Cinematographer Kris Kachikis has a few minutes before the Pats game. He’s here in Dramatic Competition with American Son which he shot for Neil Abramson during 20 days in bleakest Bakersfield.

This is Kachikis first feature (he’s a veteran commercial DP) and he laughs recalling that his whole “overspoiled, commercial crew� came along for the ride at $100 a day. Between a veteran camera crew and an experienced director, it sounds like a sane shoot—only one 12-hour day.

Kachikis shot 35mm Kodak Vision 2 5229, chosen in part by talking to Emmanuel Lubezki about the long 360 in Children of Men. “That stock carries a lot of detail into the highlights and we had a lot of daytime car interiors and no time or money to light,� Kachikis says. “I had to have detail outside the car windows while still exposing African American skin.� more

An afternoon session at the New Frontier center brought together representatives from some of the biggest behind-the-scenes companies in the film industry to discuss “How to Talk to the Big Guys when You’re a Little Guy.” The Big Guys were Lorette Bayle of Kodak, David Hays of Efilm, Allan Tudzin of Fotokem, Steve-O of Deluxe Laboratories, and Ric Halpern of Panavision. The little guys, of course, were the audience members.

Halpern spoke at length about Panavision’s New Filmmaker Program, under which a budding filmmaker might be lucky enough to score a free rental of a 35mm camera for their project. (Napoleon Dynamite, for instance, might not have been possible without this grant.) more

Bobby Bukowski couldn’t say no to Prague and the chance to shoot the Bavarian forest (for The Crown of Vysehrad). But the opportunity came at a price. The DP wouldn’t be able to join his first-time director Dainel Barnz and colorist Doug Delaney in the color suite for Phoebe in Wonderland. This was a harrowing compromise for a DP; Bukowski had planned to be there and the film counts on color as a narrative point: it’s a story about a young girl living in two worlds—one real, one imagined. And that’s not all: Barnz had his heart set on autumn and the film was shot (with a lot of exteriors) in the full force of Queens summer. Autumn would come in the DI suite. And there had been no film dailies. more

An interesting film project was the subject of a session on Creating a Low-Budget Film with High Production Value at the New Frontier center today. To create a horror/psychological thriller for under $250,000, Michael Phillips of Avid teamed up with Norm Hollyn, associate professor at the USC Film School and head of the editing track there.

The 89-minute feature, titled Jack in the Box, involved an 11-day shoot with a small crew. A single location, a creepy basement room where all the action happens, kept the budget manageable. As did a heavy dose of pre-planning. During the session, Phillips projected a chart that listed off all the video and audio formats that might ensue, such as a 1080p/23.976fps HDCAM-SR program master, and RGB 2K files on LTO tape in case a film version is needed. The chart listed postproduction processes that would affect the shooting, such as pan-and-scan for a 3:2 version. (The producers aren’t ready to say what cameras they used.) All this pre-planning on deliverables, Phillips said, would make it easier for a distributor to decide to pick up the project.

For editing, Phillips worked in Media Composer (big surprise there), in SD for the offline and in HD for the online, both on the HP 8400 workstation. more

I find Post Logic colorist Doug Delaney at 5pm, almost exactly 12 hours after he put the last flourish on Adventures of Power and pushed send on the print. He’s multi-tasking coffee and laundry; he’s had plenty of the one and run out of the other. Most of the people who work on the films here spend months if not years (even decades) of their lives on the projects. The DI colorist gets a few intense weeks in that special antechamber to reality where everyone shares the stressful truth: the movie will be finished, and soon. more