Facing the Giants
I just came from seeing the movie "Facing the Giants" which opened today. My friend and host of the last couple of months, Dave Nixon, was a co-producer and the assistant director. He even has a cameo as "Mr. Jones," the grey bearded man in the office with the real estate developer dad of one of the players. His long time D.P., Bob Scott, shot it with Dave's Panasonic Varicam hi-definition camera in 720p using the Pro-35 convertor and Panavision lenses. The edited video was transfered to 35mm prints for the theatres and it looks really good. Not quite 35mm quality, but like very good 16mm or a bit better. Quite amazing that it was originated on video. You would never know it. 720p has a much more film-like quality than the even higher resolution 1180i format. Okay so enough techie talk. As I have noted in my "about me" info here, I don't take well to sports that involve balls. I'm not a football guy. I don't think I have ever watched a game all the way through and could probably count on my ten fingers the times I have even watched it at all. I admit I only went to see the film because of my friend's involvement and because I wanted to see how the hi-def technology fared going up on the big screen. But as it happened, it was a story I needed to hear. It's all about God being God and doing whatever he wants however he wants to do it. It's a "little film," to be sure. It came out of a church of a few hundred people outside of Atlanta whose members decided to take on the giant task of making a feature movie. You oughtta go see it. It's inspiring and encouraging.
It was a big night for God in the movies. Before "Giants" started there was a preview for "One Night with the King" which looked great on the big screen. There was also one for something I had heard nothing of, "Jesus Camp." The quality of that one looked miserable. Like it was shot on standard def DV. And though the bias of it's makers wasn't evident in the trailer, I got the impression it wasn't going to make Christianity look very good. Even if the intent was positive, it makes Christianity out to look a lot like brainwashing. Not the best light. So I don't think I'd recommend that one.
It was a big night for God in the movies. Before "Giants" started there was a preview for "One Night with the King" which looked great on the big screen. There was also one for something I had heard nothing of, "Jesus Camp." The quality of that one looked miserable. Like it was shot on standard def DV. And though the bias of it's makers wasn't evident in the trailer, I got the impression it wasn't going to make Christianity look very good. Even if the intent was positive, it makes Christianity out to look a lot like brainwashing. Not the best light. So I don't think I'd recommend that one.
posted by wingman at 8:11 PM
6 Comments:
I saw the "Jesus Camp" trailer a couple months ago. Pretty scary. Now that it's beginning to make it's rounds, there is a lot of ugly talk.
Hmmmmm.
I'm excitedly awaiting One Night With The King. I've wished for that story to be filmed for years.
I had the opportunity to see "Giants" during the Christians in Hollywood conference at Biola and rather wish I had, but time didn't allow for it. I'm excited to see the 720p on the big screen as that's pretty much exclusively what I shoot in now. P2 cards are a beautiful thing, and so is the HVX-200. The blood money finally paid off the good old Mac, and now it's making it's rounds on my newest baby. :-D Thanks for your inspiration in pursuing my dream of video.
If you happen to drop back in Adam, good to see you here. Thanks for the kind words. I need all the encouragement I can get these days.
Yeah, that little HVX-200 is really something. I have done a few shoots with it, one as a P.A. and one as cameraman. It's amazing what comes out of something so small. The P2 cards, though, I'm not so enamored with. An awful lot of money for 10 minutes of video, regardless of how nice it looks. The Firestore drive seems the hot ticket. for about $1800 or so you get about an hour on a hard drive, if I remember correctly. Still have captureless editing. Those cards are way too expensive. And the Panasonic dump drive thing is kind of a joke. I have used it. It's well built, but it only holds about 10 card loads and costs more than a Firestore. Also the transfer is painfully slow. But, there is no doubt, it's a new era. It's possible to get a really respectable 35mm film print off of 720p video and that opens a world of possibilities to low budget filmmakers. Have at it!
I had looked into the firestore before, but the problem is that it's formatted so you can only get 2 gigs per clip, then it has about a second or so skip time. So this makes it wonderful for DV, but HD doesn't work so well. The P2 card is rather expensive, but so far they've been pretty reliable and make the editing stage quite a bit faster. No worrying about a dirty/corrupted DV tape or the capture time. The P2 store is pretty awful though. I was over in Kyrgazstan for 10 days to shoot a documentary(the main reason I purchased the camera) and we had so many problems with the store. Thankfully it was just rented, not purchased. I'm hoping that they stick to their P2 schedule and get them out on the same rate they're hoping to. Either way, the 20 mins(2 4 gigs) has been working well for me thus far, we'll see how it holds up in a short film enviroment though. I'm a regular here(thanks to the good ole RSS feed), so I look forward to your future posts!
Glad you spoke up, Adam. All the best with your new camera. Hope you accomplish many satisfying and worthwhile projects with it.
Dave Nixon in the sailboat?
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