Galaxy 12 Entertainment

That super high capacity memory card you have?  Aim to fill it up with photos during the week (or every other week) with RAW photos.  Bring them into Lightroom or your other favorite photo management software, sort them, tag them, and noodle around with the colors, vignettes, and other settings on your favorites.  Aim to be a decent photographer.  The only reason I say “decent” is that becoming a “great” photographer can easily take all your time leaving little left over to make films.

But why photos and why a lot?  It’s an art, and like any art (like drawing for instance) you need to make a lot of bad art before you can make good art.  Taking photos on a digital camera is an inexpensive way to take a lot of bad photos at very little expenditure on your part.  You’ll improve your cinematic eye and learn how to use your equipment.  Once you’re on set, your actors and crew will appreciate it immensely if you can block out a shot and dial in your settings quickly.  It will also help you spot opportunities that you hadn’t expected while storyboarding.

Still not convinced?  Here is a list of some the many reasons why taking photos is a great way to improve your filmmaking skills:

It will train your cinematic eye.

• Can you frame a subject to be interesting?
• Can you frame multiple subjects so that the viewer’s eye is lead through the frame in a specific manner?
• Can you do it so it’s obvious what the subject is without it being in the dead center of the frame?
• When do you want to use the rule of thirds? When don’t you?
• Why do you use a certain lens for a given shot/framing?
• When do you want deep focus?  When do you want a narrow Depth of Field?  When don’t you have a choice because of equipment limitations?
• Why might you want to change the shutter speed to something faster?  This is arguably best experimented with in video mode (just don’t go slower than 1/50 for 24fps, or 1/60 for 30) so you can see what it does to motion, but it’s good to see what manipulations to exposure/depth of field can be done with higher shutter speeds as you head towards a Black Hawk Down/Saving Private Ryan look.

Get to know your equipement.

• There are a ton of settings on a DSLR, many of the useful ones for video often aren’t in a useful place.
• Can you get to the important settings and set them quickly and properly?  If you are taking candid shots of subjects on the move at your kid’s birthday party, you won’t have the option of getting everyone to sit still while you fiddle with the camera.  If you can do it quickly here, it should be significantly easier to set your camera properly on the set?
• Can you set white balance quickly and properly? I highly recommend a good gray card and learning how to use it.
• The Canon line, for example, allows for different “Look Styles”.  Do you know which one you want to use where? Do you want to create or download a custom one?
• Can you swap out your lenses safely and cleanly on the go?
• Can you set up your tripod quickly and in the right place?

It will help train you technically in what your camera can or can’t accomplish

• Do you understand how to manipulate depth of field?  Perhaps you’ll want to invest in some ND filters…
• Do you understand how each of your lenses responds to different situations?
• It will help you figure out what equipment you may be missing.
•  Do you know what ND or polarizer filters are for?  Look them up and see if they’ll help you get the DOF or colors that you feel are missing from your stills.
• Lens hoods, eye pieces, etc. are all extremely useful but often don’t make sense until you’ve shot a bunch on a sunny day.
• What can you do in post to color correct and play with color in post?
• How do your lenses and maximum ISO settings deal with low light?  What about direct sunlight?

So go out and shoot some photos while you’re waiting for your next shoot.  You’ll be glad you did.

Today I am reviewing two movies that I didn’t like. I am not normally so down on movies, so next week I’ll prove it and write about a couple I enjoyed.

I will try to stay away from major spoilers, but read at your own risk.:

Rise of Planet of the Apes (2011)

Ok.  Don’t get too excited, this is not the movie you will be paying to see.  The movie they promise in the trailer is an exciting zombie origins thriller with the part of the zombies being played by the apes.  The movie you get is much closer to Ang Lee’s Hulk.  Slow, plodding, predictable, and dull, with reoccurring moments of ham-fisted melodrama, and an attempt at some 3rd act excitement that comes far too late.

With the overwhelmingly positive reviews on this, Thor, and X-Men: First Class, I have to seriously wonder if our collective expectations have become so low that this is what passes for a great summer film.

Here’s the thing.  The acting is good, the FX are down right amazing, Oscar worthy even, and the script isn’t even too bad.  Not good, but not bad.  I know this seems like an odd thing to say after I just called it predictable and dull.  But I have several issues with the movie as a whole:

1. Nothing very interesting happens for about the first 3/4 of the movie, and certainly no surprises throughout the majority of the film.  I can mostly forgive the surprises because we know where it’s heading.  But the trailer was the more exciting take on the story.  It’s ominous, it’s mysterious, it’s exciting.  There is little to none of that in the movie.  In fact, a large majority of what the trailer shows only happens in the last 20 minutes of the film.

2. The movie is ALL setup for the sequels.  It does it very well.  Well enough that I’ll probably be suckered into seing the next film.  However, I am extremely sick and tired of feature films that feel more like expensive TV premieres.  It was the complaint I had about the newest Star Trek (actually, most of JJ Abrams work for that matter).  The intro to the exciting stuff is the easy part and I’m left excited for the next film.  However, if a film is missing a satisfying 3rd act, it wipes out all the hard work that went into getting you there in the first place.

3.  Seriously, where did all the apes come from?  At one point 15-20 or so apes escape from a sanctuary and suddenly there are roughly 100 of them running over the hills.  As soon as they break the roughly 300 out of the zoo all hell breaks loose in San Francisco. I say this with tongue in cheek, but I honestly had a hard time suspending my disbelief during the 3rd act because of this, and I am usually very easy going with that sort of thing.

I appreciate and will admit that the filmmakers were likely trying to do something greater and more meaningful than just another summer monster flick and perhaps my disappointment may come partly from the mismarketing and false promises of the trailer.  But that disappointment in the failure of the promise and potential isn’t the only reason it fell flat for me.

The bottom line: This is not the movie that was promised to me but a mere shadow of it.  It’s predictable, dull, and way more setup than delivery.

Millennium – 1989

I watched this last night on Netflix instant streaming on a whim. I remember really wanting to see this when it was in the theaters. I was big in to time travel, sci-fi, etc. and it looked cool… back then. I will be polite and say that the years have not been kind to this film.

Here’s a vision from the future:

Yeah, that’s a robot.  What’s even better is that this robot tells one of the main characters that she isn’t smoking enough in a surprising (even for the ’80′s) and bizzarre pro-smoking message.  Apparently, the short story involved the characters from the future smoking heavily because their lungs couldn’t handle breathing clean air.  The movie just basically says, “You should be smoking more.”

I don’t want to go on longer than I already have, but end it with this: In the grand spectrum of time travel films, this is more ridiculous, more dated, and worse than Timecop.