My local movie theater is the best location for reading. Credits, that is. Other dedicated credit-readers know the mysteries that can be unearthed simply by reading between the lines as they roll up the screen. That’s not to say that these mysteries are easy to understand. After seeing Sin City I asked my date, "Who is Eric Pham?" Shrug. Pham’s name had popped up as "main title designer," and then "2D supervisor" and then "digital color timing supervisor" in Robert Rodriguez’s noir comic. That’s a lot of jobs, and varied ones that don’t necessarily ever intersect. The next day at Monday’s editorial meeting I put it out there again, "Does anyone know who Eric Pham is?"
About a week and a half later Eric Pham turned himself in. He emailed me out of the blue from Austin where it turned out he was part of a team that worked at Robert Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios. Why did Eric have so many jobs? Well, look at his boss. Maybe working for the ultimate hyphenate (director-writer-DP-editor-composer) rubs off, or perhaps working digitally had allowed artists to move horizontally into more craft areas than in a more hierarchical, photochemical situation. (More on hyphenates later.) After finishing the last shots on The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl, the artists at Troublemaker told West Coast Editor Debra Kaufman their stories. There’s no question that the guys from Austin have unique working relationships but their MO may tell you a lot about how digital filmmaking changes collaboration.
Mapping out workflows is getting harder and more creative these days thanks to the profusion of capture and recording formats. Whether you’re shooting with a Sony HVR-Z1 HDV or a Panasonic P2 camcorder, shooting 16mm, or maneuvering a Grass Valley Viper, what you’re going to do next isn’t as cut and dried as it once was. There are many paths to explore for creative editing, effects, color correction and conforming. That’s why we’ve launched a new section this month called "Other Ways To Go" (page 27). It looks at smart ways to build pipelines- real ones, not hypothetical ones. "Other Ways" is about mixing and matching formats. It’s about every budget level. This month we look at how an edit house maintained a 1080p 24 workflow from offline through finishing. If you’ve broken some new ground, call or write Executive Editor Bryant Frazer and fill him in.
Back to the other hyphenate – director Ridley Scott admits he’s a camera operator at heart, although when there are 11 on set, he’s more likely to be sitting in the video village. Senior Contributing Editor Iain Blair recently spoke with Scott about his craft(s) and how his thinking has evolved since his start art directing spots. Scott says his idea of film school was shooting 100 commercials a year until he was 39, when he shot his first feature. He also reveals that he felt initially that he’d botched Blade Runner, one of the most referenced films of the last several decades. He feels differently now.