Peter Jackson has followed up his Lord of the Rings trilogy with the first in The Hobbit Triology (I kid you not. It will actually be quicker to read the book than watch the films).

I watched it at 24 fps in 2D and thought it was over-long in places, beautiful in others. I thought the riddle scene was absolutely stunning- not visually (although it was very well done visually) nor because of the CGI on gollum (which was awesome CGI) but because of the performances of Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis. The achievement of the film to my eyes was translating that excellent performance by a live actor to a CGI motion captured bunch of pixels. I enjoyed it.

Then I went back and watched it in HFR 3D. When the film opened, there was a ripple of uneasy laughter in the theatre because the HFR initially looked speeded up. Ian Holm’s Bilbo looked like the 1970’s Benny Hill show sped-up chase sequences. Still, bearing in mind Peter Jackson’s exhortation that it would take 20 minutes or so to “tune in” visually, I stuck with it.

Unfortunately although the sped-up effect did diminish, it never went away for me and some of the later action and chase sequences still looked like the Benny Hill show.

Worse, I just couldn’t get away from the ghastly impression that I was watching the behind-the-scenes video of the film, rather than the film itself. You know how you look at the behind-the-scenes footage, and it looks crap, like a bunch of actors dressed in silly costumes and wigs jumping around a set? And when you see the final movie footage, the magic has happened and it looks like Middle Earth?

The magic never happened for me.

Sure, a few shots looked much better in 3D HFR, having looked slow and contrived in 2D 24 fps (I’m guessing those were compromised by them shooting for the 3D HFR version primarily and editing accordingly). But the movie as a whole? I couldn’t get over how bad it looked.

I don’t know how much of it is my conditioned expectations. I could never get away from the VERY STRONG visual impression that I was looking at Sir Ian McKellen, an actor, dressed in a straggly wig, wearing contact lenses (I swear I could see them in some shots) and a slightly grubby woollen costume running around various film sets and the mountains of New Zealand.

In 24 fps 2D, I saw Gandalf the Grey striding around Middle Earth.

Maybe the problem for me is the claimed strength of 48 fps- that it looks more real. So much more real that it looks like what it is, actors, sets and CGI, rather than what our imagination wants to be there to fill in the gaps. Maybe it is the very lack of visual information that helps construct the dream-like world of the movies.

Add to that the inevitable headache because I like to lean my head just a little to the side when I watch films, it turns out. Just enough to force me to sit bolt upright and consciously stop myself from doing it, and when I relax a bit, the headache starts to lurk.

Whatever, neither 3D nor HFR are for me. I hope at least some film-makers continue to shoot in pure 24 fps 2D without compromising to simultaneously shoot 3D HFR. And I have to tell film-makers planning on a pure 3D or HFR release that I’m unlikely to go see your film.

Is this the future of cinema? Not for me. Maybe it is just associations from having watched TV at 50i all my life: maybe even higher frame rates (120 fps?) would look like something else entirely. Maybe it was the interaction with 3D, which I dislike. Maybe I’m a luddite complaining about the advent of sound, colour, widescreen, or noir lighting? (I quite like the right movie in black and white, silent, 4:3 and film noir). Or maybe I’m complaining about insane shaky-cam, the over the top teal and orange effect and other effects which I think will date the films very badly and be relegated to the “special choice” locker. 3D HFR though I think should be consigned to the “never again” locker.

Hi All,

We’re launching two new/relaunched sites next year:

Silksoles.com Gorgeous girls getting naked and barefoot. Sexy stripteases and playful fun feeling, with a focus on the soles of the feet because that’s what I like 🙂

NudeInMetal.com Girls doing day-to-day tasks nude in metal bondage. In the world of the website, being a Nude-In-Metal girl is a lifestyle choice, something a lot of pretty girls decide to do. Some love it so much they do it 24/7, others enjoy it for sexy occasions. It’s a development of the “Restrained Elegance Days” video series from RE.

We’ve been shooting updates for them since the summer and we’ve had GREAT fun doing it. It’s very sexy and we find it very energising, it has already generated loads of new ideas for RE as we’ve done them. I’ll be publishing lots of teaser sets, videos and examples as soon as I have hosting for the sites and asking you all for input.

I have one big question already which I’d like all you folk out there to help me with:
Would you prefer to see stills and videos of everything? Or should we concentrate on ultimate quality even if that means sometimes doing one or the other?

Thus far, we’ve shot stills and video for each storyline/update for the new sites. For stuff shot in summer daylight, this was fine. But as winter draws in doing it in the studio is more of a challenge than I was expecting.

We can’t use stills lights for video. I like working with studio flash, and you can’t do that at 25 frames per second for video.

We can use video lights for stills but with our current equipment I’m not happy with the quality and consistency of the full-sized stills. Video is shot at 1/50th of a second, on a tripod, and motion blur of the subject is a natural part of that. To get sharp stills we need to be at 1/250th of a second, which means five times as much light as we need for video! That’s a Hollywood lighting truck plus generator truck to get that much continuous light on set. There’s just not the studio room, the electric power or the budget to do it.

It isn’t that the photos suck under video lights. They’re atmospheric and detailed at normal web/full HD size and at least as good as most websites produce.

But I see them at 100% zoom in at 17 or 31 megapixels. If we do full-sized JPEG versions for the new sites, you’ll be able to see them that way too. This is where the lack of critical sharpness caused by camera shake, subject movement, sensor noise, shallow depth of field and lens limitations shows up. It troubles me.

To deliver a stills set 31-megapixel maximum RE quality we have to relight the set with studio flash half way through everything we shoot for the new sites. We run into problems of physical space in the locations (although at least we don’t need a generator truck). It’s slow and the context switching is a downer on shoot days.

What is the “value proposition” for you as enthusiasts and future members?

For RE, we made the policy decision years ago that we’d shoot EITHER stills or video for a given idea, not both, because we were aiming for quality, quality, quality. We can go this route for the new sites too. You’d get either stills of a set, or video-plus-framegrab, but not both.

Or we can shoot stills and video for every update, but accept that the quality of the full-sized still images may not always be up to RE standards. Does that matter to you? Do we even need the full-sized images or are full-HD JPEGs enough? Most sites best resolution is only the same as our “web sized” ones anyway!

Actually even our video framegrabs are better than most website’s stills. Good enough for the cover of Vogue, literally. They’re captured from a RED digital cine camera in RAW with a higher resolution sensor than a lot of stills cameras. Even if we don’t have the dedicated stills, we’ll get great frame grabs from each video, but it is more limited than shooting dedicated stills (e.g. they’ll mostly be in landscape format).

If we shoot stills with full-size RE quality stills, we might not have time to get a video of it as well. Or if we do, we’ll end up shooting half as many updates so you’d probably get a stills set OR a video each week, rather than one of each as we are currently planning.

Which would you prefer?

1) Dedicated stills and video of every update (no full sized JPEGs)
2) Dedicated stills and video of every update (with full sized JPEGs but accepting they’ll be lower quality)
3) It is fine to shoot either stills or video, not both, for ultimate quality
4) Dedicated stills and video of ultimate quality for every update, but half as many updates

Cheers, Hywel.

Here’s a few images to illustrate the quality differences.

This is a still shot under video lights, at normal web size. It is possibly a tiny bit soft, but overall I think it looks pretty good

This is the same shot at 100%. Now you can see the limitations of the noise from shooting under video lights, and the limitations of the lens wide open. I don’t think this holds up to an RE still captured with studio flash.

A framegrab from the video, shot on the RED. (I didn’t have an exactly comparable frame). You can see there’s some blur from Kate’s movement, and the grade is different, but overall I think the level of detail and sharpness is acceptable. I’m not sure the stills add all that much to the set overall.

A full sized shot of Kate in the same studio, but using studio flash and the full “RE quality procedure”. This is from an RE stills set, we didn’t shoot a video of it as well.

Please let us know what you’d like the best:

[cardoza_wp_poll id=1]

I’ve been surfing for porn. (In a good cause.) We’ve started shooting content for two potential new web site projects, one bondage, one foot fetish & striptease. The foot fetish one is mainstream glamour, just with lots of shots where the soles of the feet are visible. Hey, that’s what I like to see, maybe other people will too.

I thought I’d do my market research, hence the porn surfing. If it is close enough in style & content to be a competitor, I should find it hot, right? Bonus.

An evening or two later, I have some conclusions.

1) Mainstream porn is over-abundant, especially hard-core. If you just want to see fucking, you can get months of viewing content for free or nearly free. Even if you are into bondage or foot fetish, you’ll find plenty of content from the last 30+ years recycled as web content for next to nothing. The content’s lame on the BDSM/foot front because it degenerates into hard-core at which point the makers seem to have forgotten the theme of their film and fall into “porno shoot” mode. So… finding porn, easy. Finding good niche porn- not so easy.

2) 99% of it is shockingly badly lit. Net result is pretty uglifying on all the stars and the locations. Even where they’ve got a gorgeous cast and have sourced a nice place to shoot, they rarely make the most of it. I want everything to look beautiful; crap lighting means it never will. I want everything to look like it was lit by Wally Pfister (it is a bit dated now but check out his early work on softcore “thrillers” like Secret Games).

3) Mainstream porn is primarily video, with stills as a afterthought if at all. The honourable exceptions are sites run by ex-stills-photographers. (Turns out these are the ones I like). I like video but have a preference for really evocative, sharp stills. I can make my own story in my head to the pictures, whereas a video needs to be much more skilfully presented to do that. Which leads to:

4) Mainstream porn is badly edited. Stills are either auto-airbrushed to plastic fantastic, or not retouched at all. In an ideal world that wouldn’t matter, but models have to be on their feet all day and so blisters and dry skin are an occupational hazard- which I don’t find sexy in the photos. I found myself importing some of the photos into Aperture to retouch them myself from frustration!

5) Mainstream porn videos are even more badly edited. I don’t claim to be far up the learning curve as a film-maker myself. But I know that one rolling take with vertiginous hand-held camerawork and shoddy zooming in and out does not make for compelling viewing. Which leads to the cardinal sin:

6) I found most of it boring as hell. Wading though screens full of confusing pop-up special offer crap to see badly resized thumbnails of muddily lit videos of badly-dubbed grunt and groan. Holding a single dull shot for upwards of ten minutes. Cutting between two static cameras every few minutes. All the action played out in real time sounds like a selling point, but actually is yawn inducing.

Do what the movies do- cut out all the dull bits and show me the bits that are either critical to the progression of the scene, or achingly beautiful to have my eyes linger over.

Did I find some good stuff? Yes. Hot Legs and Feet has lovely stills. Their videos still look muddy and a bit slow, hope we can do something different here. The content is more hardcore than my usual taste, but nicely shot if that’s your thing. The solo girl sets are sometimes exquisite. We’re going to have our job cut out to compete. Hooray! Seriously, it will mean we can’t be lazy or complacent – having a high quality competitor out there will force us to do good work.

Femjoy is lovely as always, and their videos at least have nice lighting. But DAMN, they’re boring to watch. The content is only co-incidentally foot fetish- it is really about open-leg nude poses, but happens to have a lot of barefoot girls on it. And their website layout is great. Might pinch a few ideas. Memo to self, though- try to have something happening in videos, especially if shooting slow-mo.

APD Nudes is photographer Iain T’s site. I like his work so much I got him to shoot some stuff for Restrained Elegance. Love his set design (I know I don’t have the knack, which is why we hire locations rather than build them). It is more stockings and shoes than barefoot, but I’d love to get something of the same classy look-and-feel.

There were others that looked interesting, but SOOOOO many more that just made me shudder. So it turns out I’m quite a fussy consumer when it comes to porn. I hope that’ll make me a more discerning producer, too. Sod following the crowd, incidentally. If I can’t make stuff I’d like to see myself, I might as well go and shoot corporate videos and weddings.

An early test shot to see if we can use video lighting to shoot stills. Unfortunately, the answer is no, not reliably. Camera shake and subject motion, high ISO noise and shallow depth of field make it too hard to achieve critical sharpness.

Same room, but lit with strobe and shot with the Hasselblad. Much more control in general, and much easier to achieve sharpness where one wants it.

It is the lighting, not the camera in this case. Canon shot, but in daylight (with diffused on camera flash stills). Lovely!

One other observation: porn is not just badly lit, it is overwhelmingly brightly lit. I guess that’s in the belief that the customer wants to see everything (and probably by the end of the film/photoset we do). But there’s not much allure or tease when everything is lit up like a searchlight.