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This weekend I got to see a fun film about the film business, The Last Shot (and don’t let the first 5 minutes of the film misguide you). Joe Devine pretends to be a movie director, and gets Steven Schats to believe that his film will be produced. At one point this dialogue entails between them:
Joe Devine: Have you actually seen a person die, watched them bleed to death, seen them take their last breath? I’ve seen that… many times.
Steven Schats: Why have you seen that?
Joe Devine: I used to produce music videos.
Which is especially funny if you have worked on music videos. Or pop promos as they are often referred to in the industry.
The types on a pop promo set
Pop promos are a totally different type of films from all the others; most notably there often isn’t a story, no one seems to worry about continuity, and generally there are 4 to 6 types of people on set: (more…)
I took my first photo when I was about 7 years old. Growing up in Germany of the 1970s, it was not a Kodak moment, but an Agfa moment. Anyway, the object in question was a cat on a field that apparently grasped my attention of my new Agfamatic kamera. Processing was expensive (when you had to pay it from your own pocket money), and I had another 23 pictures to take before I would get the film developed. So, it took a couple of weeks to find out that what I had seen had absolutely nothing to do with what the actual picture looked like. But still, it amazed me that it was possible to keep a moment frozen onto paper.
And that amazement never left me.
Later, when I started more seriously (as in: very interested hobbyist), I was lucky that the German Democratic Republic disappeared. With it it’s own film-making (and incredibly polluting) factory, ORWO. But between those two events, the west German mark bought incredible amounts of the ORWO black&white film. I think I must have purchased a 3-digit number of those rolls. I built myself a little robot, that would develop those film-rolls in batches of 4, thus giving me plenty of freedom to experiment.
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