_DD_460_291_70.jpg)
By sheer count of productions, the Indian film market is possibly the world’s largest for film in terms of admissions. On average, the country’s cinemas see more than 1.5 annual admissions per capita – and with a population of nearly 1.4 billion, that’s a lot of capitas – with more than 1600 features passing before the country’s censors in 2012.
It’s hard to object to raw recording. The last thing anyone wants is for the creative intent to be adulterated by unfortunate technical necessities like compression, and the flexibility of raw makes for… well. Let’s admit it: better grading, but also easier rectification of mistakes after the fact, to the point where the glitch isn’t really noticeable.
To date, the explanations of gamma that are seen mostly restrict themselves to the voltage or brightness domain and very little has been published about the effects of gamma in the frequency domain. This is a great pity, because analysis in the frequency domain produces interesting results.
There’s a famous saying about working with children and animals. During production of An Elephant’s Journey, cinematographer Stephen Whitehead would encounter both, and face the challenge of depicting the vast African landscape in a manner befitting a story from the grand tradition of children’s adventure writing.
Big movies still demand big setups, no matter what anyone tells you about the battery-powered light they’re trying to sell. Battery-powered lights are wonderful, of course, even if we only use the battery power for long enough to walk a light in and set it up, but popular ideas about just what they’re capable of can be, well, a little ambitious, and that’s occasionally getting people into trouble.
Cinematographer John Brawley finds himself happily amidst of an unprecedented renaissance of high-end television. The Great is a production that presents a lavish (if fictionalised) spectacle of eighteenth-century Russia, with Brawley photographing five episodes, with the remainder shot by Maja Zamojda and Anette Haellmigk. Ranging from the Royal Palace of Caserta in Italy to castles and estates all over England, the production also built extensive sets at Three Mills Studios in east London.
In the mid-70s, Canon released the K35 series of primes, based on its then top-of-the-line FD mount stills lenses. It wasn’t the first or last time a set of glass elements designed for stills had been repackaged for movie work, but the K35s won an Academy Award in 1977 and have since amassed a glittering resume including Barry Lyndon, Aliens and American Hustle and many others.
It is unwise to pretend that gamma corrected signals can successfully be multiplied, added and subtracted in a matrix as if they represented linear light. Yet in television it is done all the time.