While enjoying a tasty cajun filet biscuit at Bojangles on Saturday morning, Jason suggested I make some materials themed posts on nadsat similar to how he posts about his area of education on his site. This conviently coincided with an upgrade I was doing to the headlights on my Accord in which I found some pretty cool new bulbs.
Your basic incadesent lightbulb gives off about 90% of its energy in the form of heat. This heat is emited in the form of infrared radiation. So what? Light bulbs get hot, everyone knows this. What if you could use this heat to generate more light? You could get more light out of the bulb without increasing the wattage.
General Electric figured out a way to do this and patented the concept in 2000. They call the technology, Halogen Infrared. Basically, using a special IR reflective coating and a spherical shape to the bulb, the infrared radiation can be redirected back to the filament making it burn hotter and thus producing more light. The benefits: more light, same wattage, and less heat. Using an IR reflective coating is nothing new, the key for GE was they figured out to keep the costs down and use the coating to its maximum optical efficiency.
Kudos to GE for figuring this out and giving me better lighting for my car (even though my bulbs were technically manufactured by Toshiba, it’s still GE technology)!
(Thanks to Daniel Stern Lighnting for pointing me in the right direction and recommending these bulbs to me.)
Ref:
http://www.gelighting.com/na/business_lighting/faqs/halogen.htm
http://www.danielsternlighting.com
Lying on my back in the dirt, hand cramping, arm twisted in ways I had never imagined, all this to make a squirrel puppet look more squirrely. All this while Corey barks, “Yes, yes that’s great, but do it more squirrel like!” Here I am imitating a squirrel with a hand puppet and my head is turned so I cannot see what I’m doing, nevermind the fact that I had not seen a squirrel in almost two months. Why the hell would I be doing? I was cast in the role of Scooter the Squirrel, or at least my hand was, in the VFS student film, “Scott and the Squirrels”.
During my nearly two and half months in Vancouver I had the privledge of being a part of two student productions at Vancouver Film School. In the first, mentioned above, I was the squirrel puppeteer, an extra, and just a general production assistant. In the second, “Rear Ended”, I got to be an extra.
Working on a movie is unlike any other job I’ve been on. The actual work of shooting the movie is shortest part of the process. This work is crammed into the least amount of days possible so these days usually end up being 12 or 14 hour efforts. So, yes it’s tiring, but it’s not the constant work one would think. Each person has a specific job on the set and that job cannot be done constantly, so there ends up being an awful lot of down time. I personally found this aspect of it frustrating, especially when a shoot was behind. This basically means that if one person does not do his/her job efficiently then the whole show can be bogged down. I don’t know of a better way to do it though, at least at the student level.
The other aspect is how tedious the entire process is. From taking the same shot from eight different angles to making sure a character looks the exact same in each of these shots, there is a lot of precision needed to pull it all off. The goal of a film maker is to never unintentionally pull you out of the film, they want you to be immersed at all times. Errors in continuity (a character leaves a room and all of a sudden he changes clothes) can take a viewer out of the moment and remind that they are actually watching a film. This is not a good thing. The larger and more complicated the movie is, the harder this becomes.
A lot of planning is also needed. The director needs to have an idea in his/her head how the movie will look when it is all done. This means mapping out each and every shot. The worst part though (in my opinion) is that even with all that planning, if the movie is edited poorly then it will look bad.
Speaking of time and planning, the VFS films are a maximum length of 10 minutes including titles. The crews have five days to shoot all of this, sounds easy right? It’s not, they needed all that time. I was just amazed at how long the lighting set up between shots can take. It is a very drawn out process.
Being on the set and being a part of the process makes the film viewing different too. I have seen a relatively rough cut of Scott and the Squirrels. It just seemed so short compared to the amount of effort put into it. When the credits rolled my first thought was, “Wow, that was it?”. Everything was there, the whole story was told, it just flew by.
It was certainly interesting to get a glimpse at the inner workings of a movie set and I definitely enjoyed my experience. Would I want to work in film knowing what I know now? I’m not sure, it would definitely depend on what I was doing and how involved I was. For the part of the film I was involved in, it was a rush. It did not matter what I was doing as long as I was doing something. When the director yelled cut and everyone agreed it was perfect it made me feel very satisifed and excited. In most cases at work you do a good job and your boss gives you a pat on the back or best case scenario you get a raise or a promotion but you can never really relive that moment of success. With film you can. That one scene you nailed is now preserved and can be watched over and over again.
I think that was the best part of it all for me; I got to understand why these people do what they do and why normal jobs would never work for most of them.
