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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 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.
which means the number of places you could see this will be limited
Just because it's being shot on film, that doesn't mean it won't be a digital end product.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
So... you managed to read far enough to find that it's going to be shot on film, but not far enough to read that it's going to get edited digitally.
c++;
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.
"Bill, The Galactic Hero"
In a sane world, that book would be required reading, for the 7th grade.
The film should have been made, and released in 2001. It's sadly, too little, too late - but for the bitter laughter of those who were wise to this, all along.
Instead, we get fed garbage and lies like "24" and "Zero Dark Thirty" - While we are still sending children to kill children.
Fighting the "Chingers" of this world... Yeah. Seven-foot insectoid monsters. You've got to NOT see 'em to believe 'em.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
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
What about Cinellera?
Tomorrow is another day...
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
Though, we could just support OpenShot directly... turns out that they've been running a campaign for almost a month already: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/421164014/openshot-video-editor-for-windows-mac-and-linux
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
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.
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.
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.