LEITNER’S MONDO NAB, PART ONE

By David Leitner

Originally posted April 2011.

The big NAB show in Las Vegas opened Monday, and I’ll be filing reports for Filmmaker’s readers at the end of every day through Thursday, when the show floor closes.

For those unfamiliar with NAB, it stands for National Association of Broadcasters, a powerful trade association and influential Washington lobby, no bastion of progressive politics.

But for filmmakers and indie producers, it also stands for the huge annual April trade show in Vegas, where the latest in cameras, lenses, recorders, lighting, audio, and all manner of production gear are introduced.

TV execs, techies, DPs, and crew fly in from all over the world, filling several large halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the site of the massive Consumer Electronics Show only a few months earlier.

For the 100,000+ attendees, this is Sundance, Cannes, and SXSW rolled into one. The keynote address Monday morning, for instance, was delivered by James Cameron and Vince Pace, Cameron’s design partner in 3D camera systems. They came to preach, you guessed it, the gospel of 3D.

Pronounced “N-A-B” instead of like something you’d hail on a New York street, the NAB convention is a four-day whirlwind of talks, meetings, seminars, dinners, parties, and serendipity. Every manufacturer is here and eager to discuss what they make and how they can make it better.

For this reason NAB is one-stop shopping. Every new piece of gear that will arrive over the next year can be seen and touched at this show. Like Sundance, I never miss NAB. This is my 20^th.

If you want to follow breaking news from NAB, there are dozens of breathless blogs and anxious tweets and Google will serve up a flood of coverage. I intend to mention as many new products as possible, but always from the unique perspective of indie production.

Speaking of perspective, I see several strong trends here. This NAB will be remembered as the year of large-sensor cameras, PL-mount lenses, and 4K, which I’ll explain when we get to it. There is also growing emphasis on solid-state recording and its … Read the rest

THE SWEET NEW STYLE (THE CINEMA, THE FOSSIL FUEL ECONOMY AND ENTROPY) |
By Amos Poe

By Admin

What the heck is going on in the world? Where’s Andy Rooney when we need him? Where’s Marvin Gaye for that matter? Where’s the independent spirit — are thems creative passions gone? Will Video-On-Demand be the next big thing? Is it becoming a DIY world? Is Lena Dunham the new Spike Lee? What’s going to happen to the Gulf Coast when the next hurricane hits and all that muck and stew gushing out of the ocean floor starts covering humans like they were freaking pelicans, and poisoning the farmlands, shopping malls and Beale Street like it’s doing to the Gulf waters? Does Eisenhower seem like the only American president of the last 50 years who had the balls to tell the truth? I’m just asking, because I don’t know the answers. I have no clue.

Not to worry. At least the film business is booming. Right? James Cameron’s dystopic hero saga Avatar earns three billion dollars for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp. Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, Blackwater, Goldman Sachs, and The Carlyle Group are making dough hand-over-fist (see Carol Reed’s The Third Man). The Gulf of Mexico looks like an endless Morris Louis painting. Does the European Union look like a Monopoly game where the bank prints new money every turn, every roll of the dice, before the board tips over? General Motors, not too long ago, America’s biggest Hummer building company is in receivership. There are wars on terror, border wars, drug wars, oil wars, religious wars, ethnic cleansing wars everywhere you look. The President of the United States goes on TV and says lets pray this madness stops. Pray is right. The Prime Minister of Italy, and its biggest media owner, says he can’t do his job if there’s a constitution, so the Italian Parliament basically agrees to get rid of it. The wealthiest man in the world is a former KGB agent turned Stalinist-capitalist. I mean, where the heck are we? We’re certainly not in Harvey Weinstein’s Kansas anymore.

And by “we,” I mean us, ‘independent’ filmmakers.

At the turn of the last century a bunch of great ideas … Read the rest

LOW-BUDGET 3D VIDEO STARS… JAMES CAMERON

By Scott Macaulay

Joe Corey who posts at A Site Called Fred emailed with this video of James Cameron planting a tree on Earth Day. The kicker is that its in old-school 3D, so if you have some of those blue and red glasses you can slip them on. He also calls this a remake of Les Blank’s film Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe, a comparison which, I have to say, I’m baffled by. No matter — watch Cameron plant a tree in 3D (preceded by a discussion of 3D itself).

… Read the rest