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Repo Man Director Alex Cox Plans To Edit Next Film With OpenShot
New submitter JonOomph writes "Director Alex Cox, the creator of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, is making plans via Kickstarter for his next film, Bill, the Galactic Hero, a feature-length science fiction comedy set in the far reaches of our galaxy. He is challenging the norm by shooting the film on 35mm monochrome (black and white) film, possibly the last film to ever attempt this, and possibly the first feature film to be edited with popular open source video editor OpenShot." If you don't like spoilers, I suggest reading this short but fascinating piece on Repo Man (one of my all-time favorite movies) only after watching it.
It's all part of the cosmic unconsciousness...
and you get your name immortalized in imdb as a producer!
Anyone misread that as Alan Cox? I wondered why a kernel developer had to make a film.
It's like a US version of the "Max Headroom" telemovie only with a bigger budget. It was like peering into the near future - generic brand beer and all.
It's probably not the last B&W since the tone range on modern monochrome film is huge, so some stuff looks very good, so long as you have a real 35mm projector. Converted to digital you lose a lot of range so something that looks good on film may just look like mud on a TV or digital projector.
I loved Repo Man in the 80's and it was the soundtrack that made that film IMO. The punk persona it overlayed onto the themes of the movie seemed so hard core and bad ass to my then teenage self and seem so quaint and almost tame to me by the standards of today... a true "time bubble" of a movie.
and Pablo Picasso really is an A$$hole!
By Harry Harrison, I've read this book. It was funny, had a bit of a hitchhikers guide feel to it.
Although it was written earlier.
If you are going to do digital post and editing? Seems like stupid hype to get people to kick his movie. If it had been all on "film" like in the good old day I might have given him a buck or two but this is just stupid and adds nothing. (I bet second unit will be digital anyway)
A black and white Sci-Fi comedy set in the outer reaches of the galaxy? For a real retro look, why not go 1-D and have a silent movie?
Most cinemas are converting to digital like crazy - which means the number of places you could see this will be limited and the audience even more limited.
I'm not investing
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Always interested in what Alex Cox makes. Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Walker, Highway Patrolman, Straight to Hell. Doesn't he get some credit for using open source software to make a feature length movie?
Are you suggesting Openshot swallows?
If you missed it, he's going to be using an open source digital editing suite to edit the film. When you add that digital step, there is zero value in recording in analog.
He better get use to loosing all his work then, OpenShot is one crash happy application, I couldn't even edit a ten minute clip without a crash. I assume the Dev knows about it, hard to miss with all the forum posts. I'll just stick to Avidemux for smaller clips, maybe Kdenlive for larger projects.
Well the intermediary could be 16-bit or even higher, but I doubt OpenShot supports such color depth.
You'll still have more range and depth than you would with shooting on color film stock and desaturating during the editing process, or shooting digital B&W.
You people get me every time. Optical printing loses quality with every pass, unless you're looking at an answer print the effective resolution of 35mm is below that of HD.
12 bit DCP is fine, it represents a contrast ratio of 4096:1 or 12 stops of dynamic range. Beyond that, human beings have inbuilt iris adjustment. You think you'd notice visible banding or that a film print with a lower effective resolution would somehow display less posterization?
How do you edit FILM with software?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Why shoot on film if you're going to do digital editing?
Wasting chloraphylies is a capital offense, punishable by death.
Seastead this.
It will use anything supported by ffmpeg. You obvious wanted to post something negative before seeing what it it could actually do.
FYI:
The opensource video editing program also has its own kickstart page
You may want to visit it @ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/421164014/openshot-video-editor-for-windows-mac-and-linux/
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
That should be "Harry Harrison's classic Bill the Galactic Hero." He also wrote Soylent Green aka Make Room Make Room, the Stainless Steel Rat books, and many other great works that should be in any true geek's collection.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Just as long as they fund it.
i want to be excited about this, but Alex Cox seems to have lost it recently. i know Repo Chick had an incredibly tight budget, but still... he seems to have become lost in his own world. he even claimed that Repo: The Genetic Opera was a ripoff of Repo Man. sorry, Alex, you can't assert a claim to every dystopic story involving repossession.
i guess we'll see if this project gets funded.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
The hell he was!
about the openshot kickstarter project: :) I understand if openshot wants to provide a version for everyone but they can get their money from their more important windows and mac users now.
why couldn't the kickstarter project have been focused on adding stability, speed and features to the existing linux only version? why not make best in breed software to motivate moving to linux and shunning software companies that work against their interests? there are currently only 1000+ backers. Could it not have gotten that many just from linux users? This compromises the project in my eyes and i won't fund selling out to provide a version for closed platforms. This doesn't really help these windows users (in this regard) as they just think, "great, freeware rocks"! mac users have their luciferian light to guide them.
Because it works.
Can you still actually buy 35 mm. motion picture camera negative? As far as I know, one should be able to buy Orwo negative from Russia. But is Kodak still manufacturing B&W? Even Color negatives from Kodak are not so easy to get any more.
Maybe there is good b&w photo film available. I don't know. But for motion pictures, the stock has not really evolved for decades. So cinematographers started using Kodak Vision color negative even for b&w movies. Or digital. In the end, if the shoot is indeed done on 35mm, the negative will be scanned so that grading and VFX can be done in digital.
But anyway, it sounds like a fun project. And 35 mm cameras are definitely a pleasure to work with. It will be interesting to see if this project will contribute to push for the addition of professional features to Linux NLEs. That would be great.
It will use anything supported by ffmpeg
If that's the case, that may an incentive for ffmpeg to support 10 bit encoding into DNxHD, which would be nice to have. Currently, it decodes 10 bit, but only encodes into 8 bit (for DNxHD). Unless they use ProRes. Are there any other formats that are NLE-friendly (intra-frame compresion only)? Maybe MJPEG? But MJPEG would be 8-bit only, I think. Then again, 8-bit may be sufficient for what a b&w negative is able to capture... :-)
No - you produce a digital intermediate from your analog negative, edit the digital intermediate - cuts, transitions, etc, then hand that edited intermediate over to a film-cutter to assemble the analog master from the original negative, using the digital intermediate as a template.
It's much more complex than that, of course - but it's possible. Now as to why? Tonal range of 35mm film as mentioned above, probably. He'll need a good budget.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
He was too, you boys.
Since the "35mm" bit was mentioned that means it isn't a digital source.
6 of the ten top grossing movies of 2012 were shot on film...sure it's getting less popular but it's not like it's dead.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
IMX is intra-frame only, and supported by ffmpeg. ffbmc is better (and easier) at it. It's a flavour of MPEG2.
Alex Cox's work as a director lives on, but for UK cinophiles of a certain age, he's also remembered for his 'Moviedrome' series where he introduced TV sceenings of films (BBC2 sunday night, IIRC) with a pre-screening commentary. I certainly watched many classics for the first time on Moviedrome, and many films which weren't available on VHS or highly unlikely to be screened anywhere else on TV.
We figured that out.
The point being made was Cox is shooting on B&W film stock, then transferring to digital for editing/post, and since there's loss of the range of grey/tones when you transfer from analog to digital images, why bother? My point was even with that loss, the range of tones would still be greater than color film stock transferred to digital then desaturated, or shooting digital then desaturating.
Better now?
You can get cameras with 12-bit color, and projectors with the same.
... read it as "Repo Man" Alan Cox, before doing a double-take?
I need to get out more.
...which according to John Lydon is complete horseshit
You can still buy 8mm film. I think it's Japanese stock, but it's still there. Some people just want to do this weird stuff for some reason.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
There's some pretty good negative scanners out there with orders of magnitude better sensitivity than what you get in a camera that is expected to take many shots per second. Understand now?
One plausible reason someone might find vinyl sound better is that the analog electronic circuitry is vastly simpler than that of a CD player, so there is less chance to mess it up.
For the high frequency, the digital circuits could produce prominent interference because the wave shape of a digital signal has a lot of harmonics (square wave as opposed to sinusoidal). It's the same reason that on some computers you can hear whenever you move your mouse or when your CPU is doing work.
For the low frequency, the digital-analog converter might not have enough "omph" to drive the output, so you hear distortion on bases.
Vinyl players have mostly analog circuits, and analog distortions are harder to notice by ear. Digital distortion tends to be more noticeable again due to the harmonics of the digital signal. Of course I'm not talking about one of those digital laser vinyl players which I've not listened to, but I could imagine the device's designer must be careful to avoid the pitfall of both worlds, namely lower dynamic range of the vinyl and the possibility of introducing digital distortion.
Granted, what I described are generally "digital audio" problems not specific to CDs. Not all digital audio circuits are created equal. Consumer grade hardware is more hit or miss. Prosumer stuff tends to be more scrutinized so you can read reviews on zZounds or Musician's Friend or BH photo video to see if anyone is having noise or distortion problems. True for both CD player or if you're just looking for an external audio interface for your computer.
I once had a signature.
I'm not sure you understand how film exposure works, otherwise you wouldn't make the statement that there are "pretty good negative scanners out there." A Panaflex or Arriflex with a top quality lens and loaded with a top quality B&W film stock is going to provide a LP/mm depth that will exceed most (not all) scanners capability, unless you push it to an almost unmanageable file size. So there's that. Plus the depth of tone you get from the film's inherit structure can't be replicated (yet) with CCD's. The only digital camera now that can even approach the depth of film's inherit tone and grain is a Red Cinema camera shooting in RAW format, but you risk losing that benefit, depending on the level of compression used to create manageable files sizes for editing. Then despite what ever steps were taken to maintain either the film to digital transfer, or the high quality original digital shots, depending on the equipment used to render the final product can take all that away. Not all post-production digital films, Blu-Ray included, look great once rendered. That in and of itself is an art form. So just because it's shiny and new and electronic doesn't mean it's going to be better. A brand new LP, carefully mastered, played on a high quality turntable through a tube amp will provide higher dynamic range than any digital audio system ever could. There are some place analog's always going to win.
But... how long will monochrome movie film still be produced? This could well be the last movie ever made on the stuff because the film will no longer be available; even monochrome still camera film is getting scarce. Color movie film is more widely used and should endure for a bit longer.
Yes, but those would have been shot in 2011. Didn't Kodak file for bankrupcy since?
I got mixed up there with other posts (and lack of sleep) and we are really arguing the same thing since for some reason I thought you were arguing the opposite. The bit about scanning was an answer for the person in another post that went on about it being pointless to feed stuff sourced originally from film into a digital editing suite. Sorry about the confusion there and thanks for the patient reply.
The dynamic range of consumer digital cameras exceeds that of the human eye -- that is an area we see as uniform black, or uniform white, will contain detail we can't see.
The dynamic range of film - especially black & white film - is much wider still. That's why digital still photographers feel the need to achieve "HDR" (high dynamic range) by superimposing multiple shots at different exposures.
But what's the point of capturing a dynamic range that the human eye can't perceive? Well, you can bring it back into the human range in post-processing. The digital HDR folks use algorithmic processing to exaggerate edges, and bring out detail that the eye couldn't otherwise see. In the darkroom, a film photographer can choose which parts of the image to bring out.
Imagine a film negative of a photo taken from the outside of a cave on a sunny day. The dynamic range of negative film is so high that the picture can contain detail of rock shapes in the dark cave, *and* the sunlit vegetation outside. When printing in the darkroom, you can either expose it so that the detail in the dark cave is clear (and the outside is bleached out), or so the detail in the lit outside is clear (and the cave interior is black). Or, being creative, you can cast shadows while exposing the paper, to even things out and get detail in both.
For the final product, modern digital is always fine. CD audio is fine. Blu-Ray is fine. Digital cinema formats are fine. You only want higher dynamic range than that so that you have a bigger capture space to select from. Compare it with resolution. You don't need 15MP captures if you're only going to print 5x4 images -- until you decide you want to crop small parts of the image to print at that size.
I'm having some trouble with your first two statements - I've never seen an image - either via digital capture or printed via a high-quality film emulsion system that was able to compare with the brightness range of the human eye (without post-processing techniques such as burn-and-dodge or HDR). I was taught that the human eye (actually, eye+brain) can distinguish about 1000:1 brightness ratio - approximately equivalent to 11 stops on a scale relevant to emulsion sensitivity.
Black-and-white film at its best could cope with 120:1 (almost 8 stops), colour reversal film about 100:1 (7.6 stops), and colour negative film about 80:1 (7.2 stops).
Funny how the response of film emulsion turns out to have a "cousin" in binary math - each stop is a doubling (or halving) of response to light while each bit results in a doubling or halving of the numeric value it can represent.
So what's the point of trying to capture, process, and project brightness values greater than our eyes+brain can process? Was there any point in going past 15 or 16-bit colour?
Yes, I was probably a little bit imprecise. Film and digital sensors give more shades than the human eye can distinguish *within the range available on the display technology*. That is, if zero is between the blackest ink we have, and n is the whitest paper, we can print two different shades between 0 and n which can't be distinguished by a human. But start looking at the darkest darkness, or the brightest light, and sure, neither film nor digital can compete.
But our blackest ink isn't black and our whitest paper isn't white, so we have to do tone-mapping.
Also, although the human eye can handle all these shades, it can't do it without adjusting, and that takes time.
?So what's the point of trying to capture, process, and project brightness values greater than our eyes+brain can process? Was there any point in going past 15 or 16-bit colour?
For the first two, so that we can make artistic decisions in remapping to the smaller range we can project.
Since when was this unusable garbage 'popular'. This is the same rubbish you see on Apple forums expounding the same maxim that FC X is 'popular'. Editors use FCP 7, Media Composer', and occasionally Premiere CS6. Noone uses Openshit.
This is the same garbage you hear from Apple fan boys trying to justify FCP X's existence. Open Shot is a pile of garbage. It crashes all the time, and has no real-time suport. It will never become the standard here in Hollywood, and just because some no-mark director is using it, doesn't make it news.
From an anonymous coward sitting in an editing suite, proudly using Avid Media Composer to make movies that people will actually see.
I am not a video expert, but if I was digitising film footage that I had filmed in B&W for artistic reasons, I would scan it in full colour at the highest bit-depth my hardware could handle.
The colour of the greys, any colour artefacts of the grain, of any tiny scratches, all of these are things a cinematographer might want to retain.