Luctor et Emergo

There are productions that are best done on tape and there are productions best done on film.

News and sports, special events like variety shows and concerts, news-based and contemporary documentaries, industrials and educational programs are best done on tape. Anything that needs immediate presentation is obviously best done on tape.

Film, however, is best for any storytelling or narrative production. Historical documentaries, I think, are best done on film. Commercials are best done on film. Anything that is ""fantasy-based"" is best done on film. Why do I say this? Marshall McLuhan, the great media visionary, defined the difference between the hot medium and the cool medium as the audience's use of the imagination as opposed to the direct visual implant.

Tilberg Waterfall

Slow motion is ubiquitous in modern filmmaking. It is used by a diverse range of directors to achieve diverse effects. Some classic subjects of slow-motion include:

Athletic activities of all kinds, to demonstrate skill and style.
To recapture a key moment in an athletic game, typically shown as a replay.
Natural phenomena, such as a drop of water hitting a glass.

Slow motion can also be used for artistic effect, to create a romantic or suspenseful aura or to stress a moment in time

Flyer

Time-lapse photography is an interesting technique that records a scene or objects that has a slow state-of-change and turns it into a video that plays back in high speed. The easiest way to do it is to have your camera stationary on something that changes slowly (e.g. clouds, plants growing, etc) and start taking series of photo for hours or even days. Hours and hour’s worth of photos are compressed into a video with merely few minutes playtime, thus creating a time lapsing effect.

Holocaust or Holywood?

In the satirical Extras series by Ricky Gervais we get a (fictional) look behind the scenes of major film productions, with the extras in the spotlight. In this excerpt, Kate Winslet plays a nun in a Holocaust film that, once the camera is off, changes into her selfish self, who has only taken the role so that she can win an Oscar. According to interviewee Maxim Februari, it is a human trait to talk in a very committed way about terrible things, with the sole purpose of making yourself look better.

Pitlochry: salmon ladder

Pitlochry fish ladder, next to the Pitlochry Power Station on the River Tummel near Pitlochry, Perth and Kinross, Scotland – The ladder was completed in the early 1950s and consists of 34 separate pools, each 50 cm higher than the last and covering a distance of 310 m. Each pool has a 1 m opening below the water level to allow the fish to pass to the next pool. There are three larger pools which allow the fish to rest during their ascent, and one of these has an underwater viewing area with a glass wall for the public.

Jazz in North Brabant

Today more than ever, people know that films and videos are constructions made of screenwriting, acting, editing, sound design and are the result of hours of work and many people’s input. Because of this democratization of knowledge, the first layer of magic that was attached to film is gone. Nobody will ever scream watching a train entering its station because we know too much.

 

Chinese power

China is the home of the largest movie & drama production complex and film studios in the world, the Oriental Movie Metropolis and Hengdian World Studios, and in 2010 it had the third largest film industry by number of feature films produced annually. In 2012 the country became the second-largest market in the world by box office receipts. In 2016, the gross box office in China was CN¥45.71 billion (US$6.58 billion). The country has the largest number of screens in the world since 2016 and is expected to become the largest theatrical market by 2019. China has also become a major hub of business for Hollywood studios.

Swedish cinema

Swedish filmmaking rose to international prominence when Svenska Biografteatern moved from Kristianstad to Lidingö in 1911. During the next decade the company's two star-directors, Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, produced many outstanding silent films, some of the best of them adaptations of stories by the Nobel-prizewinning novelist Selma Lagerlöf. Sjöström's most respected films often made poetic use of the Swedish landscape and developed moving studies of character and emotion. Stiller fostered the early popularity of Greta Garbo, particularly through the Gösta Berlings saga (1924). Many of the films made at the Biografteatern had a significant impact on German directors of the silent and early sound eras, largely because Germany remained cut off from French, British, and American influences through World War I (1914–1918).

Heerengracht, Amsterdam

A one-shot or continuous shot feature film is a full-length movie filmed in one long take by a single camera, or manufactured to give the impression it was.

 

Stari Most

A sports film is a film genre that uses sport as the theme of the film. It is a production in which a sport, sporting event, athlete (and their sport), or follower of sport (and the sport they follow) are prominently featured, and which depend on sport to a significant degree for their plot motivation or resolution. Despite this, sport is ultimately rarely the central concern of such films and sport performs primarily an allegorical role. Furthermore, sports fans are not necessarily the target demographic in such movies, but sports fans tend to have a large following or respect for such movies.

Amazon : Heaven & Hell

There are two types of realism in film: seamless realism and aesthetic realism. Seamless realism tries to use narrative structures and film techniques to create a "reality effect" to maintain its authenticity. Aesthetic realism, which was first called for by French filmmakers in the 1930s and promoted by Andre Bazin in the 1950s, acknowledges that a "film cannot be fixed to mean what it shows", as there are multiple realisms; as such, these filmmakers use location shooting, natural light and non-professional actors to ensure the viewer can make up her/his own choice based on the film, rather than being manipulated into a "preferred reading.

Aesthetic realist filmmakers use long shots, deep focus and eye-level 90 degree shots to reduce manipulation of what the viewer sees. Italian neorealism filmmakers from after WWII took the existing realist film approaches from France and Italy that emerged in the 1960s and used them to create a politically-oriented cinema.

Amsterdam: Amstelveld

While there is no formal division between "wide-angle" and "panoramic" photography, "wide-angle" normally refers to a type of lens, but using this lens type does not necessarily make an image a panorama. An image made with an ultra wide-angle fisheye lens covering the normal film frame of 1:1.33 is not automatically considered to be a panorama. An image showing a field of view approximating, or greater than, that of the human eye – about 160° by 75° – may be termed panoramic. This generally means it has an aspect ratio of 2:1 or larger, the image being at least twice as wide as it is high. The resulting images take the form of a wide strip. Some panoramic images have aspect ratios of 4:1 and sometimes 10:1, covering fields of view of up to 360 degrees. Both the aspect ratio and coverage of field are important factors in defining a true panoramic image. 

 

Facial recognition

Social media platforms have adopted facial recognition capabilities to diversify their functionalities i
Founded in 2013, Looksery allows video chat with others through a special filter for faces that modifies the look of users. While there is image augmenting applications such as FaceTune and Perfect365, they are limited to static images, whereas Looksery allowed augmented reality to live videos.
DeepFace is a deep learning facial recognition system created by a research group at Facebook. It identifies human faces in digital images. It employs a nine-layer neural net with over 120 million connection weights, and was trained on four million images uploaded by Facebook users.

The system is said to be 97% accurate, compared to 85% for the FBI's Next Generation Identification system.

Playing with fire

BO's Chernobyl is a five-episode miniseries written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck detailing the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 1986 and the cleanup efforts that ensued in Ukraine and neighboring countries.

But as much as the show acts as a historical retelling of the incident, Chernobyl goes a step further than just recounting the swirling emotions and global fallout.
Renck actually transforms the story from a historical drama into a straight-up horror movie to ensure the impact of the catastrophe hits home in ways news reports could never translate for the public.

Hoorn in Holland

A panorama is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography, film, seismic images or a three-dimensional model. The word was originally coined in the 18th century by the English (Irish descent) painter Robert Barker to describe his panoramic paintings of Edinburgh and London. The motion-picture term panning is derived from panorama.

A panoramic view is also purposed for multi-media, cross-scale applications to an outline overview (from a distance) along and across repositories.

Narrow Fjord in Norway

You should shoot a bit more than you need, but if you shoot hours of footage it’ll take you forever to sort through it to find the bits you want. For a one-minute drama film you might need to shoot between three and five minutes of video. Documentaries – where you can’t control what there is to film – will need much more than this.