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Happy summer Hollywood tech nerds!
In this week’s post:
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Previz On Your iPhone!
I hope everyone had a lovely Memorial Day weekend! I attended a fantastic local Memorial Day parade, both to see the parade and to keep my Aunt Joan from marching in it and committing Stolen Valor. Unfortunately I was unsuccessful and she is once again in jail!
Back in January, this newsletter covered the use of ViewScreen Studio in the production of Seth MacFarlane’s TV show Ted. The ViewScreen is an augmented reality tool that “allows the film crew to see digital assets, like the title animated teddy bear from Ted, in real time as human actors interact with them, making it easier to accurately frame shots around the digital elements and speeding up production.” Pretty neat!
Excitingly, Fuzzy Door Tech, the company behind ViewScreen, has created a consumer-level app for previs and provis efforts usable on iPhones and iPads.
ViewScreen Scout scans an environment, analyzes the space and then places and animates digital objects in a scene – in real time and at real-world scale. Users can download their own custom 3D assets from Box or from the Files app on their iPhone to plan and block a scene to decide if a location works, figure out the best angles for coverage, or even build new blocking and animation on the fly.
Even better news: it’s currently in public beta and free! At last I can make my long-gestating space opera, or a video of myself with parents who are actually proud of me!
Sign up for the beta here and let me know your thoughts!
The Cameras of Cannes
Sunday was the awards ceremony for Cannes 2024, which I watched while coincidentally eating a dinner of canned beans!
Being a cinematography freak, in addition to my beans I also devoured this article from IndieWire listing the various cameras and lenses used for 59 of this year’s Cannes films. Here’s a great example from The Apprentice cinematographer Kasper Tuxen:
We tested both 16mm and loads of video formats and built LUTs to shoot on the ALEXA 35 using the 2K/16mm part of the sensor only. That gave us the beautiful latitude and colors of the new chip but also an opportunity to shoot on 16mm and video lenses. The Canon 8-64 zoom was our workhorse. We turned to 16mm Zeiss primes on a few occasions where we needed to be really small and for exposure or shallower depth of field.
Y.M. Cinema created a helpful breakdown of all the cameras discussed in the article:
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
Is Sam Altman full of shit? (link)
Prepare for Furiosa with this in depth BTS doc on the making of Fury Road. (link)
Most US TikTok creators don’t think a ban will actually happen. (link)