discs. Then the writers struck again in 2007–8 for a piece of the Internet frontier, and won not much more than they did after the last awful strike, and we all watched its terrible and unintended aftermath play out during the recession and in the subsequent suspension of writers’ and producers’ deals.
 
“I think the two driving forces [of what you’re calling the Great Contraction] were the recession and the transition of the DVD market,” Peter said. “The 2008 writers’ strike added a little gasoline to the fire.” Well, at least my writer friends would be relieved to know that Peter didn’t think it was totally their fault, as some in town were fond of intimating.
 
He went on to say, “It was partially driven by the recession, but I think it was more driven by technology.”
There it was. Technology had destroyed the DVD. When Peter referred to the “transition of the DVD market,” and technology destroying the DVD, he was talking about the implications of the fact that our movies were now proliferating for free—not just on the streets of Beijing and Hong Kong and Rio. And even legitimate users, as Peter pointed out, who would never pirate, were going for $3 or $4 video-on-demand (VOD) rentals instead of $15 DVD purchases.
 
“When did the collapse begin?”
 
“The bad news started in 2008,” he said. “Bad 2009. Bad 2010. Bad 2011.”
 
It was as if he were scolding those years. They were bad, very bad. I wouldn’t want to be those years.
“The international market will still grow,” he said, “but the DVD sell-through business is not coming back again. Consumers will buy their movies on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon et al. before they will purchase a DVD.” What had been our profit margin has gone the way of the old media.
 
It hit me like a rock in the face. The loss of DVDs for our business had created a desperate need for a new area of growth. This was why the international market has become so important a factor in creative decisions, like casting and what movies the studios make.
We sat in mournful silence for a second before I realized that Peter probably had to take a call from China and I should go home and take a Xanax.
 
But then Peter said the most amazing thing. A P&L, if you’re not a numbers person, is a profit-and-loss statement. Studios create P&Ls in order to explain to their financial boards, banks and investors how they are going to recoup their costs when they green-light films. It estimates how much money key domestic and international markets are expected to gross based on how “elements” (i.e., stars, director, title) have performed in the past in those markets, country by country. It also estimates how they will perform in various ancillary markets like DVD, TV, pay cable, Internet, airplane devices, VOD, handheld devices, etc., again based on past performance. If it all adds up to the amount of the budget or more, Go!
 
These are the quantifiers that studios use to rationalize their decisions, to put them on solid-enough financial ground on which to base predictions to their corporate boards. “So,” Peter said as I was about to leave, “the most interesting thing is what a few studio heads said to me privately about two years ago.” He stopped to smile. “None of them from Fox, of course.”
 
“Of course,” I said. I knew he was about to share something very inside with me. “They said to me, ‘We don’t even know how to run a P&L right now.’” The look on his face expressed the sheer madness of that statement. “ ‘We don’t know what our P&L looks like because we don’t know what the DVD number is!’ The DVD number used to be half of the entire P&L!” “What are the implications of that?”
 
He looked at me incredulously, as if to say, Haven’t you run a studio? Then he said very emphatically, “The implications are— you’re seeing the implications—the implications are, those studios are frozen. The big implication is that those studios are—not necessarily inappropriately—terrified to do anything because they don’t know what the numbers look like.”
 
Of course they are. They’re frozen, so the gut is frozen, the heart is frozen, and even the bottom-line spreadsheet is frozen. It was like a cold shower in hard numbers. There was none of the extra cash that fueled competitive commerce, gut calls, or real movies, the extra spec script purchase, the pitch culture, the grease that fueled the Old Abnormal: the way things had always been done. We were running on empty, searching for sources of new revenue. The only reliable entry on the P&L was international. That’s where the moolah was coming from, so that’s what decisions would be based on.
 
The Great Contraction explains the birth of the New Abnormal, and so many of the cultural changes that came along with it. Technology changes culture. Think of the way the all-embracing texting culture of the Japanese teenager created the first-person text novel (keitai shousetsu). The anonymous romantic accounts of teens written by texters were sent chapter by chapter as apps were being designed in real time to meet the needs of the growing audience. That birthed a genre that spawned “real” books and movies. Our industry reformatted itself with an application called “new revenue streams.” A crucial question of that app was “what stars play in foreign territories,” and the answer was, “whoever had a big hit there before!” Casting was not the only thing that technology changed, nor was the (disappearing) pitch. The big change was what movies get made.
 

Firstly there is a multitude of problems that were allowed to happen, that has had this announcement made and uncharacteristically these comments are made by the two people often associated with destroying Hollywood in the first place, whilst both Lucas and Spielberg created moments in cinema that yielded the terminology 'blockbuster', they are not to blame entirely.
 
The studios having let the dreamers of the 70s have their way, in order to stop their film industry falling apart, an industry that no longer knew what to do with the fast changing cultural landscape of the era, decided to play observer. In observing they saw a formula and took the reigns back, what they didn't observe is the 'why' and focused only on the '$' these films made. Having run much of the Hollywood gauntlet under this ideology worked until the era of todays audience kicked in, or more importantly speaking the age of the internet. Today audiences are in charge and the film industry is having to fight back against many other forms of entertainment on many different portals out there, what is making it worse in this 'tailored to my own choice' era, is that again the industry isn't wanting to understand or learn from, so they keep upping the event tentpoles and not the culture of what cinema has been for a 100 years.
 
Originality costs today, that is the fundamental reasoning behind remake culture, the last studio original fable was Inception and Nolan had to earn that, and did so with the ROI of TDK and the promise that he would also do TDKR. The same goes for Spielberg, just because he has made a lot of hits doesn't mean they will bow to him, the business is about the business of film, so for Schindlers List to be green lit, he had to sign for JP:Lost World and when you watch that film, you can tell right away his heart is not in it, in any of it, because he had to make it and not wanted to make it.
 
As for Lucas and his Red Tails nightmare, the business told him 'no one would be interested in that particular story, it was the business talking and he didn't want to listen, this was both right and wrong. Lucas accused the industry of being racist and this was a huge error on his side of reasoning, a little blind sided and more in line with a trouble maker, than as a bonafide reason. He should have understood what the industry was saying or just financed it himself, which he ended up doing.
 
At the Berlinale this year, I spoke with a lot of buyers at the EFM (European Film Market) as I have a UK thriller script set in the Afro Carribean UK community and even though it's not about the culture of these people, the first thing more than half of them told me was, we don't buy black stories, when I probed why, rather than assuming the worst, they said we cannot sell them, it was that simple, they were being truthful about sales which is what they do and they know what they are talking about, they were not being racist.
 
What is clearly missing and has been for a long time is what the culture of cinema used to be about that led to an industry being fruitful and now that there are signs of it becoming fruitless, no one wants to understand the hierarchy of the failure that has led to that.
 
If anything, the people, as in the audience, well they are in charge now right, not the studios, and are dictating what is being made by them. Good you might say on one hand, well actually it is bad on the other, because for every $1b, an empty and void of content Iron Man type movie makes, this only guarantees to Hollywood that that is what the people want, hence why they will only give their energies and resources to keep making them. However, if only those type of movies are shown, what choice do we have? It's a vicous circle, and until once more the industry collapes, and again they ask the creatives to give them back an industry again, it will be too late.
 
We cannot have the 70s again, and Hollywood cannot rely and hope the same can be repeated again, because those that can have gone on to other portals now to deliver them, furthermore, watching cinema and that magical artful experience of having a voice shared by many at the same time, a voice that matters first, is truly if not already lost right now.
 
A New Hope is more than needed, both culturally, creatively and most importantly, in alignment with an industry willing to listen and apply.
 

The truth? Good films end up shelved ALL THE TIME.
 
Great films often get lost in the system. 
 
Brilliant ideas often never get funded. The best scripts, the ones that get passed around back and forth -RARELY- get greenlights.
 
About 15 years ago, there was a round table with Francis Ford, Spike Lee, Scorcese, Spielberg and others, and they ALL confessed they
struggled to get their next film made. 
 
Wait, it gets better....
 
The days of a Tarantino or Rodiriguez getting through the door and blowing up are slim to none. Even during the heyday of 90's indie cinema, only a few got past the gatekeepers...because even on a low indie level, there are gatekeepers.
 
There are only a hand full of sales reps, and only a couple dozen distributors who have handled projects you've heard of.
The festivals are set up like getting into Harvard Law....some are there on merit, but most on pedigree and association.
 
Think the internet is the great equalizer? It is. But it's also a slush pile of camera tests, and garbage that few people can wade through.
 
Which means a guy like Spielberg who was big man on campus, and owned his own campus feels the heat of a more democratizing process, and studios reacting by only producing sure thing major blockbusters with toy and product tie ins, so they can make back their marketing budgets. (Even Django had action figures).
 
All the while, indie films take even less economical risks, less creative risks, and the gatekeeping requires you the filmmaker to be the Prom King/Queen or the captain of the football team to get through that system. It means the big festivals have already selected films connected with a hand full of known industry people, before the submission deadlines. It means more than half the films a Sundance are repped by one man. It means distributors are offering award winning films deals in the 50k range, before you pay out E&O insurance, and differed costs. It also means distributors are making offers of 5K for a feature film, for world rights, and doing it with a straight face.
 
This is the reality we're up against. Creative filmmaking is not as important to getting your film seen as creative salemanship, and business. This is what we're all up against. 

Firstly there is a multitude of problems that were allowed to happen, that has had this announcement made and uncharacteristically these comments are made by the two people often associated with destroying Hollywood in the first place, whilst both Lucas and Spielberg created moments in cinema that yielded the terminology 'blockbuster', they are not to blame entirely.
 
The studios having let the dreamers of the 70s have their way, in order to stop their film industry falling apart, an industry that no longer knew what to do with the fast changing cultural landscape of the era, decided to play observer. In observing they saw a formula and took the reigns back, what they didn't observe is the 'why' and focused only on the '$' these films made. Having run much of the Hollywood gauntlet under this ideology worked until the era of todays audience kicked in, or more importantly speaking the age of the internet. Today audiences are in charge and the film industry is having to fight back against many other forms of entertainment on many different portals out there, what is making it worse in this 'tailored to my own choice' era, is that again the industry isn't wanting to understand or learn from, so they keep upping the event tentpoles and not the culture of what cinema has been for a 100 years.
 
Originality costs today, that is the fundamental reasoning behind remake culture, the last studio original fable was Inception and Nolan had to earn that, and did so with the ROI of TDK and the promise that he would also do TDKR. The same goes for Spielberg, just because he has made a lot of hits doesn't mean they will bow to him, the business is about the business of film, so for Schindlers List to be green lit, he had to sign for JP:Lost World and when you watch that film, you can tell right away his heart is not in it, in any of it, because he had to make it and not wanted to make it.
 
As for Lucas and his Red Tails nightmare, the business told him 'no one would be interested in that particular story, it was the business talking and he didn't want to listen, this was both right and wrong. Lucas accused the industry of being racist and this was a huge error on his side of reasoning, a little blind sided and more in line with a trouble maker, than as a bonafide reason. He should have understood what the industry was saying or just financed it himself, which he ended up doing.
 
At the Berlinale this year, I spoke with a lot of buyers at the EFM (European Film Market) as I have a UK thriller script set in the Afro Carribean UK community and even though it's not about the culture of these people, the first thing more than half of them told me was, we don't buy black stories, when I probed why, rather than assuming the worst, they said we cannot sell them, it was that simple, they were being truthful about sales which is what they do and they know what they are talking about, they were not being racist.
 
What is clearly missing and has been for a long time is what the culture of cinema used to be about that led to an industry being fruitful and now that there are signs of it becoming fruitless, no one wants to understand the hierarchy of the failure that has led to that.
 
If anything, the people, as in the audience, well they are in charge now right, not the studios, and are dictating what is being made by them. Good you might say on one hand, well actually it is bad on the other, because for every $1b, an empty and void of content Iron Man type movie makes, this only guarantees to Hollywood that that is what the people want, hence why they will only give their energies and resources to keep making them. However, if only those type of movies are shown, what choice do we have? It's a vicous circle, and until once more the industry collapes, and again they ask the creatives to give them back an industry again, it will be too late.
 
We cannot have the 70s again, and Hollywood cannot rely and hope the same can be repeated again, because those that can have gone on to other portals now to deliver them, furthermore, watching cinema and that magical artful experience of having a voice shared by many at the same time, a voice that matters first, is truly if not already lost right now.
 
A New Hope is more than needed, both culturally, creatively and most importantly, in alignment with an industry willing to listen and apply.
 

Absolutely agree with mostly everything Im hearing on here. I hate how our industry is man handled by the big studios. I now even cringe at the thought at working a a big factory slamming together VFX porn. I hope there is another way for distribution because I would not want a larger studio to have their greedy little mits all over my work. Kevin Smith went an interesting route with Red State, and along with the kickstarter wave, vimeo on demand, netflix etc I hope we can just by pass the damn studios all together. Digital distribution to large theaters shouldn't take the backing of a major studio anymore its mainly about getting you $8M-$40M to make the film. But maybe Im wrong...Im in a part of thee industry im trying to get out of, if a movie like Life of Pi make $600M and the artists are all out of work its no wonder everything is falling apart, money flowing up and crap flowing down.

I didn't make it clear that the buyers I spoke to were from all over the world, they were more than willing to listen. I told them it was an urban thriller, all good, I told them it was set in London, all good, I told them it was about injustice, all good, I told them it was a multi-cultural cast... they were outta there LOL. To be honest I wasn't at all surprised. One thing you do when you come to understand film sales agents is understand the numbers, they now all have a universal processor which not only determines how much they will pay for a film but will also tell them what they are expected to make from it, it's actually quite scary when they talk to you about it, with a big grin on their faces, you are standing there watching your project being stripped of any artistic merit, any soul that might touch a persons heart and resonate with them, and are left being like a piece of sushi on those conveyor belts.
 
I am often dumbfounded by what I find is just normal today, in a lot of what we call a way of life, which is a total lack of quality control or oversight as basic values, what these people don't want to understand, is that they are in the business of creating film to sustain a fim business, and what filmmakers more often than not when starting out don't want to understand, is... that they are wanting to get into the business of making films as a living. What both need to get on board with, is how to help each other sustain each other. I remember at film school being ignored for 3 years because I said the forbidden words, 'the business of film', when what I should have said is, 'I want to make films that no one will ever see, that are about fruit decomposing over 24 hours, that I will then project in slow motion to deliver my artistic vision', that would have got me luvved up from day one, and played no doubt in the arsehole of the ICA!
 
Creative vision is all fine and dandy if you are spending your own money but the second someone gives you a pound or a dollar you will have to accept that opinion and deliver a return on that investment, that's what you are promising by accepting the investment to begin with. The films you make today must deliver the business and as previously mentioned, the mechanical only wants the formula and only the formulaic will be adhered to as it makes sense to support that, risk and lean management are what all these guys are about, your vision means nothing to them, the numbers do.
 
It is quite possible that maybe this outburst from Spielberg and Lucas should NOT be adhered to, and allowed to happen, only then they may wake up, well only for a moment before the next original idea gets exploited, and milked to death, afterall Steven Soderbergh recently quit because of the same reasons. You and I both know Andrew, creativity is risk and risk only! To step into the unknown is the excitement and when you do and it works then they all come following!
 

Firstly there is a multitude of problems that were allowed to happen, that has had this announcement made and uncharacteristically these comments are made by the two people often associated with destroying Hollywood in the first place, whilst both Lucas and Spielberg created moments in cinema that yielded the terminology 'blockbuster', they are not to blame entirely.
 
The studios having let the dreamers of the 70s have their way, in order to stop their film industry falling apart, an industry that no longer knew what to do with the fast changing cultural landscape of the era, decided to play observer. In observing they saw a formula and took the reigns back, what they didn't observe is the 'why' and focused only on the '$' these films made. Having run much of the Hollywood gauntlet under this ideology worked until the era of todays audience kicked in, or more importantly speaking the age of the internet. Today audiences are in charge and the film industry is having to fight back against many other forms of entertainment on many different portals out there, what is making it worse in this 'tailored to my own choice' era, is that again the industry isn't wanting to understand or learn from, so they keep upping the event tentpoles and not the culture of what cinema has been for a 100 years.
 
Originality costs today, that is the fundamental reasoning behind remake culture, the last studio original fable was Inception and Nolan had to earn that, and did so with the ROI of TDK and the promise that he would also do TDKR. The same goes for Spielberg, just because he has made a lot of hits doesn't mean they will bow to him, the business is about the business of film, so for Schindlers List to be green lit, he had to sign for JP:Lost World and when you watch that film, you can tell right away his heart is not in it, in any of it, because he had to make it and not wanted to make it.
 
As for Lucas and his Red Tails nightmare, the business told him 'no one would be interested in that particular story, it was the business talking and he didn't want to listen, this was both right and wrong. Lucas accused the industry of being racist and this was a huge error on his side of reasoning, a little blind sided and more in line with a trouble maker, than as a bonafide reason. He should have understood what the industry was saying or just financed it himself, which he ended up doing.
 
At the Berlinale this year, I spoke with a lot of buyers at the EFM (European Film Market) as I have a UK thriller script set in the Afro Carribean UK community and even though it's not about the culture of these people, the first thing more than half of them told me was, we don't buy black stories, when I probed why, rather than assuming the worst, they said we cannot sell them, it was that simple, they were being truthful about sales which is what they do and they know what they are talking about, they were not being racist.
 
What is clearly missing and has been for a long time is what the culture of cinema used to be about that led to an industry being fruitful and now that there are signs of it becoming fruitless, no one wants to understand the hierarchy of the failure that has led to that.
 
If anything, the people, as in the audience, well they are in charge now right, not the studios, and are dictating what is being made by them. Good you might say on one hand, well actually it is bad on the other, because for every $1b, an empty and void of content Iron Man type movie makes, this only guarantees to Hollywood that that is what the people want, hence why they will only give their energies and resources to keep making them. However, if only those type of movies are shown, what choice do we have? It's a vicous circle, and until once more the industry collapes, and again they ask the creatives to give them back an industry again, it will be too late.
 
We cannot have the 70s again, and Hollywood cannot rely and hope the same can be repeated again, because those that can have gone on to other portals now to deliver them, furthermore, watching cinema and that magical artful experience of having a voice shared by many at the same time, a voice that matters first, is truly if not already lost right now.
 
A New Hope is more than needed, both culturally, creatively and most importantly, in alignment with an industry willing to listen and apply.
 

I didn't make it clear that the buyers I spoke to were from all over the world, they were more than willing to listen. I told them it was an urban thriller, all good, I told them it was set in London, all good, I told them it was about injustice, all good, I told them it was a multi-cultural cast... they were outta there LOL. To be honest I wasn't at all surprised. One thing you do when you come to understand film sales agents is understand the numbers, they now all have a universal processor which not only determines how much they will pay for a film but will also tell them what they are expected to make from it, it's actually quite scary when they talk to you about it, with a big grin on their faces, you are standing there watching your project being stripped of any artistic merit, any soul that might touch a persons heart and resonate with them, and are left being like a piece of sushi on those conveyor belts.
 
I am often dumbfounded by what I find is just normal today, in a lot of what we call a way of life, which is a total lack of quality control or oversight as basic values, what these people don't want to understand, is that they are in the business of creating film to sustain a fim business, and what filmmakers more often than not when starting out don't want to understand, is... that they are wanting to get into the business of making films as a living. What both need to get on board with, is how to help each other sustain each other. I remember at film school being ignored for 3 years because I said the forbidden words, 'the business of film', when what I should have said is, 'I want to make films that no one will ever see, that are about fruit decomposing over 24 hours, that I will then project in slow motion to deliver my artistic vision', that would have got me luvved up from day one, and played no doubt in the arsehole of the ICA!
 
Creative vision is all fine and dandy if you are spending your own money but the second someone gives you a pound or a dollar you will have to accept that opinion and deliver a return on that investment, that's what you are promising by accepting the investment to begin with. The films you make today must deliver the business and as previously mentioned, the mechanical only wants the formula and only the formulaic will be adhered to as it makes sense to support that, risk and lean management are what all these guys are about, your vision means nothing to them, the numbers do.
 
It is quite possible that maybe this outburst from Spielberg and Lucas should NOT be adhered to, and allowed to happen, only then they may wake up, well only for a moment before the next original idea gets exploited, and milked to death, afterall Steven Soderbergh recently quit because of the same reasons. You and I both know Andrew, creativity is risk and risk only! To step into the unknown is the excitement and when you do and it works then they all come following!
 

I didn't make it clear that the buyers I spoke to were from all over the world, they were more than willing to listen. I told them it was an urban thriller, all good, I told them it was set in London, all good, I told them it was about injustice, all good, I told them it was a multi-cultural cast... they were outta there LOL. To be honest I wasn't at all surprised. One thing you do when you come to understand film sales agents is understand the numbers, they now all have a universal processor which not only determines how much they will pay for a film but will also tell them what they are expected to make from it, it's actually quite scary when they talk to you about it, with a big grin on their faces, you are standing there watching your project being stripped of any artistic merit, any soul that might touch a persons heart and resonate with them, and are left being like a piece of sushi on those conveyor belts.
 
I am often dumbfounded by what I find is just normal today, in a lot of what we call a way of life, which is a total lack of quality control or oversight as basic values, what these people don't want to understand, is that they are in the business of creating film to sustain a fim business, and what filmmakers more often than not when starting out don't want to understand, is... that they are wanting to get into the business of making films as a living. What both need to get on board with, is how to help each other sustain each other. I remember at film school being ignored for 3 years because I said the forbidden words, 'the business of film', when what I should have said is, 'I want to make films that no one will ever see, that are about fruit decomposing over 24 hours, that I will then project in slow motion to deliver my artistic vision', that would have got me luvved up from day one, and played no doubt in the arsehole of the ICA!
 
Creative vision is all fine and dandy if you are spending your own money but the second someone gives you a pound or a dollar you will have to accept that opinion and deliver a return on that investment, that's what you are promising by accepting the investment to begin with. The films you make today must deliver the business and as previously mentioned, the mechanical only wants the formula and only the formulaic will be adhered to as it makes sense to support that, risk and lean management are what all these guys are about, your vision means nothing to them, the numbers do.
 
It is quite possible that maybe this outburst from Spielberg and Lucas should NOT be adhered to, and allowed to happen, only then they may wake up, well only for a moment before the next original idea gets exploited, and milked to death, afterall Steven Soderbergh recently quit because of the same reasons. You and I both know Andrew, creativity is risk and risk only! To step into the unknown is the excitement and when you do and it works then they all come following!
 

Firstly there is a multitude of problems that were allowed to happen, that has had this announcement made and uncharacteristically these comments are made by the two people often associated with destroying Hollywood in the first place, whilst both Lucas and Spielberg created moments in cinema that yielded the terminology 'blockbuster', they are not to blame entirely.
 
The studios having let the dreamers of the 70s have their way, in order to stop their film industry falling apart, an industry that no longer knew what to do with the fast changing cultural landscape of the era, decided to play observer. In observing they saw a formula and took the reigns back, what they didn't observe is the 'why' and focused only on the '$' these films made. Having run much of the Hollywood gauntlet under this ideology worked until the era of todays audience kicked in, or more importantly speaking the age of the internet. Today audiences are in charge and the film industry is having to fight back against many other forms of entertainment on many different portals out there, what is making it worse in this 'tailored to my own choice' era, is that again the industry isn't wanting to understand or learn from, so they keep upping the event tentpoles and not the culture of what cinema has been for a 100 years.
 
Originality costs today, that is the fundamental reasoning behind remake culture, the last studio original fable was Inception and Nolan had to earn that, and did so with the ROI of TDK and the promise that he would also do TDKR. The same goes for Spielberg, just because he has made a lot of hits doesn't mean they will bow to him, the business is about the business of film, so for Schindlers List to be green lit, he had to sign for JP:Lost World and when you watch that film, you can tell right away his heart is not in it, in any of it, because he had to make it and not wanted to make it.
 
As for Lucas and his Red Tails nightmare, the business told him 'no one would be interested in that particular story, it was the business talking and he didn't want to listen, this was both right and wrong. Lucas accused the industry of being racist and this was a huge error on his side of reasoning, a little blind sided and more in line with a trouble maker, than as a bonafide reason. He should have understood what the industry was saying or just financed it himself, which he ended up doing.
 
At the Berlinale this year, I spoke with a lot of buyers at the EFM (European Film Market) as I have a UK thriller script set in the Afro Carribean UK community and even though it's not about the culture of these people, the first thing more than half of them told me was, we don't buy black stories, when I probed why, rather than assuming the worst, they said we cannot sell them, it was that simple, they were being truthful about sales which is what they do and they know what they are talking about, they were not being racist.
 
What is clearly missing and has been for a long time is what the culture of cinema used to be about that led to an industry being fruitful and now that there are signs of it becoming fruitless, no one wants to understand the hierarchy of the failure that has led to that.
 
If anything, the people, as in the audience, well they are in charge now right, not the studios, and are dictating what is being made by them. Good you might say on one hand, well actually it is bad on the other, because for every $1b, an empty and void of content Iron Man type movie makes, this only guarantees to Hollywood that that is what the people want, hence why they will only give their energies and resources to keep making them. However, if only those type of movies are shown, what choice do we have? It's a vicous circle, and until once more the industry collapes, and again they ask the creatives to give them back an industry again, it will be too late.
 
We cannot have the 70s again, and Hollywood cannot rely and hope the same can be repeated again, because those that can have gone on to other portals now to deliver them, furthermore, watching cinema and that magical artful experience of having a voice shared by many at the same time, a voice that matters first, is truly if not already lost right now.
 
A New Hope is more than needed, both culturally, creatively and most importantly, in alignment with an industry willing to listen and apply.
 

Firstly there is a multitude of problems that were allowed to happen, that has had this announcement made and uncharacteristically these comments are made by the two people often associated with destroying Hollywood in the first place, whilst both Lucas and Spielberg created moments in cinema that yielded the terminology 'blockbuster', they are not to blame entirely.
 
The studios having let the dreamers of the 70s have their way, in order to stop their film industry falling apart, an industry that no longer knew what to do with the fast changing cultural landscape of the era, decided to play observer. In observing they saw a formula and took the reigns back, what they didn't observe is the 'why' and focused only on the '$' these films made. Having run much of the Hollywood gauntlet under this ideology worked until the era of todays audience kicked in, or more importantly speaking the age of the internet. Today audiences are in charge and the film industry is having to fight back against many other forms of entertainment on many different portals out there, what is making it worse in this 'tailored to my own choice' era, is that again the industry isn't wanting to understand or learn from, so they keep upping the event tentpoles and not the culture of what cinema has been for a 100 years.
 
Originality costs today, that is the fundamental reasoning behind remake culture, the last studio original fable was Inception and Nolan had to earn that, and did so with the ROI of TDK and the promise that he would also do TDKR. The same goes for Spielberg, just because he has made a lot of hits doesn't mean they will bow to him, the business is about the business of film, so for Schindlers List to be green lit, he had to sign for JP:Lost World and when you watch that film, you can tell right away his heart is not in it, in any of it, because he had to make it and not wanted to make it.
 
As for Lucas and his Red Tails nightmare, the business told him 'no one would be interested in that particular story, it was the business talking and he didn't want to listen, this was both right and wrong. Lucas accused the industry of being racist and this was a huge error on his side of reasoning, a little blind sided and more in line with a trouble maker, than as a bonafide reason. He should have understood what the industry was saying or just financed it himself, which he ended up doing.
 
At the Berlinale this year, I spoke with a lot of buyers at the EFM (European Film Market) as I have a UK thriller script set in the Afro Carribean UK community and even though it's not about the culture of these people, the first thing more than half of them told me was, we don't buy black stories, when I probed why, rather than assuming the worst, they said we cannot sell them, it was that simple, they were being truthful about sales which is what they do and they know what they are talking about, they were not being racist.
 
What is clearly missing and has been for a long time is what the culture of cinema used to be about that led to an industry being fruitful and now that there are signs of it becoming fruitless, no one wants to understand the hierarchy of the failure that has led to that.
 
If anything, the people, as in the audience, well they are in charge now right, not the studios, and are dictating what is being made by them. Good you might say on one hand, well actually it is bad on the other, because for every $1b, an empty and void of content Iron Man type movie makes, this only guarantees to Hollywood that that is what the people want, hence why they will only give their energies and resources to keep making them. However, if only those type of movies are shown, what choice do we have? It's a vicous circle, and until once more the industry collapes, and again they ask the creatives to give them back an industry again, it will be too late.
 
We cannot have the 70s again, and Hollywood cannot rely and hope the same can be repeated again, because those that can have gone on to other portals now to deliver them, furthermore, watching cinema and that magical artful experience of having a voice shared by many at the same time, a voice that matters first, is truly if not already lost right now.
 
A New Hope is more than needed, both culturally, creatively and most importantly, in alignment with an industry willing to listen and apply.
 

My theory is the German film industry suffers from too much professionalism.
 
The UK is a ragtag island of adults who haven't quite grown up and crazy ideas :) We're also a bit arrogant, on the whole we don't take cues from the audience or pander to what sells best. That in my view is why we're creative.
 
There are probably more hard working consummate professionals here in Germany but not very much room for playing around. As a result a lot of people in the consummately professional German film industry feel they are in a creative crisis and ignored internationally due to uninteresting output.
 
Salesman don't play.
 
These people grew up quickly into adults and began striving for careers.
 
It's essential to experiment, to play and to go crazy. The film industry demands it, always has. Creativity IS play.
 
The problem is just like with professional sport, the creativity and personality has been sucked out of it because it is striving for performance, like a machine and it's become too sensible and sterile.
 
A salesman's target is to sell in the biggest numbers possible, but they don't realise how the film industry works...
 
Good films come from play, and good sales begin from niche hits.
 
A salesman's job is to observe current market trends.
 
Essentially the film industry has turned into an observer rather than a creator.
 
The role of a creator is to create! Not just watch what sells best and copy it.

Firstly there is a multitude of problems that were allowed to happen, that has had this announcement made and uncharacteristically these comments are made by the two people often associated with destroying Hollywood in the first place, whilst both Lucas and Spielberg created moments in cinema that yielded the terminology 'blockbuster', they are not to blame entirely.
 
The studios having let the dreamers of the 70s have their way, in order to stop their film industry falling apart, an industry that no longer knew what to do with the fast changing cultural landscape of the era, decided to play observer. In observing they saw a formula and took the reigns back, what they didn't observe is the 'why' and focused only on the '$' these films made. Having run much of the Hollywood gauntlet under this ideology worked until the era of todays audience kicked in, or more importantly speaking the age of the internet. Today audiences are in charge and the film industry is having to fight back against many other forms of entertainment on many different portals out there, what is making it worse in this 'tailored to my own choice' era, is that again the industry isn't wanting to understand or learn from, so they keep upping the event tentpoles and not the culture of what cinema has been for a 100 years.
 
Originality costs today, that is the fundamental reasoning behind remake culture, the last studio original fable was Inception and Nolan had to earn that, and did so with the ROI of TDK and the promise that he would also do TDKR. The same goes for Spielberg, just because he has made a lot of hits doesn't mean they will bow to him, the business is about the business of film, so for Schindlers List to be green lit, he had to sign for JP:Lost World and when you watch that film, you can tell right away his heart is not in it, in any of it, because he had to make it and not wanted to make it.
 
As for Lucas and his Red Tails nightmare, the business told him 'no one would be interested in that particular story, it was the business talking and he didn't want to listen, this was both right and wrong. Lucas accused the industry of being racist and this was a huge error on his side of reasoning, a little blind sided and more in line with a trouble maker, than as a bonafide reason. He should have understood what the industry was saying or just financed it himself, which he ended up doing.
 
At the Berlinale this year, I spoke with a lot of buyers at the EFM (European Film Market) as I have a UK thriller script set in the Afro Carribean UK community and even though it's not about the culture of these people, the first thing more than half of them told me was, we don't buy black stories, when I probed why, rather than assuming the worst, they said we cannot sell them, it was that simple, they were being truthful about sales which is what they do and they know what they are talking about, they were not being racist.
 
What is clearly missing and has been for a long time is what the culture of cinema used to be about that led to an industry being fruitful and now that there are signs of it becoming fruitless, no one wants to understand the hierarchy of the failure that has led to that.
 
If anything, the people, as in the audience, well they are in charge now right, not the studios, and are dictating what is being made by them. Good you might say on one hand, well actually it is bad on the other, because for every $1b, an empty and void of content Iron Man type movie makes, this only guarantees to Hollywood that that is what the people want, hence why they will only give their energies and resources to keep making them. However, if only those type of movies are shown, what choice do we have? It's a vicous circle, and until once more the industry collapes, and again they ask the creatives to give them back an industry again, it will be too late.
 
We cannot have the 70s again, and Hollywood cannot rely and hope the same can be repeated again, because those that can have gone on to other portals now to deliver them, furthermore, watching cinema and that magical artful experience of having a voice shared by many at the same time, a voice that matters first, is truly if not already lost right now.
 
A New Hope is more than needed, both culturally, creatively and most importantly, in alignment with an industry willing to listen and apply.
 

Firstly there is a multitude of problems that were allowed to happen, that has had this announcement made and uncharacteristically these comments are made by the two people often associated with destroying Hollywood in the first place, whilst both Lucas and Spielberg created moments in cinema that yielded the terminology 'blockbuster', they are not to blame entirely.
 
The studios having let the dreamers of the 70s have their way, in order to stop their film industry falling apart, an industry that no longer knew what to do with the fast changing cultural landscape of the era, decided to play observer. In observing they saw a formula and took the reigns back, what they didn't observe is the 'why' and focused only on the '$' these films made. Having run much of the Hollywood gauntlet under this ideology worked until the era of todays audience kicked in, or more importantly speaking the age of the internet. Today audiences are in charge and the film industry is having to fight back against many other forms of entertainment on many different portals out there, what is making it worse in this 'tailored to my own choice' era, is that again the industry isn't wanting to understand or learn from, so they keep upping the event tentpoles and not the culture of what cinema has been for a 100 years.
 
Originality costs today, that is the fundamental reasoning behind remake culture, the last studio original fable was Inception and Nolan had to earn that, and did so with the ROI of TDK and the promise that he would also do TDKR. The same goes for Spielberg, just because he has made a lot of hits doesn't mean they will bow to him, the business is about the business of film, so for Schindlers List to be green lit, he had to sign for JP:Lost World and when you watch that film, you can tell right away his heart is not in it, in any of it, because he had to make it and not wanted to make it.
 
As for Lucas and his Red Tails nightmare, the business told him 'no one would be interested in that particular story, it was the business talking and he didn't want to listen, this was both right and wrong. Lucas accused the industry of being racist and this was a huge error on his side of reasoning, a little blind sided and more in line with a trouble maker, than as a bonafide reason. He should have understood what the industry was saying or just financed it himself, which he ended up doing.
 
At the Berlinale this year, I spoke with a lot of buyers at the EFM (European Film Market) as I have a UK thriller script set in the Afro Carribean UK community and even though it's not about the culture of these people, the first thing more than half of them told me was, we don't buy black stories, when I probed why, rather than assuming the worst, they said we cannot sell them, it was that simple, they were being truthful about sales which is what they do and they know what they are talking about, they were not being racist.
 
What is clearly missing and has been for a long time is what the culture of cinema used to be about that led to an industry being fruitful and now that there are signs of it becoming fruitless, no one wants to understand the hierarchy of the failure that has led to that.
 
If anything, the people, as in the audience, well they are in charge now right, not the studios, and are dictating what is being made by them. Good you might say on one hand, well actually it is bad on the other, because for every $1b, an empty and void of content Iron Man type movie makes, this only guarantees to Hollywood that that is what the people want, hence why they will only give their energies and resources to keep making them. However, if only those type of movies are shown, what choice do we have? It's a vicous circle, and until once more the industry collapes, and again they ask the creatives to give them back an industry again, it will be too late.
 
We cannot have the 70s again, and Hollywood cannot rely and hope the same can be repeated again, because those that can have gone on to other portals now to deliver them, furthermore, watching cinema and that magical artful experience of having a voice shared by many at the same time, a voice that matters first, is truly if not already lost right now.
 
A New Hope is more than needed, both culturally, creatively and most importantly, in alignment with an industry willing to listen and apply.
 

Outstanding time and effort into this Andrew, but I still can't help but be floored by the GH2 in all the shots. The GH3, given it's a pre-model, looks whack next to it and even the BMCC didn't really stand out, your own cinemascope films shot even on the GH1 were far more gorgeous in their presentation, and that always has to be what this shooting game is only about... about how it makes you feel rather than what's under the hood. At the end of the day that is what only matters, what you craft, how you shape and ultimately, how you you see something, being the image maker, not what makes you the image, although to some extent that does matter :)

leica made one of the greatest super 8 film cameras in the 1970s
the leicina special with an m mount and 10mm and a zoom lens it was tiny and superb piece of engineering i have 3 and they still work never been serviced.

using an existing body dumping the latest stills sensor and sticking a lower resolution sensor using a kodak or dalsa ccd would not be an epic project for them.
clearly they already have live view prototypes for future cameras andrew needs to go fined them at the show and explain to them fuji is bound to do something interesting so trump the future competition

GREAT!! Cant wait for the GH3 to be released, so I will order another GH2 when the price drops even more!!

[quote name='Axel' timestamp='1348061545' post='18582']
Remember that, properly lit, one seldom had any banding issues with the GH2. The Bloom film [i]was[/i] properly lit. After reading [url="http://panasonic.net/avc/lumix/systemcamera/gms/gh3/still_image_quality.html"]this[/url] (scroll down a bit), it seems this thing is not yet in the can with the ominous 'HDR'. Looks as if it is a feature for stills only, and the iPhone 4 has a similar function (it differs from HDR developing in Photoshop insofar as it [i]may[/i] be also possible for moving objects or handheld camera, if not, if I have to use a tripod for landscapes or the like, I do much better with the GH2's auto bracket and [i]seven[/i] 'consecutive' photos!). Also, the clip with the cat on the chair didn't look as if it had HDR, it looked definitely LDR. After all the minor and major disappointments, that we work hard to get used to, this would for me be the last straw. Still banding? OMG.
[/quote]

I think that HDR video is something that will be reserved for the high-end niche (i.e. RED One MX) at least for a while. But with moire and aliasing already back in a big way with the GH3, I agree, banding would kill this camera for me. I'm leaning more and more towards not getting a new camera this cycle. I have not been floored by anything I have seen, including the BMCC MFT.

[quote name='Anil Rao' timestamp='1347753417' post='18180']
ok, my genuine points to consider after watching this.

1. Watch the fans blades in the beginning, that was really shocking,
unless they are all really furry, as I have seen fan blades with tassles before.

2. There is no demeaning here, the grading really is all over the place and that is not the fault of the camera now is it?

3. I'd like to know what is the budget of this, time frame of schedule and furthermore, look at how many people worked on it?

This would negate a few things to consider, the first being if you are going to do this properly, give it all the quality it needs. I am not going to fault the craftsmanship as there is a considerable amount of blood, sweat and tears that goes into a production like this and especially with a short timeframe to accomplish everything, however, if this is an official Panasonic showcase why didn't they take the time to do it right instead of a rush job?

More importantly, most of us are not going to have the kind of background support this demo utilises when working for ourselves, so that is not a real working example to use, to fairly showcase the camera, and even if we did, in all honestly I expected a better showcase, and not these kind of Ideal Home Exhibition demos, or shots of frogs close up you see on HD screens in Dixons.

I watched this as a film first and it was just too hammy, now before the obvious reply to that will be, yes but it is to show what the camera can do, I say that is fundamentally wrong as an example to sell this camera and here's why... I want to be held by the idea, if this idea is to show the GH3 as a working tool for filmmakers and not just to start flames and wars amongst the online pixel peepers, then shoot it as a film and not a technical promo, then when one watches it, you can say to yourself, 'wow that was great', followed by, 'what!!!! that was all shot on a GH3', then you have proven the point.

Philip made a film about a camera guy who collects cameras and it was awesome, then he told us at the Mac Video Expo where it was projected for us, that it was all shot on the NEX 5N, I was totally floored, that's the kind of example I expect to see. Even now when I think about it I can recall my wowness at watching it.

When I made a short film for the French filmmaker [i]Luc Besson[/i], I shot it on a 200 line resolution security camera, the kind put outside your garage, I just loved the field of view, (which was very [i]Terry Gilliam[/i] meets[i] Jean-Pierre Jeunet[/i]) and the image the camera gave me.

I had reworked the wiring so I could record the image to a DV Deck and shot my film as a film, as an idea I wanted to express. I then graded it at VTR (now known as Prime Focus) in Soho, by the legendary colourist [i]Tareq Kubaisi[/i] and it was screened in Paris, London and Tokyo.

My point being here, is that I could have shot it on 70mm if I really wanted to, however I am a guerilla filmmaker, and by guerilla I mean that I want to push what can be achieved without all the bells and whistles that raise costs and still be held up as a validated professional piece of work.[i] GENESIS[/i] obviously has all the bells and whistles thrown at it and it's unfortunately speaking, not a good showcase for what it should be doing, which is telling a story that at the end of it, has us go wow and then unbelievable.

They should have given this to Michael Mann and stipulated, off you mate and only by yourself, but he loves his Nikons too much ha :)

Doesn't matter though, I am really looking forward to getting one of these, and if I had the added expenditure I'd feel the same about the BMCC, I'll be watching how that all develops before stepping in, but it's all good. Someone already said it before, but a new kid always stirs things up for everyone else to re-raise their game and that's better for all of us right?

:)
[/quote]

Pretty good points here man.

Most of us have been following the development of the, (we'll call it) - "affordable cinema look project" since 2008 when Reverie hit the web. I'm sure it went back further, I remember Wolf Creek was shot on high-def....but that ran how much then? I like the philosophy of "the best camera for the job is the one you have".... It keeps you productive. This is a love for cameras that has developed since the dawn of DSLR cinema and its affordability over the last 4 years though. It's likened to a breakthrough medical explanation, lol. (yeah, turns out a.d.d. Is legit!)
We spend a ton of time watching tests with different lenses, patches, cameras, etc... Most of them are flowers. "Flowers with Sedna AQ1" - because we don't have Paramount budgets. But those are some of most cinematic flowers i've ever seen...

The case could be made for both. If you have a story, and the resources to make it, schedule it, and rent a Scarlet.... they're reasonable on lensrentals.com, and Red has a few big budget flicks under its belt.

Otherwise, you're probably looking at a camera for under $3000 because you want to own it, and use it whenever you want, can.
If you love the cinematic look... Shallow dof, interchangeable lenses, Etc... - you won't get that with an ipad.

So I think for some, it is about the cameras and that's cool, because I can see how it's happened. These are exciting times for poor, talented, aspiring filmmakers and if something like a GH2 would have been around when I was making my Army movies as a kid, I would've shit my pants.

So i see your argument here man and it's a good one... Because from an image standpoint, technically the GH2 has impressed me far more than a Nex 5n ever has...but I haven't seen a story on it that moved me... But that's a matter of personal taste on my end.

In Genesis, we see shallow dof, low light, wide angle, fast pace, detail, etc.. Shots most will pixel peep for things like banding and shit, even though it was a pre-production model. Obviously the story didn't concern anybody as much as the rolling shutter did. Ha!

It's funny. I spend more time watching vimeo than I do actual films anymore...Bourne Ultimatum is on right now in the background as I type this. Such a gritty, badass movie. It however breaks every single law of Vimeo cinematography I've come to know.. It's hilarious. I didn't care in 2007 when i first saw it. Now i subliminally think, "Cameraman on Adderall.". or "Blown highlights everywhere...all the time... Blown out.". Then that car chase comes on, and i don't give a shit anymore what it was shot on.

So yeah, i think if you shoot movies for a living, it takes something special to draw you away from that when you watch one. Same thing for a recording engineer. Good music, and all he's thinking is, "That's a Neumann U87."

ok, my genuine points to consider after watching this.

1. Watch the fans blades in the beginning, that was really shocking,
unless they are all really furry, as I have seen fan blades with tassles before.

2. There is no demeaning here, the grading really is all over the place and that is not the fault of the camera now is it?

3. I'd like to know what is the budget of this, time frame of schedule and furthermore, look at how many people worked on it?

This would negate a few things to consider, the first being if you are going to do this properly, give it all the quality it needs. I am not going to fault the craftsmanship as there is a considerable amount of blood, sweat and tears that goes into a production like this and especially with a short timeframe to accomplish everything, however, if this is an official Panasonic showcase why didn't they take the time to do it right instead of a rush job?

More importantly, most of us are not going to have the kind of background support this demo utilises when working for ourselves, so that is not a real working example to use, to fairly showcase the camera, and even if we did, in all honestly I expected a better showcase, and not these kind of Ideal Home Exhibition demos, or shots of frogs close up you see on HD screens in Dixons.

I watched this as a film first and it was just too hammy, now before the obvious reply to that will be, yes but it is to show what the camera can do, I say that is fundamentally wrong as an example to sell this camera and here's why... I want to be held by the idea, if this idea is to show the GH3 as a working tool for filmmakers and not just to start flames and wars amongst the online pixel peepers, then shoot it as a film and not a technical promo, then when one watches it, you can say to yourself, 'wow that was great', followed by, 'what!!!! that was all shot on a GH3', then you have proven the point.

Philip made a film about a camera guy who collects cameras and it was awesome, then he told us at the Mac Video Expo where it was projected for us, that it was all shot on the NEX 5N, I was totally floored, that's the kind of example I expect to see. Even now when I think about it I can recall my wowness at watching it.

When I made a short film for the French filmmaker [i]Luc Besson[/i], I shot it on a 200 line resolution security camera, the kind put outside your garage, I just loved the field of view, (which was very [i]Terry Gilliam[/i] meets[i] Jean-Pierre Jeunet[/i]) and the image the camera gave me.

I had reworked the wiring so I could record the image to a DV Deck and shot my film as a film, as an idea I wanted to express. I then graded it at VTR (now known as Prime Focus) in Soho, by the legendary colourist [i]Tareq Kubaisi[/i] and it was screened in Paris, London and Tokyo.

My point being here, is that I could have shot it on 70mm if I really wanted to, however I am a guerilla filmmaker, and by guerilla I mean that I want to push what can be achieved without all the bells and whistles that raise costs and still be held up as a validated professional piece of work.[i] GENESIS[/i] obviously has all the bells and whistles thrown at it and it's unfortunately speaking, not a good showcase for what it should be doing, which is telling a story that at the end of it, has us go wow and then unbelievable.

They should have given this to Michael Mann and stipulated, off you mate and only by yourself, but he loves his Nikons too much ha :)

Doesn't matter though, I am really looking forward to getting one of these, and if I had the added expenditure I'd feel the same about the BMCC, I'll be watching how that all develops before stepping in, but it's all good. Someone already said it before, but a new kid always stirs things up for everyone else to re-raise their game and that's better for all of us right?

:)

[quote name='theSUBVERSIVEBIRDS' timestamp='1347734379' post='18156']
What I don't get in people nowadays is how they think that everybody has to have the exactly same necessity over things and usually - actually always - think that people has the same necessity as them, like it's not possible to have different needs.[/quote]

I agree.

One thing that no one has mentioned here is that the BMC is the first camera ever made by BlackMagic. The GH3 is coming from an established camera company with several previous models that Panasonic has been able to use as benchmarks and improve upon. As good as it looks, this is the FIRST camera by BlackMagic. The first step can be painful. It's something I think that everyone should take into consideration when it comes time to buy a camera.

For my needs (mostly short films and the occasional corporate shoot when we're short a camera at work), I could make either camera work. I will probably end up buying the GH3 and then possibly the [i]successor[/i] to the BMC MFT because if it is as excellent as it looks, there WILL be a successor.

Lightpainter - your posts are unreadable. What are you on? I appreciate English possibly isn't your first language but please try and find a way to be clear otherwise you will have to go elsewhere, sorry.

This is the one I wait for :-)

They need to send the first one to Vitaly, that way when it gets to the rest of us it will be much more improved!

They really are desperate to keep selling new things to consumers, and the old production industry is desperate to differentiate "pro" from consumer production. 3D is a headache-inducing hassle, and 4K is just too much of a luxury and doesn't make enough difference to the the end user experience. People's houses are getting smaller, not bigger, we're over populated in the extreme! There aren't enough people with room for a 100-inch telly to support this stuff.

There will be another world war before 4K is in every home, unless Apple release a cheap 4K iPad. Like that'd make a blind bit of difference to the viewing experience...

most content I work on day to day is delivered SD or 720p. a request for full HD is quite rare. One project shot at 5K was delivered 1080i. My own promo work is always 720p or 1080i.

The best film-like digital images I've seen come from the Alexa, that's 1080p. Drive looked amazing on a [i]huge[/i] [i]cinema screen[/i], as did Avatar, both 1080p. So where do you [i]really [/i]reap a benefit that justifies the huge extra cost of 4K?

Screw 4K, what about actually distributing some interesting content in 1080p? There's so much out there that's ignored... what about saying "that's good enough quality" for a while, and focussing on the content. It shows that the biggest companies are the distributors...

Hello Mr Rao :) I'm not really crying, it was a figure of speech :) The only time I cried was when Spike snuffed it. That was far worse than some misconceptions ;)

Remember the above is just my opinion - others may disagree. But I hope to have balanced my subjectivity with enough facts to make it useful to read.