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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 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.
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?
"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.
It was the "beer" :-)
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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.
It will use anything supported by ffmpeg. You obvious wanted to post something negative before seeing what it it could actually do.
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.
Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez, and whoever played Miller were perfect. Olivia Barash and Agent Rogersz were supposed to be ridiculous. Everyone else was an extra.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Not only is it a great social satire; it's possibly the best 80s coming-of-age story ever. The punk version of Stand By Me.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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... :-)
I love seeing different projects supporting each other on Kickstarter. OpenShot is awesome, and this seems like a great way for it to be improved (in addition to the two new platforms, the OpenShot folks have some pretty cool features planned). I have to say, I'm more excited about enhancements to OpenShot, than I am about Cox's new film :-)
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
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
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.
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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.