Erkki

500$ I think, for one year festival and online usage. Perpetual would double it.

We filmed a dance scene on Sunday. It turned out the original one sentence in the script - "Cleo dances from the office to the street" or something like that - was several practice hours of preparation with a choreographer, a whole day of shooting (and probably another 2-3 hours later to do some fixes), over 1 minute of the film and licensing about 100 seconds of a music track.

Jacques Rivette is a pretty weird French New Wave director. I’ve seen several of his films and I kind of like parts of them, but also think that they are too weird and long. Noroit has really cool weirdly diegetic music, but I think Celine and Julie Go Boating is his most accessible film. At least it kept my interest better than the others. So if you want to watch at least one Rivette film (and you should), this is the one.

Tale of Tales (1979) is a Soviet animated short and it is really good. By the same guy who made Hedgehog in the Fog, which is really famous in Estonia, but I had never seen Tale of Tales before. Watching it kind of felt like something between Tarkovsky’s The Mirror and Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow.

What’s the appeal of the Marx Brothers? I’m watching Duck Soup and it seems like one of the least funny comedy movies ever to me. Maybe you have to know the brothers before seeing this? It starts out completely silly, with no motivation for why things happen and only gets stupider.

Oh, vampire movies that I didn’t find as good as I expected based on other’s opinions: Near Dark. Although it definitely has nice shots.

Some progress, we started the dancing lessons for the actress with a professional choreographer. It's going to be pretty cool, I think. I was trying to find camera angles during the lesson, but it's also been a couple of years since I did any dancing and I was kind of wanting to also take part in that.

Days of Heaven (1978) is super good. It's maybe my favourite Terrence Malick movie so far. I don't give it the full 5 stars only because I am not a huge fan of the distance Malick keeps from the characters, making them seem slightly unreal. But it's shot perfectly, I'm glad I am still discovering films this good after watching through what I thought was almost all of the highest rated classics in the past few years.

Great news, a couple of days ago I came to this forum to check if we had a Mastodon

You're right, what I said is not that applicable to starting out. Sometimes I wish I could give advice to people who are going through a similar thing that I've gone through, but I usually can't because I forget (sometimes knowingly) what was going through my mind when I was just learning something. All I can say is that perhaps Python is indeed a good way to start. Although I've never used it for anything serious myself, I know they do use it at our company for some back-end systems.

Luckily today it's a bit simpler. We have cameras and other equipment so easily available that we can do it without much business, organization or taxes. The budget for my film was basically just for renting lighting equipment and a gimbal at first. Although I also purchased a lot of gear for myself personally, which I also hope to use in future films. Sure, I could have optimized what I pay somehow, by registering a company and getting out of paying VAT somehow, etc., but it didn't feel like it was worth the trouble to get into some legal complexities. Later I added music licensing and choreography which added additional costs, though. But anyway, I think for a lot of people, if they already have a good recent photo camera that can do video, they don't really need to even buy any extra gear to make a movie, especially if natural lighting can be used. And maybe even a hand-held reflector can be used to add enough lighting without using any electricity. So basically if you can convince people to work with you, you can make a movie without any budget. But I definitely agree that the best education in filmmaking is to make films. But also there's so much about specific technical stuff on YouTube and elsewhere, which you can use to improve your understanding of what you need to do, even before shooting. And I've also been lucky to have found some local short courses and having been able to afford those.

I loved Waterworld AND Postman, even in my early twenties. I’m scared of rewatching them now, though. Back to the topic. I’ve kind of mellowed a bit since making this thread and maybe calling these movies “overrated classics” is not exactly using the right term... But I think I’ve found another movie that sits nicely especially next to Goodfellas as one of the classic movies whose content doesn’t hold up to real scrutiny and that’s Once Upon a Time in America. I read this movie as a long-winded rape apology. ps this is all IMHO, not claiming objectivity

This July I collaborated as the cinematographer, sound editor and colorist on this short film:

I kind of want to argue against that, but then again there is some truth to it. Sorry if this post is already too off topic BTW, maybe we should move this convo to another thread? I think programming on a certain level is about managing complexity, and as such it has analogues in EVERY FIELD. All fields probably have similar issues that a programmer might deal with. But yes, in programming that complexity is represented in abstractions and mathematical models, which can't be said for many other fields. Source code can be much more efficient in representing complexity than for example business processes that span humans and computer systems in other fields, or even physical systems. And you definitely need to learn some quite advanced skills to learn to play with these abstract models. But at the source code level it's very easy to add accidental complexity - that's when programmers come up with the wrong abstractions and they end up making the whole system much more complex than it needs to be. I have personally seen the damage that a programmer with a lot of knowledge about new trends was able to make, convincing many people in our company that he knew what he was doing, and to some extent he did, but he also ended up leaving a big mess behind. So the challenge in programming to me is about finding the right abstractions. In the real world (aka "other fields"), I think if you stumble on wrong abstractions, people will probably tell you and stop you. But in programming there is a lot of freedom in creating the abstract model* that represents what your program needs to do. And if you don't have the right mentors (often the case because good mentors are rare, in my experience) you can go in very wrong directions and even convince someone with a PhD that the thing you are doing is right, while it might not be. But then again, it's not that serious. If you go in the wrong direction, you still learn from it and hopefully know better next time. And it doesn't mean you're a fraud (look up impostor syndrome, many people in programming apparently feel they might be frauds), it just means you made some mistakes and you can still learn a lesson and keep learning and try a different approach. * [edit] also another challenge is that to manage the complexity of the model you actually need to use (or even invent) abstractions that don't necessarily have any correspondence to the real world things the program is dealing with. So some of the abstractions are solely about structuring the programs, and which abstractions are popular keeps changing over the years. Especially in web programming there are a lot of trends and things changing constantly, about what kind of abstrtactions are "in". I'm not super familiar with Python, but I think Python might be one of the most stable languages in this sense, that they don't keep changing how things are done. I might be wrong about that.

Finally the story of a white middle-aged man who doesn't stand down before anyone... We've all been waiting to hear this tale. < / sarcasm > Color me unexcited.

I watched the first episode of Terrace House: Boys & Girls in the City. It's definitely very nicely shot, and I can see some of the appeal already, but normally I don't watch reality TV and I'm not sure if I'm going to keep watching or not.

Yeah, Steven Universe gets really good at some point. I have forgotten to check for new stuff, I think I watched two seasons. Same happened with Adventure Time, I watched 7 or so seasons, but then then forgot to check for new episodes. I think Adventure Time also got somewhat less interesting at one point in season 6 or 7. I used to watch these illegaly since i don't have any reasonable legal options to watch them (waiting for Blu-Ray is not reasonable most of the time). And now Netflix is making so much stuff available (even as the Estonian selection is 10 times smaller than the US, it's still a lot) and is so easy to use, that I am trying series that are of limited interest, but are on Netflix, rather than finding something I know I love that is not on there. [edit] Actually this situation kind of sucks, I keep giving Netflix money despite them not making a lot of things available to me, while I'm watching things I like less instead of things I like more I should change something about this. Plus, I'm also only seeing the content in 720p since I'm watching it through Steam Link. I'm going to check out that Terrace House thing if it's on Estonian Netflix.

I tried to watch The Expanse with a friend, but I somehow always got sleepy and missed part of each episode, and eventually lost interest. Maybe I shouldn't fault it on the show...

I've only seen the original of all The Cops Robo, and it sounds like I should leave it like that at least until the Blomkamp sequel? The first one was amazing, though.

Congrats!

Already seen those. Looking for newer stuff

Any recommendations for new TV shows? I've recently watched GLOW Season 2 OITNB new season Fargo 3 Mindhunter Brookline Nine-Nine (still watching) Kind of bored/don't want to bother with Archer (watched till season 6 or something) Final Space (liked premise, but first half of first episode was really lame) Chewing Gum (I dunno, the interest only lasted a few episodes) Sherlock (uh, I don't know, I was bored within minutes of ep 1, maybe I should keep going?) Jessica Jones season 2 (don't know if it's just me who has changed, but something was lost to me compared to first season) Sci-fi (all the current ones I've tried to watch are so boring, besides black mirror and sense 8 and stranger things)

Here's the short film we made in Tallinn Summer School's Short Film course: I was the cinematographer, sound editor and colorist.

We shot a 3 min short with the group from the 3-week course two days ago. I was the cinematographer/camera/sound guy. I was actually surprised how much we managed in one half-day, only missing a couple of shots. It was thanks to the director focusing on getting it done rather than getting it perfect, but the result seems to be quite ok. She works as an actor, and played the only part, so it probably came from some experience. We had some problems with lighting continuity as the sun went down (it shone into the room), but it might actually work. Or we might reshoot one or two shots on Monday.

The problem is how to find a free/cheap song quickly because I need a choreography based on it