mtheory

  Most of that fascist wanking in '300' came from Frank Miller, a closet fascist, Snyder just added great visuals and slow-mo. Other than that his work generally does not have any ideological themes, only visual ones.

Suckerpunch was Snyder's Inception, it failed on an emotional level, it failed even on VFX level ( looked like a video game, just like Man of Steel ) but it did manage to mislead 99% of audiences in critics into an incorrect interpretion of the story. And this is where it is a 100% success in terms of what it was trying to do, that is sucker punch everyone.   Almost everyone interprets the film as a story of a girl who is in a madhouse who escapes into a fantasy whorehouse reality, then escapes into a video game reality. That is incorrect. The correct interpretation is that this film is about a girl in a whorehouse who escapes into a madhouse fantasy, then escapes into a video game fantasy.   There was never an evil uncle or a dead sister, there was never a lobotomy...the "sister" is the girl who sacrifices herself to let her escape, the evil uncle is the pimp, the "lobotomy" is her losing her virginity to John Ham, who she visualizes as the Doctor who "penetrates" her body. Lobotomy = Loss of virginity, innocence, childhood.   The movie basically reveals the artifice of the lobotomy in one key scene when she first arrives at the Whorehouse, you see the other girl performing a theatre play portraying a character GETTING A LOBOTOMY, that's where she got the idea for her Madhouse fantasy. Even more, the opening narration SPELLS IT OUT for you, when it talks about "angels, demons, and an old man who comes to save us when we least expect it"...the old man on the bus who saves her from the cops is REAL and everything else is imagined, she is imagining everything on the bus, having escaped the whorehouse.   Is noone paying attention anymore? That was probably Snyder's point. 

The ML does't need alot of research or time to test out, - about a day actually. It behaves 100% predictably within the same parameters and settings. 

Cool, how exactly does it work, you just mount it to the base of your camera and it's supposed to stabilize it? How do you mount two of them? Waiting for the videos. The site says these guys are sold out, - if this works as I want it to, I'll send my money NOW. 

Most people in their 20's and 30's who grew up with computers/internet in 90s simply don't share his distaste for watching movies on pc/laptops/tablet/phone. If it's streamed/downloaded properly and you got your headphones and you're watching it without interruption, it's just about as immersive as cinema. Personally, the only times the phones take me out of the cinema experience is when they ring..IN THE CINEMA.

Watching douchebags like Ashton Kutcher and Kanye West imagining themselves as Jobs is bizarre, I'm waiting for the Alan Sorkin movie. The best Steve Jobs movie so far is "Pirates of the Silicon Valley".

  Yep, I was looking at the similar $999 pricepoints for Macbook Air and iPad and was thinking just how much more I can do on Air with a full-fledged OS. Plus, if it doesn't work you can always cut stuff with it. I know Boris would.  

Remember that creating the mood in post was really something that took off in the 90's with the aggressive telecine processes, - for most of cinematic history selecting the look for the film was about selecting the film stock and lighting long before the editing process began, so there's tradition there, one that is no longer necessary in the age of raw but still strangely intuitive to those used to the old ways. In 10 years our idea of RAW footage will be the ability to change Depth of Field of our footage in post....we might even be able to eventually change focus lengths and lenses all completely in post, we'll probably look back at today's techniques for pre-selecting a lens for a shot as also being inefficient and unnecessary, now that would be funny. Just food for thought.

You know, it's funny, you are completely right, but I still do it the other way round. I don't know why. It takes longer, it's wasteful and inefficient given that about 60%-70% of the material will be cut and trimmed, thus lots of rendering/human time will be wasted, but I love this workflow much more and use for personal projects. Editing graded footage in FCPX is just very different experience, you feel alot closer to the finished piece as you make those cuts.

Big Budget movies are now essentially two hour commercials designed to sell toys ( All of Marvel and Disney ) and product placement ( Audi in all of Iron-Man movies ) for big brands, they are no longer a product in itself the way a self-contained cinema experience was designed to be. No, movies won't whither and die, - quite the opposite, we'll see more...ALOT more movies...Marvel for example wants to churn out a superhero movie every 6 months, reboot-rinse-repeat.   It's filmmakers with an independent creative vision who are metaphorically withering and dying in Hollywood, being replaced by marketers and stylists instead. Cinema will continue to exist simply because watching a film with your friends is a social experience in itself, which does not compete with that other cool movie you will watch on your iPhone/Netflix, a new home for modern independent filmmakers.    I don't really see what the problem there. You want global audiences? They are there, at the click of a button if you are willing to forsake the champagne at the festivals and the elitist "I've been screened in a theatre, bitch" smirk and go into the most competitive global digital marketplace. Look at David Fincher, the guy did it with House of Cards, and the audiences showed up, - I'd readily view his next movie exclusively online.    And Alejandro Gonzales Innarritu shot his last film on VHS and released it online, because he is an artist who doesn't care about the festival circuit and the big honors of theatrical releases, he creates because he likes to create, and he shares using whatever medium is at hand.    Spielberg and Lynch are just afraid to adapt to this change, that's all...to them I say, grab a 5D and show us what you can do without a million dollar budget, your talent is now laid bare. David Lynch can have an army of volunteers of actors and crew if he only asked for it on Twitter, his movies can be shot with ANY camera, he could be shooting and releasing several movies a year to online audiences if he wanted to and yet he sees obstacles instead of an opportunity in digital.    Dinosaurs...

  That's precisely why your film will stand out if you can deliver quality.       Behind every successful director there is a successful producer. Get on a phone.

Heh, with all that heat 12 cores and dual GPUs will generate you might just be able to do some BBQ on it while it's rendering.

In the end, your only weapon is innovative content. You have a global audience at your finger tips, - can you win them over? There has never been a better time for emerging filmmakers than now.   Words of wisdom from Tarantino and Rodriguez.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVE296BvOj4

  Like BMW 5 and BMW M5, same chassis, but alot more evolution under the hood. I love this one too, will just have to figure out how to customize/paint/poke holes in that Mac Pro cover so it doesn't look like a trash can.

Implosion? Maybe for pampered filmmakers used to the status quo. Yes, Steven, now you gotta compete in a much more democratic digital environment. The days of a dozen good filmmakers and hundreds of millions of audiences are over. We are heading into the era of tens of thousands of filmmakers and billions of audiences. Grab a fucking camera. 

I was hoping for a more evolutionary design though, basically an iMac on steroids. Something like this.  

I'm really happy they didn't kill Mac Pro. This tower will be an amazing setup with the BMPC4K! Now give us a 4K Cinema Display, Apple!

It looks like an IKEA dustbin.

  What's the source of this info? I didn't find any confirmation of this on the BM forum. 

Let's go after 1DX RAW, goddamit, it will be the ultimate all time low-light full-frame slow-mo 4K RAW champ if ML guys mod it. We don't even need 1DC firmware, just port existing ML to 1DX.

  :D

Personally, I think the $3000-4000 camera coverage is what most serious filmmakers will be interested in, so 5D/BMPC is my preference. But we can't expect you to buy every camera you review, I think we should all help out with community-submitted reviews and tests more, I'm pretty sure we'll find forum members here who'll have access to BMPC and be able to run some tests. 

  Broadcast television does not have a culture of fine retouching and grading, so this one is purely for filmmakers. I expect the next batch of Sundance films to look better, a LOT better with the help of this RAW hack alone as filmmakers will not fail to take advantage of such a powerful workflow which was out of their reach for DECADES!

For me personally, this crop can make a significant difference in a shooting workflow if they optimize the UI further ( which they will ). I prefer to use primes instead of zooms and that slows me down. Imagine switching the crops instead of switching prime lenses on a shoot realtime with a single button for example...that's SPEED, nevermind convenience. 

Awesome tutorial, Alec! Seems like at this pace of development BMPC will get its ass kicked come July. ;)