a film production blog
This is something I meant to blog about literally forever, so here it is, finally. People who...
I am happy to announce that my feature documentary “Every Step You Take” is available...
I’m proud to announce that our collaborative feature film project, “The Owner”,...
I just stumbled upon this incredibly useful chart, which lists all – notably high-end – cinema cameras currently on the market, ranging from the Sony F3, the Canon C300 and the various RED models all the way to the Alexa.
This is something I meant to blog about literally forever, so here it is, finally. People who follow me on Twitter regularly might already be aware of this. This is about an amazing experience we made with a viral self-marketing campaign. First of all, check our video out, and then read and most importantly WATCH our “revelation” at TEDxVienna.
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I am happy to announce that my feature documentary “Every Step You Take” is available for rental via web stream, for all territories.
It’s only $2.99 / €2.30 / £1.99, so no excuses 
I’m proud to announce that our collaborative feature film project, “The Owner”, which is currently in post production, was covered by CNN.
You’ve seen my last post about the BTS shoot by Rodney Charters when he was testing the C300 alongside Lan Bui and Drew Gardner in London. Well, here’s even more of that in interview form, and Rodney is very candid about his thoughts on the Canon C300 – you can see he’s fallen in love, and hearing a major DP talk about it like this makes me looking forward to mine even more.
Rodney Charters says the Canon C300 is the "camera of the decade"
I witnessed the live stream yesterday and thought this was worth sharing:
If you ever wanted to hear what a well-established Hollywood DP thinks about the upcoming C300, look no further: Rodney Charters, director of photography best known for his incredible work on the TV series “24″ (here’s his IMDB profile), had a go with the C300 together with Lan Bui and Drew Gardner, both highly talented filmmakers in their own rights.
read moreSome of you will remember that I blogged about an amazing collaborative feature film project that I am part of quite a while back (if not and if you want to see some amazing BTS and stills from the set of my comedic segment, click here).
Disclaimer: This is not a scientific test. We have had the chance to test the two cameras at the same location but different dates and with different lenses and decided to compare them to get a rough feel for each cameras low light sensitivity.
This was originally posted as a guest post on Cinema5D – click here to go to the original article.
I have learned that fellow DP Yves Simard, known on Twitter as @CrewsTV, has lost his family’s home in New Zealand in a fire that burned the place to the ground.
Luckily, nobody was hurt and his wife was able to save herself and the children, but virtually all of their possessions are gone.
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Check out our C300 test short “13:59″ right here:
EDIT: This is the new grade, which is much more subtle and shows more of the camera’s strengths. Thanks to Micha Schmidt for this!
Here’s the new great BTS from Peter Hainzl. Thanks so much!
… and here’s another NEW behind-the-scenes video from Patrick Zadrobilek, thanks again!
Big thanks to our actors Karim Ismael Rahoma and Mirjam Birkl, and the entire crew. It was a fun shoot but a lot of stress! Great to make something like this in virtually no time, great job everyone. The music was composed within less than a day by the extremely talented Cedric Conti, who already contributed the music to Philip Bloom’s INSIPIENS (or “Nino”), which we shot after our Masterclass in Majorca this past June (click here). Thanks so much Cedric! Check out his work here.
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Over the past months, I have been given the chance to so something quite ordinary with extraordinary people: shooting interviews for TV and other media outlets – interviews with famous film stars and film directors. As you can imagine, there is hardly any room for screwing up something like this, so the preparation needs to be meticulous.
Still frame from my interview shoot with David Cronenberg for the Austrian premiere of "A Dangerous Method" at the Viennale International Film Festival - parts of the film were shot in Vienna, where Sigmund Freud used to live
Red Giant software was busy developing a version of their very popular Magic Bullet Looks suite for Apple’s controversial and not-yet-quite production-ready Final Cut Pro X.
In case you missed it, I wanted to let you know that the incredible Automatic Duck plug-ins are now available for free.
Automatic Duck supplies plug-ins to allow round-trips between Final Cut Pro 7, Avid, After Effects or Pro Tools. It’s an incredibly useful array of tools if you have ever had the problem of moving your Final Cut Pro timeline into After Effects to do color grading or any post production work.
Every now and then, a disruptive company comes along that just does what everybody was hoping for – simply because it could be done – and thereby disrupts an entire industry.
To confuse matters after today’s Cinema EOS / Canon C300 (1080p camera) revelation further, Canon just announced it’s developing a yet-to-be-named DSLR capable of acquiring 4K images. Not many details yet.
It’s full frame like the 1D X or 5Dmk2, but uses an APS-H like area of the sensor, just like a 1Dmk4.
More details here on Engadget.
According to Canon’s technical director Chuck Westfall (read The Verge interview here), the camera will be available within 12 months. In the interview, he talks about the superiority of the new Canon C300, which I covered in here as well.
Canon announced their long-anticipated new EOS C300 Super 35mm video camera. Finally Canon is directly aiming at professional video production with a need for cinematic images.
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Gregor Schmidinger is the director of “The Boy Next Door”, a short film that garnered a whopping 2 million views in less than 3 years. Incredible success for a short film, certainly because Gregor managed to evoke a lot of emotions with the story about a male prostitute longing for real affection.
In case you have missed it, read Gregor’s great guest blog series “How to Reach a Million Video Views” in which he deals in detail with the strategy and the blueprint for a viral success such as “The Boy Next Door”.
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With great sadness we all have learned of Steve Jobs’ death at the age of 56. He was my one true idol since I was a kid. I have never used anything else than Apple computers.
I know this isn’t usually the blog for such things, but I will take my time to collect my thoughts and write something more extensive on Steve Jobs’ death.
For now, I urge anyone to watch the extremely inspiring speech that Steve Jobs delivered in 2005 at Stanford University. I have watched it again and again over the years and I have hardly ever seen another speech as inspirational as this one.
If you have already seen it – watch it again.
The world has lost somebody who has made an enormous impact. You will be missed, Steve.
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In case you started building up a collection of great Canon lenses after you purchased your video capable DSLR, and later decided that it’s probably time for one of the new large sensor camcorders (F3, FS100, AF101 …), you probably found yourself in a similar position as I.
Well, fast Canon EF lenses definitely are great, but their biggest drawback is that they control the aperture electronically, not mechanically on the lens (as most Nikon lenses do). That means you need to use a camera to control the iris. Not any camera. A Canon of course. EF is a proprietary standard, and Canon has not released the specifics as to how this communication between the lenses and the camera work.
The Canon EF Mount
I know, I know, our Cam Busters workshop tour through Germany and Austria with Philip Bloom, Sebastian Wiegärtner & me has been over for quite a while now, so I am really sorry for the late wrap-up post. Been very busy with some great new stuff on the horizon, but more on that some other time.
It was incredibly intense fun, meeting a lot of people and different crowds across the two countries, and the overall response to the workshops was extremely positive.
The three of us not looking so fresh anymore after the last workshop! (Berlin)
Just a quick event update about an event I am attending tonight in Zürich, Switzerland:
My 2007 documentary “Every Step You Take“, which deals with the massive amount of video surveillance in the United Kingdom in a critical way, is being screened by the Pirate Party Switzerland in Zürich, followed by a panel discussion on “data protection and the surveillance state”.
As you might already have heard, Engadget was sent an invite from Canon to a November 3 event in Hollywood, dubbed with the headline “The Story Begins – Canon is making an historic global announcement”.
Pretty mighty words, but of course promising. We have all been waiting for any news on Canon’s DSLR line-up for years now (I mean it, because there was no innovation in sensor technology since the introduction of the 7D over two years ago).
I usually don’t often feature other people’s works on my blog, but when I find something particularly worth pointing out, I do – and this is the case with the “Tour de Cure” documentary:
Recently, Linda Ung and Mick Jones, two very talented filmmakers and shooters from Australia who I had the pleasure to meet in person at this year’s NAB in Las Vegas, set out to make an incredible documentary series about the “Tour de Cure“. It’s a ten-day cycling tour aimed at raising money for cancer research and ultimately finding a cure for cancer. Please donate at Tour de Cure website to help reach this aim: http://www.tourdecure.com.au/
Before you read further, I suggest you start by watching the first episode. The other episodes are at the bottom of this post.
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My apologies for the lack of blog posts lately, but the weeks after our Cam Busters workshop tour have been filled to the brim with work and therefore I’ve been too busy to do anything else. A round-up blog post about the Cam Busters tour will be posted in the coming days.
IBC 2011 in Amsterdam is around the corner. Right after NAB, it’s the most highly anticipated professional broadcast event of the year. It’s Europe’s NAB, so to speak.
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I wrote this post originally for OMM! – the Open Media Magazine, a new iOS publication by talented young filmmaker/designer Daniel Freytag, who asked me to contribute to his first issue. It’s definitely worth checking out, it’s absolutely free for your iPhone and iPad, and the design and interface is very innovative and fitting to an iOS device. There are many other great articles included, among them one by my friend Mario Feil, who actually talks about why film schools were unnecessary for him 
Future versions of the magazine will be web based and therefore available on all devices.
I love the community that has sprung up around the revolution of DSLRs in recent years. The accessibility of cameras delivering a cinematic quality for low budgets has opened up opportunities to almost anyone interested in becoming a filmmaker. People who used to feel excluded from what used to be an elitist profession now have a better chance of making it simple because the gear is cheaper and quickly becoming ubiquitous.
read moreThe Falcon Follow Focus from Hangrip is an inexpensive follow focus system available for €199 plus shipping.
Please watch the review video below, produced together in conjunction with Cinema5D. This carries on what we started as “Gearama” and carries it to a whole new level, bringing in additional experts for reviews regularly. So stay tuned for new episodes!
Thanks to my colleagues Bobo, Johnnie Behiri and of course Sebastian Woeber – we are partners in these reviews and aim to bring an evenly balanced look to any gear we look at. Much more to come!
The Cam Busters Workshop Vienna
is proudly sponsored by:
Only a week until Philip Bloom & Sebastian Wiegärtner arrive here in Vienna for our kick-off Cam Busters DSLR/AF101 workshop on August 9th!
After the workshop, we will go and have dinner with the attendees, and then it’s time for the first DSLR Meetup in Vienna! I’ve been organizing a regular meeting of filmmakers in Vienna together with Gloria Gammer since early 2010 now, but this time, it will be specifically for and by DSLR filmmakers and of course, as far as I know it’s Philip Bloom’s first time in Vienna, so let’s give him a very warm welcome! (That hopefully goes for the weather, too!)
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And here we go, the 2nd episode of our gear review show GEARAMA is online!
This time we talk about the Cinevate Simplis Dual (or Pro, how it’s called with the Cyclops viewfinder included) DSLR rig. In case you missed the first episode, check it out here - we talked about the Cinevate Cyclops DSLR viewfinder.
read moreAccording to my WordPress statistics, this is my 100th blog post. And it is the one in which I announce that this design is obsolete. It has served this site well for over 1.5 years, but it is time for a change.
This blog was originally started when I posted world’s first short film and review of the then-new Canon T2i/550D, bringing huge numbers of people to the site on the first day. Apart from making films, I have always enjoyed writing and that’s why I kept going. And boy, it’s been a very rewarding thing to do – because of all the great people I got to know through my activities with this blog and Twitter. But this was just the start of something that can become much more. It really is time for the next step.
read moreA few weeks ago I returned from beautiful Majorca (as the English write to pronounce it correctly – or Mallorca, as it is really called in Spanish) after the 3-day intensive HDSLR/AF101 Masterclass that I did there with Philip Bloom & Sebastian Wiegärtner.
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For our incredibly successful HDSLR/AF101 Masterclass in Majorca in June, we had some really generous sponsors who supported us along the way.
Three of them were so generous that they actually donated equipment to be given away to participants.
Philip, Sebastian and I did not want people to compete for these prizes with their filmmaking on the three-day course, because we figured that would distract them from actually learning things – and that’s what a Masterclass is all about in the end. We did a random prize drawing on the last day, and Philip Bloom picked all the winners.
The biggest price, worth about $4,000, was a brand-new CamDolly – a full-size dolly rig with incredible versatility, which I have already looked at several months ago. Check it out here.
It was for free only when it was broadcast live from July 8-10: “Learn DSLR filmmaking with Gale Tattersall”, DP of HOUSE – a three-day course.
This blog post was originally put online to notify people of the live broadcast.
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Months ago, it was still winter, I went out shooting with my buddies Gunther Machu and Peter Hainzl to test and compare the GH2 to the GH1.
Check out what we came up with … thanks to Peter for shooting most of the BTS stuff and to Gunther for editing such a nice piece out of it:
read moreThe weeks since the release of Apple’s all-new Final Cut Pro X have been filled with controversy about the new editing software.
There is no doubt that Apple made a crucial mistake calling an all-new editing application “Final Cut Pro”, while it has nothing in common with its predecessor and isn’t even able to open any of the past projects. Also, if they hadn’t stopped selling the old Final Cut Studio altogether, the controversy would have been much less – because nobody expects much of a 1.0 version of any application. It’s very different when you claim to skip 3 version numbers and jump straight from version 7 to 10 …
Anyway, I will write about my mixed bag of feelings with Final Cut Pro X in a different post.
Get 50% off Adobe CS5.5 Production Premium or Premiere Pro using promo code SWITCH
Check out the first episode of GEARAMA & tell us what you think!
Beware that this was really a test and we will move on to more scripted reviews in the future.
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My name is Nino Leitner, aac and I am a filmmaker, DP and producer based in Vienna, Austria. I focus mainly on commercial & corporate work as well as documentaries.
