http://www.outside-hollywood.com Isaac Botkin's film and video website Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:31:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Over the last few years, I’ve touched on screenwriting rather infrequently. I’ve discussed theme, how to write a simple pitch treatment, and analyzed other people’s stories, but most of the time, I’ve focused on color grading, computer gear, and cameras. It’s a little unbalanced, because post-production is such a ... http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2010/03/the-board/ Twelve years ago, James Cameron made the world’s most expensive movie, which turned out to be the world’s highest grossing movie (unless you adjust for inflation, of course). A vast majority of its colossal budget went to the painstaking detail of historical authenticity; custom carpets woven by the same companies ... http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2010/01/film-review-avatar/ A common idea in modern journalism is that for a documentary to be “fair,” its creator must have no biases about the subject in question. Even if this were remotely possible from an ideological standpoint, the filmmaker would still have to know nothing and care nothing about the subject or ... http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2009/10/homeschool-dropouts-production-notes/ As I’ve mentioned before, we shot the documentary Homeschool Dropouts on the 5DmkII in August, and posted it during September. It was a great learning experience, since it was our first time shooting video on a dSLR. Below is the worst shot from the project - all of the 5D’s ... http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2009/10/shooting-and-posting-on-the-5dmkii/ Several months ago I (and pretty much every other video blogger) talked about what Canon could do to improve their lineup of HD-capable dSLRs from the perspective of video production. Since then, they have added a lot of improvements, some with firmware upgrades, and some in new hardware. Here’s a ... http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2009/10/latest-video-dslr-news/ Obviously SIGGRAPH was a while ago, but I’ve been out of town working on a project that I will reveal shortly. Firstly, I’d like to report that my talk went pretty well. I was blessed to be part of a fantastic session and lots of neat material got covered. ... http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2009/08/siggraph-2009-report/ "I think the toughest thing for a director to do is to know what he wants. It's not how to get what you want; it's knowing what you want. So many people make movies and they don't know what they want." –Stephen Spielberg As many people know, Spielberg is probably my ... http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2009/07/directors-should-be-animators/ Last month I mentioned that seeing Up in 3D had inspired me to do a few of my own experiments. Below is one of my renders (cross your eyes to see it). Dual-eye renders are easy to produce from just about every animation program, but it's tricky to tweak ... http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2009/07/outside-hollywood-at-siggraph/ I don't write that many movie reviews, but Pixar's latest release was such a cut above other films that I wanted to comment on many aspects of it. My brother Ben also had a few things to say. The Story of Up Story is king. Pixar's writers and directors are known as ... http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2009/07/the-up-collection/ Most Pixar films have had one area of groundbreaking technical achievement. Monsters Inc had a lot of new hair and fur simulations. Finding Nemo debuted a lot of new fluid dynamics. With Cars it was volumetric dust, and Wall-E made some serious advances in emulating light in physical camera lenses. I ... http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2009/06/the-technology-of-up/