I stumbled upon David Mamet’s now twenty-year-old book On Directing Film while looking for something else on Amazon, Jeff Bezos should be happy. Whatever algorithm is working behind the scenes spit out  just what I was after.

I bought the book because I like Mammet’s writing for films like House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Wag the Dog, Ronin and State and Main. Like Aaron Sorkin’s double speed writing you can really tell a Mamet script by the halting cadence.

On Directing Film comes from a series of lectures Mammet gave at Columbia University after directing House of Games. The format is a transcript of Mamet’s lecture with his student’s responses to his questions.

There will be two moments to give you pause reading this book, one in the beginning when you pull out a dictionary to understand what Mammet means by uninflected a word he uses again and again. Another when you wonder if the book should be titled, On Writing for Film. Mamet does have a Pulitzer.

Mamet’s key point is that a movie is a story told in cuts. It should be created by juxtaposing uninflected images which tell the story. By uninflected he means something like unrelated. This is essentially Eisenstein’s theory of montage. Show the audience a series of images that move the story forward; tell the story in the simplest way without narration. There is an entire chapter on this here: David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross: text and performance 

For a moment I wondered if this book was really about directing or if it was about writing drama. Really it’s a book about preparing. I think Mamet is very right when he says that being unprepared on set will not cause you to be creative, at the best you can copy something that you know works or do something interesting that may not be right for the story. He says that directing is all done before the cameras and crew show up.

Mamet shows his students how to see a film in manageable units. The largest unit is the film, the smallest is the shot and the unit of most interest to the director is the scene. Each scene should be a tiny drama of its own where the protagonist has a goal to achieve (or not). Then we are to break the scene down into beats and shots. For Mamet preparing this road map from shot to beat to scene to film is directing.

To better understand this, think of a scene. For example, the scene is “flee from a crime”. The protagonist’s goal is: get away. The beats are: a) get to the car, quickly b) start the car, c) drive away, unnoticed. At this point the shots start to fall into place: Running from a distance, tight shot of feet showing speed, looking over his shoulder, getting to the car, working the key in the lock, starting the car, hands on wheels, foot on pedal, eyes in mirror, tires spinning, car moving through the lot, turning onto the road, disappearing into traffic.

Mamet explains it much more convincingly then I could here, read the book. What you will learn is that this concept of looking at each scenes as a drama told in beats and shots provides a check-sum. An opportunity to see the story very close up (shot by shot) or to pull back to the beats or scenes and make sure that everything contributes to the through-line.

Polaroid Type 55: Sunday morning at Mt. Herman Baptist Church

Friend of the blog Jeff Singer let me know about New 55. Bob Crowley in Massachusetts is working on a brand new 4×5 film that resembles Polaroid Type 55. May even be an improvement based on his explanation of what they are working on. This is very exciting news. I wish these guys the best of luck and when they are ready would like to support or help them in any way I can.

Portrait of Michael Winokur by James Lesko, second sheet of film and we're off to a good start.

My friend James and I spent Saturday in my studio shooting some of the last Polaroid 8×10 film in the world. James brought over his beautiful Linhof 8×10 view camera – what a stunning example of mechanical engineering. We experimented with some black and white Polaroid 804 and a processor I had found on eBay. Neither of us had ever used this film before. All I can say is I wish I were shooting 8×10 Polaroid by the box back when it was still being made. It’s a slow methodical process but one with exactly the magic that people talk about when they romanticize photography.

James inserting the Polaroid film holder into his Lindhof Master Kardan.

The film was almost 10 years old. The processor in unknown condition. We could just have easily found out that neither worked. It could have been a hugely expensive pile of garbage. It was not garbage, it was amazing. All these years later it still made pictures that have that Polaroid goodness.

Shooting and processing 8×10 Polaroid requires - according the the instructions - 33 steps. From inserting the negative in the holder to placing the positive in the processor and timing the development to finally peeling the print from the negative. We shot 8 pictures in about 5 hours. We could have been faster but we didn’t want to waste any film. Oh, we did waste film. The first sheet got flared and then we mis-processed a sheet – that’s an expensive mistake about on par with shattering a bottle of fine wine.

The very first sheet we exposed, showing light leaks form improper handling.

Let us not give all the credit for this look to Polaroid. The Linhof camera fitted with a Heliar 360mm lens is special all by itself. One of the reasons this camera is exceptional for portraiture is that huge 8×10 image area. Technology companies have done wonders with small sensor digital cameras. But there is no changing the physics that govern light and optics. The bigger the imager (in this case 8×10) the longer the focal length of the lens which creates a “normal” field of view.  The longer the focal length the greater the compression and shallower the depth of field.

Back to the Polaroid. The science side of photography is all about controlling variables. E.g. processing time and temperature effect film speed and contrast which in turn effect exposure. Many of these variables are well documented. In the case of 10 year-old film, the temperature vs. processing time side of the equation  is a mystery. We started at the recommended 45 seconds and quickly doubled that to 90. With a decent supply of film that was all manufactured and stored under the same conditions we could determine the “right” processing time. Since that’s not possible we tried some variations around 90 seconds then accepted that as optimal.

This incredible day of making pictures purely for the sake of experimenting with the medium reminds me how much I loved working with Polaroid films, especially Type 55. It of course also reminds me how betrayed photographers feel by Polaroid for taking away integral film. There are fine-art photographers whose entire style was based on Polaroid’s films, if I’m annoyed by loosing this film I’m sure they are devastated.

The ghostly Polaroid negative just after being peeled away from the positive print.

There has never been more interest in photography and never have we seen more people building small companies devoted to photography enthusiasts. Somehow the MBA’s at Polaroid thought it would be better to hire Lady Gaga then to make even small amounts of the film that made them a worldwide brand. All we can hope for is the impossible. Impossible project that is. Maybe in years to come there will be more of this film. But there are very few 8×10 cameras, so it’s kind of hard to imagine. There are however tons of 4×5 cameras, I am told that 4×5 integral film like type 55 will never be made again. Polaroid destroyed the equipment. Fuji still makes a 4×5 instant film, it’s very good but it’s not the fine-art media that Polaroid’s films were.

Digital photograph of the ground glass

Michael Winokur photograph by James Lesko

James seen on the ground glass of his Master Kardan

While I’ve been waiting patiently for Red to ship my Scarlet camera I’ve been taking the opportunity to do some reading. On a recent flight I brought along Movie Makers Master Class. It’s a good read.

Laurent Tirard wanted to be a filmmaker but found a career as a journalist. He figured out a way to make great use of his job to meet the best directors in the world. In the process he taught himself to make films – which he is now doing – and created a book which is at the least a good read and at the most may be the inspiration for your directing. The masterclass is an interview format in which Tirard asks the same series of questions to 20 of the best directors in the world. Or as he says the ones he could get to sit with him. The result is that the reader has a  framework to compare the answers from each director to each question. For example Tirard asked each interviewee how they decide to position the camera, what is the first thing they do on set each day, how they work with actors, their opinion of the auteur theory…

Some of the directors Tirard talks to are household names, all are people whose work has helped shape the way movies are made and stories are told: Joel and Ethan Coen,  Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Woody Allen, Tim Burton, David Lynch, John Woo, Pedro Almodavar, Sydney Pollack, Bernardo Bertolucci,  Emir Kusturica, Claude Sautet,  Wong Kar-Wai, Wim Wenders, Lars Von Trier, Takeshi Kitano, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, John Boorman, David Cronenberg, Jean-Luc Godard.

The problem with a book titled Master Class is it can’t help to be disappointing. The reader has been promised the meaning of life. The reality is the only high-level lesson that will come from a book like this is that each of the artists interviewed have found their own path, stuck to that path and brought a unique vision to their audience. That alone is a lesson any creative person needs to learn – maybe again and again. The real value in these master classes is accepting that there is not one path but seeing how each of the directors found a unique solutions to the creative problems at hand.

You may not recognize Walter Murch’s name but there is no doubt that you know his work. He edited Apocalypse Now, Godfater II and III and The English Patient to name a few. I bought this book when I was deep into my first couple motion projects. I realized learning to use the editing tools is just putting your toes into the water. To edit film you have to understand what a cut is and why it works for the human brain. This is where Murch’s book starts. He takes us through both the mechanics of film – frames flashing by 24 times a second – and the neuroscience of why the human brain accepts the illusion. It could just as easily have not worked and movies wouldn’t work the way they do. He spends a fair amount of time talking about editing actual film and most of this is wasted on people who are only familiar with NLEs (non-linear editors like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut). The second edition goes into his beginnings in digital post but I would love to see him write a new version of this book discussing his own thoughts now that digital intermediaries and digital capture are standard. That said, the tools are irrelevant, read this book to start thinking like an editor and start really understanding how films are like dreams and how the audience perceives the cut.

Red Studios Hollywood, the historic Ren Mar lot was home to productions including I Love Lucy, The Jack Benny Show, I Spy, Hogan’s Heroes and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

I’m off to Red Studios in Hollywood for three days. I’ll get to work with the Epic and Scarlet and I’m sure there will be other really interesting stuff going on.

Red Epic

We invited friend of the studio Daniel Castro to shoot a fashion test here at The Foundry studio a few weeks ago. While he and his team were here I shot a few minutes of behind the scenes video with my “toy” camera the Panasonic GF1. Take a look and see a whole new side of the Foundry Studio.

I’m not much for tech talk but I thought I’d start posting items about some of the tools we use here in our studio. A few months ago I started worrying that the grey card I use to set white balance was discolored. I looked online to see about a replacement. I happened to find the X-Rite Color-checker Passport on Amazon.com. $99 seemed ridiculous for a grey card, but I thought the integration with Light Room seemed intriguing. Now that I have it I wish I had one from the first day I bought a digital camera. We’ve been calibrating scanners and monitors for years. That it took this long to start calibrating the digital camera, in hindsight, seems crazy.

Setting Profile in Adobe Light Room

The color checker provides the same functions as a good grey-card for white balance. What makes it so brilliant is it also includes software to create a DMG table which replaces the Adobe Standard profile in the camera raw converter. Essentially it tells the converter how to convert different colors. The difference is remarkable for saturated reds and blues. We now shoot the Passport in each lighting scenario and then I use Lightroom to set white balance and camera profile before I do anything else to the files.

File straight from Canon 1ds MKIII with white balance set for Strobe

File with X-rite profile enabled

File with camera profile and white balance set.

Notice in particular the reds and blues and the stronger delineation between colors in the slur gauge on the left side. For some pictures the effects of the profile are hardly noticeable, for images with strong colors the difference can be like throwing a light switch.

Color profile set for Adobe ACR 4.4

Custom Profile

In my opinion if you care about color you need to be using this tool for every shoot, btw I have no relationship with X-Rite. There is a video tutorial here.

This might be the cutest thing you’ve ever seen: Here is Mr. Fox Takes A Nap:

Introducing the adorable Zero and rambunctious Velcro: I had the great fortune to be the first photographer to work with two brand new talents in the industry. Zero, a beautiful Arctic Fox and Velcro the wide-eyed Ring-Tailed Lemur. I’ve been working on an Animal Portrait portfolio for years, I just had the amazing opportunity to photograph an 18-foot Reticulated Python named Lemondrop for California Academy of Sciences. I love making portraits of animals so I’m actively looking for new subjects and clients who share my interest.

The Fantastic Mr. Zero

Velcro the ring-tailed lemur

I found out on Facebook that Bowwow Productions were here in town working with my friends Jennifer Bullock and Tom Hood, they were doing a shoot with a big adorable St. Barnard, but they were traveling with two fresh young faces who had never been in a real shoot before. It was an opportunity for me not only to photograph two of the cutest animals, but to meet and work with Stephanie and  Judy from Bowwow. I’m so happy it worked out, it was great fun for everyone and I’m very happy with these new additions to my collection of animal portraits. Check out Winokur Photography to see more photos of Zero and Velcro.

Zero is an Arctic Fox - Vulpes lagopus

There is something about a studio-portrait of an animal that I find endlessly fascinating. The thing is, and this is true for much of my work, by removing every element except the subject and the relationship between the viewer and the subject, we create an image that allows us to believe in a personal connecting with the sitter. An introduction if you will. Photographs of these animals in the wild can certainly be beautiful and fascinating, but by photographing them in a neutral setting we have the opportunity to focus on their eyes, expression and body language. These are character studies just like the portraits of people I make.

I knew it would be huge fun to have a fox and a lemur in my studio, so I recruited my brother, Stephan, to shoot some video while we worked. I edited his footage and put together this 2 minute video showing us working with Stephanie and Judy of Bowwow Productions:

This coming Thursday 8/18 presents you with a great opportunity to meet two San Francisco celebrities: Lemondrop and Adam Savage from Myth Busters. It’s comedy nightlife at the California Academy of Sciences. If you haven’t already seen Lemondrop you can check him out in this video from our shoot with him. Meanwhile I’m actively looking for more cool animals to photograph. So, if you happen to know someone who has a Long Nosed Bandicoot or a Rainbow Lorikeet let them know I’m interested in photographing all kinds of cool and interesting creatures.