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Last week was the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic. At her launch, she represented a new, golden age of science and technology, luxury and opportunity. She was an unprecedented monument to man’s greatness… but only for five days. James Cameron’s 1997 film, technically groundbreaking though it was, emphasized the pride of enlightened humanism while ignoring the true lessons of history, and turned a true story of heroism into groundless class warfare.

According to Paula Parisi’s gushing book Titanic and the Making of James Cameron, the director would actually go out of his way to enforce the brutish behavior of his cast. “Stop helping people,” she quotes Cameron barking on the water-logged sinking set. “I hate that. it’s every man for himself.” Despite being overbearingly demanding in his pursuit of the physical accuracy of costumes, props, and sets, James Cameron would chastise extras for modeling the very sacrificial character that made the actual sinking of the ship iconic.

The legacy left by the Titanic and her passengers is much bigger than mere records broken by a gigantic ocean liner or a gargantuan Hollywood blockbuster. The cultural impact and character lessons of this event should not be forgotten or ignored. Last week The Vision Forum put on a centennial celebration of the lives and examples of those who lived and died, underscoring the Christian principles that we should remember.

Also, a very important article just went up on the Western Conservatory website, entitled “What Lifeboats and Grief Ships Can Teach Modern Americans,” by Geoffrey Botkin. It puts the event and its fallout in the context of the hundred years that have followed, and underscores why we remember.

I don’t have much to add, but I was able to finish these two paintings in time for the Centennial. The sunrise painting shows the Titanic as the symbol of modernism at the dawn of the 20th century, and the wreck painting shows her as a monument to entropy. In continuing my study-through-forgery art experiments, I attempted to imitate the work of oceanographer, historian, explorer, and ship artist extraordinare Ken Marschall.

Since ocean liners with such flowing lines are tricky objects to draw, and cracked and buckled ocean liners are brutally difficult to capture the with proper perspective, I bought a rough 3D model and tried to rebuild it to match blueprints and wreck photos and experimented with camera angles in Lightwave. As I began painting the details and rust and lighting, I decided that I didn’t want to destroy her to the extent that she has corroded today.

Ken Marschall has painted the definitive pictures of the wreck as it was discovered in 1986, and the photos from the recent National Geographic expedition for the 100th anniversary show extensive deterioration even since then. I didn’t want to paint millions of rusticles, and I really didn’t want to corrode so much of the details and paint of the bow section. And so, my final painting is a semi-educated guess as to what the R.M.S. Titanic might have looked like in 1962, at the 50th anniversary of her sinking.

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Fortunately, I can now report that Tintin was brought to the screen without any of Crystal Skull’s franchise-breaking silliness or King Kong’s over-sentimentalized faux historicalism, adapting Hergé’s stories straight up and without too much theatrical mugging. Also, much of the franchise’s character survived intact.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the series, Hergé was a Belgian comic book author who, from the 1920s to the 1970s, wrote and illustrated 23 books about a young journalist’s adventures around the globe. Tintin and his dog Snowy faced down an increasingly realistic series of villains as they investigated lost treasure, counterfeiting rings, museum robberies, and political intrigue. Tintin’s friends, the tough sea-faring Captain Haddock, the brilliant but deaf Professor Calculus, and the often misguided Thompson and Thomson from Scotland Yard, usually ended up in the middle of gang wars, military invasions, lost tribes, scientific expeditions, and more.

Incredibly popular throughout Europe, the Tintin adventures aren’t known as well here in America. Part of that reason may be the content of the books. Tintin is an incredibly clean-cut young hero, but even though the above paragraph reads like light, fluffy Saturday morning cartoon fare, his adventures deal in a pretty no-nonsense way with murder, kidnapping, drug smuggling, and human trafficking, usually against a background of political revolution, totalitarian tyranny, or betrayal. Furthermore, modern critics often complain about Captain Haddock’s near-constant drinking, the inevitable gunplay, the many fatalities, complex moral dilemmas, and situations uncomfortably similar to world events of the time.

Studios tend to shy away from these issues in a children’s movie. A regular film adaptation of these books for 21st-century American audiences would probably remove the moral spine of Hergé’s work to make it “safe” for kids, or transform Tintin into a conflicted adult hero in a deeply depraved world.

Spielberg and Jackson wisely picked a few of Tintin’s blander books for this introductory movie, enabling them to preserve most of the aspects of the original vision. The film is a nice blend of exotic locations grounded in realistic dirt and smell, epic adventures tempered with real blood and exhaustion, and heroic idealism that is unfettered by the sarcasm, sefl-doubt, or existential darkness of most Hollywood protagonists.

Hergé’s World
Spielberg managed this balance well in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but the ability to portray realistic situations in a fantastic setting, danger without wallowing in gloom, or fearless heroism without stooping to superhuman abilities (especially to a younger audience), is Hergé’s signature style. The universe that Tintin occupies is very much like our own, with actual political and moral situations simplified for young readers, but neither ignored or exaggerated into pure fantasy.

For example, when Tintin’s adventures take him to the Middle East, he visits fictional Islamic cities, but nevertheless gets a pretty clear-eyed look at backwards, conflicted Muslim culture. Glittering mosques sit right next to decaying slums full of beggars. European arms dealers sell surplus weapons to traditionalist, tent-dwelling sheiks. The reality of 1940’s and 50’s geopolitics is communicated without being exploitative or white-washed, without dwelling on the degrading filth of the beggars or overlooking the manipulations of imperialist colonialism.

This is even more true in the later books. Tintin’s first comic strips in the 20’s tend to be much less sophisticated, when the young Hergé sent his new Boy Scout character around the world for the amusement of Belgian school children. After his blunt criticisms of the newly-formed Soviet Union, contemporary writers labeled him a fascist, and modern readers who have seen Tintin’s Congo adventure have branded him a racist.

The first allegation is laughable, but the second is not as funny. Hergé’s first portrayal of African culture and Africans themselves is extremely condescending, and exacerbated by his early, primitive drawing style and a plotless reliance on punchlines. He matured quickly, however, growing as a social commentator, an artist, and a storyteller.

His stories developed better structure, inciting incidents, multiple plot lines, and became more cinematic in their scope. The humor became more subtle, and the melodrama became real drama. His setups and payoffs are brilliant, like a pickpocket who appears to exist only to offer comic opportunities for bumbling detectives but unwittingly steals important clues from the story’s main villain, thus tying all the plots together and providing new twists and setups.

Spielberg’s Style
This ability to effortlessly condense and expand plotlines is also one of Spielberg’s greatest strengths. He likes to create miniature, self-contained story moments as a break from the main plot, but these almost-asides usually strengthen, rather than distract from, the main plot flow and his characters. He can easily switch characters from heroic to comedic and back without weakening them, and as such was the ideal director to bring Tintin to the screen.

Spielberg is also the best visual director for this job, and makes the most of his first animated film. With a virtual camera at his disposal, he uses framing and motion cautiously during action and boldly during dialogue, often mimicking Hergé’s setups from the books, but usually expanding shots and scenes to better fit the medium of cinema. Benjamin Botkin jokes that this film is his apology for the Crystal Skull.

The trademark Spielberg lighting elements are there, as are the use of reflections and atmospheric elements, sometimes exaggerated in ways only possible in animation. Characters are often seen reflected or distorted in bottles, bubbles, puddles, swords, or other objects that would be impossible to properly choreograph with live action props. It’s very fun, and fits the story well, even if it could be excessive for other films.

As much as I love the simple, strong claire ligné style of Hergé’s drawings, it’s hard to imagine them working in motion, and a live-action Tintin film, like the one Spielberg was planning in the early 80s, would have had other significant challenges.

A lot of credit needs to go to the art directors at Weta Digital. While other mocap films like Polar Express and Mars Needs Moms fall into the “Uncanny Valley” between cartoons and live action, where stilted animation and dead eyes repulse rather than attract audiences, Tintin and his friends work… for the most part. Snowy and Thompson and Thomson fare the worst in trying to combine realism and caricature with appeal, but they aren’t too distracting.

The reveal of each character is handled well, and played to the weaknesses of the technology. Tintin himself is introduced in silhouette during a 2D animated title sequence at the beginning of the film, but then seen only from behind as other 3D characters acclimate the audience to the look of the film. Tintin then has his caricature sketched by a digital cameo of Hergé himself as dozens of extras pass by. Only after we’ve seen many other people does the camera reveal our hero’s iconic features in 3D.

Likewise, Thompson and Thomson first “appear” while hiding behind newspapers, and Captain Haddock’s head is hugely distorted through a whiskey bottle for a line or two of dialog before his face emerges. It is very clever to introduce audiences to the new voices and faces of their favorite characters gradually, in stages.

Speaking of which, the actors did an excellent job, and were cast well. Captain Haddock does have an inexplicably Scottish accent for the heir to an upper-crust English title (especially since his servant-of-the-crown ancestor has the same exaggerated brogue), but otherwise Andy Serkis did excellent work.

Character Growth
For cinematic purposes, Tintin’s main flaw is that he has no flaw. He cannot grow, and thus he cannot have a character arc. Fortunately, Captain Haddock does have a character arc, at least in the first couple of books. After he sobers up he becomes the same gruff and powerful seadog for the remainder of the series, continuing to drink but being only occasionally drunk. In many ways, The Secret of the Unicorn is his movie.

The film begins when Tintin, after having his caricature drawn, buys a model ship from an antique dealer. It is a model of the HMS Unicorn, commanded by Sir Francis Haddock in the 17th century. Complications ensue when this ship model turns out to be highly sought by various members of the criminal underworld in hopes that it contains some clue to the lost treasure of the Unicorn.

Long story short, it does, and after many thrilling action sequences involving guns, cars and dockyards, Tintin finds himself a prisoner in Act II, shanghaied aboard a tramp steamer on its way to north Africa, and reluctantly teamed up with Captain Haddock, the permanently inebriated descendant of Sir Francis.

Half a dozen narrow boat and plane escapes later, Tintin and the Captain beat the steamer to the African Coast, are rescued by the French Foreign Legion, and attend an musical event hosted by a prominent Arab leader, and things continue logically from there in another serious of big screen conflicts and adventures until the climactic finish.

Throughout all this, Tintin is chasing down the answer to the mystery, the villain wants the treasure, and while various clues pop up here and there, the real key to the secret of the Unicorn is in the memory of the drunken, useless Captain Haddock. In order for him to assist Tintin and thwart his nemesis, he must sober up.

As in the book that their meeting is based on, Tintin is the example that the Captain needs, and he begins to resist the temptation to drink. While temperance groups have criticized the Tintin books because of their regular depiction of alcohol consumption, Hergé handles alcohol abuse properly. Captain Haddock is Tintin’s closest friend and greatest ally – unless he’s been drinking. I can’t think any lesson against drunkenness as vivid as the Captain’s violently dualistic nature in the early books.

The film handles the Captain’s rejection of whiskey very well, especially when all the setups pay off in Act III, but the lessons on temptation and self control are a little weakened by all the humor that is squeezed out of the Captain’s ongoing struggle. Some of the jokes are too broad, making the Captain more of a buffoon than he should be, but between his hallucinations while detoxing in the Sahara desert and a short relapse involving some medical alcohol, he begins to remember his family legacy.

This was my favorite part of the film. Watching Sir Francis Haddock single-handedly sink a pirate ship and nearly defeat the entire pirate crew easily trumps everything seen in all of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Even better is the way that the Spielberg laid out the naval battle, Captain Haddock’s very active retelling of the history, and the transitions between the two scenes.

It’s a masterfully directed sequence, but it also sets up the Captain’s character. Up until now he has been either a comic or tragic figure, at best a hindrance to Tintin and at worst a serious liability. But now we see what kind of men his ancestors were, and we can’t wait for him to man up, kick his whisky habit, and smash the villain for good.

In film, it can be dangerous to reveal a character’s potential before he himself realizes it, and it is also important that audience not have to sit through too many scenes waiting for the character to become cool or useful. In addition, Spielberg had to make sure that Captain Haddock’s final showdown with his nemesis was no less cataclysmic than his ancestor’s duel with the pirate chief. In this he succeeded.

Lessons for Filmmakers
While I don’t believe that Spielberg is at the top of his game anymore, Spielberg in a slump is still the best. There’s a lot to learn from this film, mostly in how the camera is moved and how it is placed. With total freedom to position the camera, to frame any way and show anything, each shot is Spielberg’s ideal setup. I can’t wait to further dissect this film shot by shot.

There are also some valuable lessons in what could have been done better. The lack of an arc for Tintin is basically made up for by the Captain’s arc, but he doesn’t show up until Act II, so more emotional connection to Tintin would have been really helpful. Adapting Tintin for the big screen is challenging, since his character is pretty flat, mainly representing the reader’s own perspective, and Snowy isn’t quite a strong enough foil to support him during Act I.

Tintin and Captain Haddock express few emotions during the course of this journey; curiosity, wonder, indignation when experiencing the machinations of the villains, and a tiny, brief moment of discouragement when the “all is lost” moment occurs at the end of Act II. More emotional reaction would have resulted in a little more emotional connection with the audience, and provided some welcome pauses in the whirlwind action of the main plot.

Ultimately though, many of the lessons from the film come from Hergé’s storytelling ability, and the universe that he places his stories in. During WWII Tintin’s enemies were generic, non-political badguys, since Belgium’s Nazi occupiers ran the newspapers, but prior to the occupation Hergé had used his comics to criticize Fascism and the Anschluss in King Ottokar’s Scepter, and The Blue Lotus even had Tintin witness the actual 1931 Mukden Incident that led to the Japanese invasion of China.

After the liberation of Europe, Tintin’s adventures returned to a much more recognizable world and actual events. Later stories show the fictional but clearly Soviet-esque nation of Borduria stealing military technology from other nations, racing western superpowers to the moon, and initiating South American revolutions and Arabian wars. As Tintin books were translated into other languages, children around the world had complex geopolitics explained to them in a consistent, mature, conservative way.

Twenty-seven years after the extremely embarrassing Tintin the Congo, Hergé’s Red Sea Sharks adventure involves a slave ship in the Mediterranean. While his drawings of the black slaves still tend to elicit criticism, these characters are treated with much more dignity, and Tintin and Captain Haddock respond to the slave traders with fury, the act of slavery with horror, and the slaves with great compassion.

The Secret of the Unicorn hasn’t been as successful a film in the US as it has internationally, but at least one sequel has already been greenlit, to be directed by Peter Jackson. Even if the future films and characters don’t grow in maturity like Hergé’s creations did, I hope they can maintain the sunny-but-serious tone.

And even if Jackson and Spielberg miss out on an opportunity to depict real historical situations using this franchise, Christian filmmakers can still learn from Hergé’s example. When he avoided a totally fantasy world and refused to shrink from real issues, he managed to tell stories that still ring true with all ages and audiences, and also teach valuable moral lessons about a multitude of issues from drunkenness to nuclear espionage.

These lessons work because the situations are realistic without being defiling, exciting without being gratuitous. Modern entertainment tends to equate moral realism with pessimism and darkness, and even when it does place a protagonist in a politically-correct magical superhero world, he tends to be crass and whiny. Tintin is one of the last heroes to seriously confront real-world sin and corruption while remaining optimistic and pure-hearted. From his first adventure to his last, he remains a boy scout.

Discerning filmmakers should carefully analyze how this is done, and build on what Hergé accomplished.

Drew Struzan, now retired, was in many ways the most successful movie poster artist in the history of film. His technical ability was unmatched, and his aesthetic style was incredibly appealing, but his greatest skill was capturing the best elements of a film and making them stronger. He made adventures more adventurous, dramas more dramatic, and the posters were almost always better than the movies. When I became a man I put away childish things (and then watched as George Lucas made them into stupid, infantile things), but even so… I’ve got to admit that looking at the posters makes me want to watch Star Wars again.

Even though his work only involved creating advertising materials for films that were already complete, I believe that he had a significant influence on the direction of Hollywood in the 80s. Films with Struzan posters did well financially, and sequels, spinoffs, and imitations seem to follow the essence of the posters as much as the plots of the films. Also, in the same way that John Williams brought film scoring back to a symphonic and orchestral base after the improvisational synth soundtrack trends of the 70s, Struzan brought more of a fine-art sensibility of portraiture back to advertisements that were becoming crude and intangible.

His posters are yet another example of commercial illustration, which socialists and auteurs denigrate as being low-brow populist drek, really being some of the best art of its time. John Sargent, Norman Rockwell, and Drew Struzan, within the constraints and supports of the free market, have created some of the most technically superior art of the last century, while their contemporaries in the subsidized or “proper” art world were generally lost in the ugly and abstract.

This is also obvious in film. Talented filmmakers like Spielberg, Lucas, and Zemeckis are at their best when working for critical employers using limited resources to sell tickets to a dubious audience. When they have unlimited budgets and can coast on name recognition with an army of yes-men supporting them, they create bloated, pointless movies that were probably more fun to make than to watch. Of course, these Hollywood blockbusters still have good photography, thrilling scores, and at least some measure of story – a holdover from the disciplines achieved by these directors in their younger, more structured, free-market days.

If you think I’m being harsh, consider the new generation of “free-thinking” indie filmmakers with no constraints or rules or even marketing goals. Inevitably, they make terrible, selfishly-motivated films that only artsy posers can pretend to like, just like the works of unconstrained composers, painters, and sculptors of the past. When a desire to communicate edginess or chaos (usually under the pretense of truer truth or more realistic reality) trumps the desire to communicate actual truth and reality (as Rushdoony wrote, “Reality reflects the mind of God, not man.”), the artist must shake off all traditions and standards of his craft, as well as the limits of the market.

In fact, as Christian observers, we can go further. We can see active rebellion against created order in the works of many artists, particularly those artists who desire only self-expression and self-satisfaction. Artists who specifically work for the glory of God (such as J.S. Bach), the approval of paying clients (the Dutch Masters), the gratification of a paying public (professionals during the Golden Age of Illustration), or all three (J. S. Bach), tend to achieve a better aesthetic, amazing technical ability, and are much less likely to go insane.

Now, it should be noted that Drew Struzan’s amazing artistic talent and solid technical disciplines have largely been used to glorify Hollywood films and rock albums, and this in itself is an important lesson. Art is a powerful tool, not just passive or neutral decoration. We need to think long and hard about the effect that our creative energies may have, and who might benefit from them. Whatever can be said about Struzan’s legacy, I think that when we see a man who is skilled in his work, we should take notice.

Struzan is a master of lighting, color, and composition, and since I can’t really simulate mastery, I decided to copy a few of his trademark poster elements and the overall look of his physical style. Specifically, I wanted to evoke the Last Crusade poster, possibly his best work. That poster also contains a few hat-tips to the original Raiders poster by Robert Amsel, so I studied it as well.

These posters have a rougher, older, more distressed style than some of Struzan’s more airbrushed, 80s sci-fi posters, but you can see a lot of his signature elements: a college of overlapping faces, many elements or locations from the film expertly blended, at strong atmospheric feel, harsh back or side lighting with very soft fill, a broken frame made of architectural elements around the subjects, and some glows or lens flares, usually from a visible sunset.

Struzan tends to mix transparent acrylic paint and opaque color pencil to create his posters. Sometimes the paint is applied over a pencil sketch with an airbrush, and sometimes the sketch goes on top of a thickly applied undercoat, and the brushstrokes become part of the image. However, the final touches are usually sharp, bold pencil lines, which look loose and sketchy but fall precisely in the right places.

His adventure posters have less airbrushing and more pencil, usually rough pencil scratches over rough brushstrokes, which get rougher the farther they get from the main portraits. Worn fabrics and worn stone are accentuated, sometimes with a pass of charcoal or pastel, sometimes with a few paint spatters from a brush. In short, a lot of very analog physical elements that are hard to recreate digitally.

First, I tried to duplicate all of this in Photoshop by simply painting over some photos that I’d assembled into a rough mockup, but it really didn’t match. At all. It turns out that the best way to simulate the look is to bite the bullet and actually do the work, so I started over with a pencil sketch and painted on top of that using the colors from the photos.

Then came the textures, the paint spatters, the lens flare, and the detailing, essentially in the order that they’d be done on a board, or at least, as near as I can guess how Struzan likes to do them. It took me a few days of sketching, painting, and experimenting… but Struzan can create a complete poster, start to finish, in two days, and that’s without cheating in Photoshop.

Attempting to copy another artist is very educational. I’ve always liked Struzan’s work, appreciated his eye, and thought that I understood all the elements of his style, but attempting to duplicate it forced me to really study him in a way that I never had before. I only wish I had time to redo this poster from scratch, since I now have a much better grasp, and appreciation, of the craftsmanship that is involved.

I don’t have much time for painting in general, but traditional art is one of my main interests, and I’ve decided that if I have a few free days in 2012, I should keep experimenting. I’ve already started a list of other artists to copy in an effort to learn more about them, since that seems like one of the best ways to hone my own analytical eye. Which makes yet another lesson that I’ve learned from Drew Struzan.

The Canon EOS C300 is an all new digital cinema camera in the $15-20,000 dollar range. It’s meant to compete with the Arri Alexa and Red Epic, but in many ways is most similar to the Sony Cinealta F3. There are technically two versions of this camera, one with an EF mount, and one with a PL mount, but otherwise they are identical. Both cameras will be shipping worldwide by January 2012.

The C300 uses a brand-new 4K Super35 sensor, which resolves an incredibly clean 1080p image, with a particular focus on color reproduction. There isn’t much raw technical data on the sensor yet, but everyone who has had a chance to experiment with it reports far greater low-light performance than anything from Canon or Arri previously on the market. Unlike Canon’s video-enabled dSLRs, this sensor is built specifically for HD video, so there are no aliasing or moire artifacts.

Essentially, this is closer to the fully video capable version of the 5D MkII that most shooters were hoping for, but at a higher price tag and much higher capability. Key features include heavy-duty weatherproofing, genlock and sync (required for broadcast and 3D), full XLR ports and audio tools, waveform and vectorscope, live magnified focus and peaking, hot-swappable CF card slots, uncompressed HD-SDI output, and flexible framerates, all in a package weighing less than four pounds and compatible with professional cinema lenses.

Despite the new form factor, the C300 does live up to its inclusion in the EOS family with compatibility with various other EOS camera modes and accessories, including the new WFT-E6 wireless adapter, which will allow for full wireless control and viewfinder streaming to computers, tablets, and phones.

Of course, a Canon video camera release wouldn’t be the same without a new Vincent Laforet film, and also the trailer for a new Ron Howard film apparently being shot on the C300. Vincent Laforet offered a number of technical insights during a panel discussion, and he has also posted some thoughts on the camera at his blog. Other speakers at the event included Felix Alcala, Sam Nicholson, Masaya Maeda, Martin Scorsese, and Canon’s Chairman and CEO, Fujio Mitarai.

As soon as the Canon event ended, RED began theirs, which consisted of Jim Jannard and other RED staff speaking over a video link on a projector screen. This was a far cry from the lineup of live industry professionals at the Canon show, but the newly adjusted Scarlet-X and C300 seem to have a lot in common, especially at first glance. They are similar sizes, weights, and each is available with a EF or PL lens mount.

Underneath the surface, however, there are major differences. Each camera records to a 50mbps 4:2:2 codec, but Canon uses the widely accepted MPEG2 MXF format (subsampled upon compression), and RED uses its own efficient yet proprietary wavelet-based REDCODE (subsampled at the sensor). The C300’s gargantuan 4k Super35 chip downscales to 1080p, while the Scarlet’s 4k image is picked up raw on a smaller area of the sensor, apparently pulled from rejected Epic chips.

At only $9,750, the Scarlet-X comes in at less than half the retail price of the C300, but at an estimated $16,000 street price Canon also includes a viewfinder, 4” HD monitor, rotating detachable handgrip, dual CF card writer, and a bunch of other stuff that RED (and other manufacturers) tend to charge a lot extra for. To get these two cameras on more of an equal footing, I predict that you’ll spend about the same money.

And you can probably have them at about the same time, too. The Scarlet can be ordered now, theoretically shipping next month, and Jannard gave his word that cameras would actually be in stock by February, only a month after the C300. Of course, with Canon we can expect that all purchased cameras will be fully functional. I don’t mean to pick on RED, but the Epic shipped eight months late, and it is still missing extremely basic features. Features like playback.

All in all, I think that the C300 is a much closer competitor to the RED Epic than the Scarlet, and the amount of preparation that went into each product launch is revealing. It’s also worth noting that the C300 has no automatic focus and no automatic iris settings. It is not a prosumer video camera, or even a professional video camera. It is a professional digital cinema camera, built for skilled camera operators working on features, TV pilots, and high-end documentaries.

Now, we filmmakers live in a wondrous age, an age where we don’t really have to make do with technically inferior cameras any more. If in funds, we can pick between a pretty wide selection of completely competent cameras. The “best” camera is no longer defined by “most resolution” or “fewest workarounds in post” because we now have so many high-powered camera options that we can pick based on image quality or pipeline compatibility.

The Red Epic claims to record the most raw pixels, but many claim the Arri Alexa records better-looking pixels. The 1080p Panavision Genesis is getting pretty long in the tooth, but still pulls its weight on hundreds of movies a year, even big-budget VFX films like Captain America. Sony’s ubiquitous F35 and brand-new F65 still integrate seamlessly with the CineAlta pipelines developed a decade ago for the F900. They are all pretty amazing cameras.

I think Canon’s EOS C300 should be able to hold its own in that group, especially considering that its price is a fraction of what operators pay for similarly spec’d gear. If it shoots well, is utterly reliable, and fits into existing production workflow as easily as Canon’s current still and previous video cameras have, I predict that it and its successors will do very well.

Oh, and Canon had another announcement as well. It’s more of a tease, but apparently a new dSLR prototype exists in the Canon Labs. It will be part of the “EOS Movies” family, shoots 4k footage on a Super35 sensor, and records to a M-JPEG codec. I’m hoping that it’s the 5D MkIII.

You can read more about all the bits and pieces over at Western Conservatory, and here is the new trailer, complete with finished color grading, HD, and spoilers:

It’s been a long time coming, but everything should start shipping in a week or so. Take a look at the cover art for the DVD case and book and let me know what you think.

There will be a lot of Navigating History announcements coming soon, so stay tuned, either here, or on the Navigating History Facebook page.

I’ve been recommending the Cineform codec to video editors for years. Its speed, quality, and efficiency make it an intermediate codec that is perfect for all areas of post production. However, it would also make an ideal acquisition codec, and so, for years I have also been urging camera manufacturers to purchase or license the encoder so we can more easily shoot “visually lossless” video natively in-camera.

At the moment, the only camera system that records using Cineform is the Silicon Imaging line, most famously used to shoot the Bombay scenes from Slumdog Millionaire and currently hard at work on Transformers 3. There is also the CineDeck, a solid state encoding and playback device that can record the video feed from a camera using the Cineform codec, but so far none of the larger camera manufacturers are using it natively. This is all about to change. Sort of. Possibly.

It’s too early to know exactly how this will play out, but GoPro, creator of the extreme sports camera GoPro Hero, has just purchased the entire Cineform company, obviously with an eye to utilizing Cineform tech for existing or future cameras. Essentially, nothing will change for Cineform customers, but Cineform is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of GoPro.

This is an unexpected development that, at first glance, doesn’t make much sense. GoPro manufactures extremely cheap, rugged, fully-automatic HD cameras with limited feature sets for a specific consumer market. The Cineform codec supports a vast panoply of video options usually of interest only to high-end professionals – things like 4:4:4 color, Camera RAW, look up tables, up-conversion color filtering, up-to-8k resolution and an excellent implementation of stereo 3D.

However, that last feature is telling. One of the great advantages of the GoPro Hero is its sheer tinyness, which makes 3D rigs incredibly easy to build. An enclosure that holds two Heroes side by side and includes a custom cable to keep them in exact sync is shipping now, and Cineform is already providing the software that users can use to merge and manage the resulting stereo video files.

So, is this corporate acquisition just the fastest way for GoPro to bring solid 3D support to customers, or will this partnership result in more professional features for GoPro cameras and a wider userbase for the Cineform codec? Only time will tell, but David Newman and the Cineform team are very happy with this development, and the Cineform software packages have already received some large discounts thanks to GoPro’s financial support.

Personally, I’m excited. Professional adoption of GoPro cameras hasn’t been as fast as say, the 5D Mk II, but there is a lot of Pro value in the platform. Our two Heroes functioned extremely well in Egypt, shooting covert stills, timelapse, or HD video footage in cramped locations like elevators, taxis, or under the Nile. A better bitrate or more efficient codec would only increase their usability, and more people using Cineform will only improve support for existing users.

Ideally, GoPro should create a Cineform-powered hardware encoder on a chip, which might find a home with many other camera manufacturers and continue to drive software sales, but for now, I think both companies will benefit from cross-pollination. An extremely promising indication is the easy interoperability of the free GoPro desktop software (which will convert any H.264 mp4 file to Cineform for free) and Cineform’s Neo grading tools.

In two weeks, a four-man video team is heading to Egypt. We will be there for two weeks. During that time, we will post a 24-minute video episode every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We will stream this video live to subscribers on the web and immediately afterwards stream live audio from the team on the ground for 30-minutes of interactive Q&A.

It’s a pretty brutal production schedule, and to make it work we’ll be relying on the blinding speed of Premiere CS5 on two high-powered laptop editing suites, the superior image quality of the Canon 5D, and the extreme flexibility of the GoPro HD Hero. We’re using a mix of shotgun mics and wireless lavs for audio, LED flashlights for lighting, and an assortment of GPS trackers and satellite pagers, not mention a huge stack of redundant eSATA hard drives that we’ll be backpacking around the desert.

It’ll be quite an adventure, but the project is more than a simple travel show. We’re hoping to cover the history and culture of Egypt in a presuppositional way, and look at the consequences of the ideas that have affected it. The four dominant ideologies of the globe – ancient paganism, Greek humanism, Christianity, and Islam – have all owned Egypt at different times. A hike down the Nile will reveal pyramids, Roman temples, New Testament-era churches, and modern mosques, and the effects that these influences have had on the surrounding culture.

We’re calling this the Navigating History project, and we’re hoping that Egypt is just the first of many seasons to come. You can read more about our goals and process on the website, and over the course of our trip, we’ll be posting images and video there at least once a day once we hit the ground in Egypt.

If this production schedule works, and our subscriber model works, we’d like to produce a new season of Navigating History every 4-6 months, each focusing on a different location and culture, and rotate different crew members through the process as well. So, check out this first season. It’ll be interesting, educational, and entertaining, and it’s very possible that readers of this blog will be on the teams working on future expeditions.

The Sony HXR-MC1 is a solid recent version, with a splash-proof 1.5” wide camera head tethered to a larger camera body, which records 1080i into 16mbps AVCHD. It’s made by a professional video camera company so it has a lot of professional features, like a proper zoom lens and a 1/5” sensor, but its downsides include the short nine-foot tether and the large $2,500 price tag.

If that’s a bit too much to spend on a camera that you will use rarely or you’re looking for something more rugged, there is an alternative available from the extreme sports crowd. It may not have manual controls, moving lens elements, or even a viewfinder, but it’s waterproof to 180 feet, fits in the palm of your hand, and shoots full HD video
for around $250.

The original GoPro Hero was a relatively popular wide-angle helmet cam for the BMX and skateboard set, but their new, HD capable version has much wider appeal. The HD Hero is one of the most interesting cameras I’ve played with recently, partly because of its extreme flexibility and partly because it really shouldn’t perform as well as it does.

When I bought the camera, I hoped that the (relatively) giant lens port on the body contained a giant lens in front of a giant sensor. Unfortunately, that is not the case. It’s a tiny fixed lens like many cell phones have. It has a very small aperture, which means almost infinite depth-of-field, which means no worrying about autofocus. The 170° field of view is about as distorted as a normal fisheye.

Behind the tiny lens is a tiny 5 megapixel sensor, also like many current cell phones, but this sensor’s refresh speed is very fast, which minimizes rolling shutter skew pretty well. This is important, since it’s meant to be an action cam for extreme sports. It’s also meant to be used outside during the day, which means that it hasn’t been built with low-light performance in mind. It gets very grainy very quickly in the dark.

In the daytime, however, it is excellent. It has pretty good dynamic range and passable auto-exposure, and the images are saturated and sharp – almost too sharp for the codec. The 1080 footage is compressed to h.264 at around 12 Mbps, which is just on the low end of usable, but if there were some sort of image stabilization, it would be better. However, there are times when consumer features trump professional ones, like the way this camera charges from a standard miniUSB cable and records to cheap SD or SDHC cards.

Here are some screenshots, and I’ve uploaded PNG files taken directly from the MP4 files with no adjustments. Some of the shots are stationary, some are fast moving, but all of them are high detail images that are stressing the limits of the codec and the latitude of the sensor. Turns out chicken feathers are a great compression test, since they have a high contrast area and lower contrast area and anisotropic, iridescent highlights.

There are five video modes and four photo modes available on the HD Hero. These can be finicky to set, since there are only two buttons on the camera and the LCD screen is miniscule. Fortunately, most users will be able to set the camera to a single video mode and not worry about it much after that. The photo modes allow a click of the shutter button to shoot a single image, a burst of three images, set a ten second timer, or begin timelapse shooting at 2, 5, 10, 30, or 60-second intervals. As I’ve said before, timelapse is a handy tool for videographers, so it’s a nice addition to the Hero.

The video modes are a 848×480 square-pixel widescreen SD at 60p, 1280×720 at 30p, 1280×720 at 60p, a bizarre 4:3 HD at 1280×960 at 30p, and finally, full 1920×1080 at 30p. Interesting, the four lower resolution video options shoot using the full 170° FOV of the lens, while 1080p crops the sensor to a somewhat narrower 127° angle. This is a very good thing, firstly because the nearly 180° fisheye is pretty excessive for non-snowboarding video, and secondly because it means that 1080p video is apparently a non-scaled 1:1 crop of the sensor, which means fewer moiré and aliasing issues.

Furthermore, the HD Hero has a new firmware upgrade that enables us to switch between NTSC and PAL shooting modes, which changes all the framerates to 50p and 25p at the same resolutions. This is excellent news for those of us who predominantly work at 24p. The recorded audio is still almost useless from a production standpoint, but it’ll usually be good enough for a PluralEyes sync.

At the end of the day, a camera this small that shoots a crisp HD image this wide offers a lot of new creative possibilities to the documentary filmmaker. The ability to snap it onto a monopod and boom it around or suction cup it to a windshield and get a wide-angle view of a car interior is pretty amazing. It’s also an interesting reminder of how far digital cameras have come recently; apart from the lack of stabilization, the HD Hero’s footage compares very favorably to the Canon HV20 I reviewed three years ago.

If you haven’t read my article on Three-Act Structure yet, you should. This post will make more sense if you do, and so will the three books on screenwriting that I recommend.

I’m a big fan of Syd Field and his gamechanging book Screenplay, which was published in 1979. Prior to that, there wasn’t that much material on how to write movies, and what there was hadn’t been too specific on details. Field is the one who really nailed down the concept of plot points being part of a three act storyline.

Other authors quickly jumped on this concept of structured plot and pacing, but it also had plenty of detractors. Field’s paradigm has been rephrased and tweaked by every solid story specialist in Hollywood, but the best of them have stuck close to his formula. The most notable of these successors is probably Bob McKee, who after years of teaching screenwriting published the 1997 book Story.

Then, in 2005, the late, great Blake Snyder published his advice in the extremely practical Save The Cat. The book is subtitled “The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need,” and I think that’s actually a fair claim, especially if you’ve previously read anything by Syd Field or Bob McKee. Save the Cat fills in a lot of the blanks that those authors may have left, emphasizes their main points, and is a get-your-hands-dirty approach to the nitty gritty aspects of writing movies.

For example, Blake Snyder was the first writer I’ve come across who really described how to make the proper use of The Board, even though it’s a tool that virtually every screenwriter depends on. For example, here’s The Board for one of my projects:

It’s a giant piece of paper, divided into four horizontal sections. The top is Act I, the next two are the two halves of Act II, and the bottom is Act III. Written on the paper in the appropriate spots are the immovable Things That Must Happen* in any movie, and pinned in top are my story beats – all the main events, scenes, and ideas that tell the story.

It’s an easy matter to add, subtract, and rearrange these story points to get the beats of the story really hammered into shape, and it’s a great way to visualize where the story drags or is too rushed. This Board is in an early stage; it hasn’t been color-coded and there are no arcs on it, but soon a single glance will explain where specific events occur in space, in time, and in relation to all the other points in the film.

The only downside to this system is that it’s difficult to share with long-distance collaborators, and it’s not very portable. Of course, The Board can be altered and shrunk. I’ve seen rolled-up posters plastered with post-it notes, and folding whiteboards, and those are pretty good solutions, but I still tried my hand at making a digital one.

Oh sure, there are plenty of online corkboard programs, professional screenwriting packages like Final Draft offer some neat index card tools, and Blake Snyder’s site even offers a nifty iPhone app for creating beat sheets, but my option is very basic.

It’s just a simple Microsoft Word document, with four vertical pages representing the horizontal strips of The Board. I’ve also added the 40 beats that Snyder recommends writers limit themselves to, and I’ve labeled the immovably* required ones as per the suggestions of the three authors listed above. It’s cramped and not as tactile as a physical Board, but it has a few advantages.

Color-coding is faster, it’s easier to save revisions, you can track changes, and the entire board can be emailed back and forth easily. It’s also very portable; on a 15” or 17” widescreen laptop, all four pages are simultaneously viewable. Besides, once you have a bunch of beats written in Word, it’s easy to print them out, cut them up, and pin them to a real corkboard anyway. So what are you waiting for? Try it out!

 TheBoard.doc  

In addition to the first four pages, there are a few other things that you might find useful, like dialogue and cast lists. If anyone has any suggestions on improvements to the file, send them in. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to get Word to print the pages side by side on a single sheet automatically, but if you cut your regular 8.5×11 printer paper in half before printing, it works great.

*I’ve been referring to certain beats as immovable, but this isn’t strictly true. You can always slide them around a bit, but not that much, and the order really can’t change. The hero’s debate always follows the inciting incident, for example, and he can’t break into Act III until after his lowest point, etc.