Philip Bloom

Which DSLR audio recorder is best? Coming soon on my blog

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:41:59 +0100

Which DSLR audio recorder is best? Coming soon on my blog

Great example of convergence. I took these stills on the 5d...

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:59:26 +0100

Great example of convergence. I took these stills on the 5d whilst shooting the tv commercial with the same camera. You can see the commercial on my site www.philipbloom.net

lit by one small candle, shot on 5dmkII and Zeiss ZF 85mm...

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:45:48 +0100

lit by one small candle, shot on 5dmkII and Zeiss ZF 85mm f1.4

The rest, variable lighting. Either Zeiss ZF 85mm f1.4 or Canon 35mm f1.4

Blown away by quality of footage today in candle light

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:52:51 +0100

on 5d…had some issues which I resolved. All footage from today looks stellar. Very happy and Thanks so much to Edward Mcleod-Jones who volunteered to assist. He was brilliant. Perfect AC, great with clapperboard and a top bloke. Also top marks to my new try sound recordist Alan Hilll. Top of his game that fella. The sound was perfect. Can’t wait to sync it up with the images.

Still hate the metering on the 5d. Getting that perfect exposure is tricky. I do tend to under expose with it these days as it’s safer.

stanley kubrick eat your wonderful heart!

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:10:50 +0100

lighting this current scene with two candels. one for the actor, one in background. only on 400 iso with an 85mm zeiss f1.4

had some issues with some of the inbetween isos and noise. interesting, maybe best not to use the extended iso with video…

Russian Poet Shoot on 5d

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:47:46 +0100

not got off to good start. its raining cats and dogs! i am not certain what the poems are about but in my last shoot with him it was all about his infatuation with England and it’s beauty…not so good for that today!

trying out the glidetrack compact for the first time. taken the small video head off of my new namfrotto monopod and have attached it to the glidtrack. i will mostly use it on the miller ds20 head which will take the weight of the 5d and glidetrack for some subtle moves.

none of this shoot will be handheld. there will be movement, i will also use my wally dolly, just a shame the weather isn’t there for us yet!

got Alan Hill recording sound onto his own recorder and Edward Macleod Jones as AC. more to follow…

shooting on 5dmk2 tomorrow in Chiswick

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:53:55 +0100

got sound man and assistant. filming a Russian Poet. should be fun and I have license to be uber creative and really try some different ideas. going to use the glidetrack compact too hopefully. follow my tumblring tomorrow!

at the 10 years younger show at Earl’s Court with my glam...

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:40:19 +0100

at the 10 years younger show at Earl’s Court with my glam model mum and me dad. Shot on 5dmkII in disgusting sodium light.

My Indian visa application photo. would you let him into your...

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:30:33 +0100

My Indian visa application photo. would you let him into your country?

My Indian visa application photo. would you let him into your...

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:29:16 +0100

My Indian visa application photo. would you let him into your country?

not enough days in the week!!

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:44:40 +0100

it doesn’t help that i worked all last weekend and this week was mad manic but I had so much to do today and i just didn’t have the hours in the day.

i really wanted to test out my new Encore and redrock live lens but I had to finish off some editing first that needed to be done today. Then going through and trying to sort the bachelor accumulated mess of the week. Then do some work for F-Stop Academy by which point it was late. I promised myself an evening off by going to a friend’s house for a BBQ which is where I am en route to now in a taxi.

So i failed miserably with the encore test but at least i got it mounted on my ex1.

Tomorrow is highly unlikely too. Got a Sunday breakfast meeting with a contact from Hong Kong then I have family duties. My glamorous mature model mum is at a makeover show in London and I am going to see it with my dad then early dinner afterwards. Its hilarious as my mum doesn’t look 65 at all. Naughty lot have made her wear a grey wig and “olded” her up for the pre-video then she comes out looking all made over, it’s just how she is normally! Very funny.

So the chances are my testing of the Redrock this weekend have failed to happen. I am just too busy. I am working solidly now every single day for the next 4 weeks with no days off. Lots of F-stop content to make, working for my usual clients too and then off to India for Greenpeace on the 5d. crazy schedule.

i will TRY and do something this week one evening as we still have long evenings. it just dependa on how hard this week is.

i need a holiday!

My "Public Enemies" raw review!

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:48:00 +0100

Who doesn’t want to be a movie critic? What a job! paid to watch movies all the time…here are my two cents, for what anybody cares. i have a Tumblr blog now so I can talk about whatever I want, keeping the main blog for proper stuff! Well, i have just come out of Public Enemies, the new Michael Mann gun fest… Initial thoughts…good looking film thanks to DP Dante Spinoti and amazing production design, although a bit too murky for my tastes, but it’s impossible to say how much of that is down to the cinema where i saw it. Too much handheld aswell, making it difficult to make out what was going on. Mann did keep my attention with his once again incredible gun fight set pieces but during the quiter stuff I felt slightly lost. It felt kind of quite rushed at times too. I have zero idea what period of time this spans in weeks or months or years.. Dillenger escapes, gets captured, escapes etc…with only a couple of scenes creating any real tension for me. Part of the issue was down to indentifying who the characters were. They mostly wore hats and had the same hair so i I kept on getting people mixed up, even more emphasised when the credits rolled and i didn’t even realise some well known actors were in it, I hadn’t recognised them! Apparantly Johnny Depp was in it? ;)

Seriously, I thought he was superb. utterly charasmatic and ruthless at the same time. Our sympathies really did fall with him, despite him being the bad guy. Parlty because Christian Bale was, well Christian Bale. intense but not very charismatic. I like Christian but he was lacking in character development completely. I didn’t care about him at all, nor did Michael Mann it seems! I have no idea how accurate the film was but it felt it very episodic which is often a hallmark of true stories.

The film was shot on an F23 with rumours of some EX1 stuff. For the most part it looked very filmic but there were some scenes which looked awfully video like to my eye. Our first encounter with Bale when he shot Pretty Boy Floyd looked awful, low resolution. like it had been blown up too much. Some other outdoor scenes during the day looked poor too. interiors looked way better. they desturated and gave it a very brown 30s palette in the grade. Perhaps too obvious? I am pretty certain the 30s looked less murky than that! Anyway I am nit picking. I enjoyed the film. Felt I got my money’s worth, didn’t get bored and adored the gunplay. I just wanted more meat. Mann is a glossy film maker and not the master of character stuff, he doesn’t make you care that much for characters in his movies. I hated Miami Vice a lot. Liked Collateral and of course enjoyed Heat, but mainly for the gun fights. Loved to have seen what Scorsese would have done with this. just look at the character development in The Departed. you knew who everyone was and cared when they got killed. Here someone got killed and I just thought, which one was he again!?

As this is my first movie review it is structurally all over the place. But hey, this is the first of my ‘Raw Reviews”, something I will be doing a lot more of. It’s written on Tumblr on my Blackberry just after coming out of the cinema (and there is no spell checker so sorry about the typos!) Shall I score my movie reviews? Why not?! This is a 6 out of 10. My overall feeling was that I wanted to care more and I didn’t. But Depp was great.

What do you need to make a movie?

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:26:18 +0100

A RED? thousands of pounds? Tens of thousands? Hundreds…millions?

Not really! I filmed with marc price yesterday doing a zombie feature for channel 5. we spent more on our budget for two minutes than he spent on his 100 minute zombie film Colin. It was a huge hit at Cannes and I am sure it will make a fortune.

I will be doing an interview with Colin soon so stay tuned.

So remember it’s not what you shoot on it’s what you shoot! Content is king! He shot his feature almost completely 4:3 on a 1 chip SD camcorder on mini dv.

Google Colin and Zombie to check out his trailer an clips. My two minute homage to zombie flicks be on tv in two weeks.

What a busy day!

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:58:37 +0100

Started off filming Zombies for a piece for channel 5. Great fun, making people up. Getting people eating each other. Lots of fun. I will share this with people when it goes out on TV in 2 weeks.

Finished, maybe, the edit of the M-Tel commercial. We finally got some music sorted. Not my first choice. A little bit too upbeat for me, i preferred a melancholy feel, but it still works. it certainly feels much more like a commercial than Sofia’s People did but that is what the whole point is…

Am hoping it gets the seal of approval as I need to upload a pro res version to the production company ftp and my upload speed is slow. It’s being broadcast tomorrow! So any Bulgarians reading this please watch out for the new M-Tel Prima commercial and let me know what you think!

Phil

Photo

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:09:06 +0100

Two zombies munching

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:30:07 +0100

Two zombies munching

Ruth getting zombified

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:21:08 +0100

Ruth getting zombified

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:20:33 +0100

Ruth getting zombified

Zombie two! Need more

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:17:39 +0100

Zombie two! Need more

Our first Zombie! We need more!

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:31:51 +0100

Our first Zombie! We need more!