Tom Burstyn on digital cinema

Posted on 25 August 2009

Again, returning to the craft of filmmaking. I received a note from a friend of mine, Tom Burstyn, a wonderful DP (director of photography). I had seen a film of his, referred to in his response, “This Way of Life,” shot on a $4000 camera and he had been checking out my website and was responding to my video clip of August 7th. I thought it worth it to present his whole response:

That whole Red camera hype is bullshit. The camera is a camera. That guy was lying when he said the complete camera was $35K – that buys you a camera NOT comparable to the $150K camera the other fellow was talking about. I’ve been shooting with the Red for the last 2 projects – a big budget mini series and now a tiny poor tv series. The camera was used with 2 different ‘philosophies’ in each case – big budget bells & whistles & poverty just make it work and in both cases the Red camera suffers from a major fault: Inconsistent reliability. Steven Soderbergh loves it because it makes beautiful pictures (have you seen Che?) but what everyone fails to note is that Red had a team of experts and a dozen camera bodies on set all day to keep things going. The camera crashes all the time. They’ll work it out, it is a lovely machine, kinda, but when you use it you are obliged to use great glass with it – Zeiss, Cooke, whatever, and that obliges you to either buy a set of lenses at great expense ($60k-100K) or rent them and their attendant accessories at the same price they’d cost if you’d used an Arri or Panavision camera. When you rent a camera package, the body itself is usually a loss leader, the rental expenses come with all the fucking doodads.

I keep seeing the problem with low budget independent filmmaking as not an equipment as much as an attitude issue. When we use the Red we introduce the camera into an existing orthodoxy and workflow that is ponderous and expensive. So you save a few bucks on the camera body. Big deal. You have to rent more lights and pay for the time it takes to set ‘em up and take ‘em down. We have to change our approach and more importantly our style of filmmaking. The work you compliment me on was done with a $4000 camera – the trick for me is to use the camera, the location, story, cast, everything in the way they suggest. To look for the opportunities each aspect of the process presents instead of changing it to suit a preconception. Interesting thing the writers did on this series I worked on a while back: One key cast member was seriously miscast – a bad actor, a stupid man, no clue – he was unable to play the role as written, they couldn’t afford to replace him so they re-wrote him to play the fool that he is, not the tough guy they originally conceived. That’s the way of the low budget movie in my mind. To work in concert with the world. Leave manipulation to Transformers and Dark Knight and that heartless shit.

There’s a great documentary made by Velcrow Ripper called Scared Sacred – the film goes to trouble spots around the world and asks survivors what inspirational thing happened to them when they lived through Bhopal, Bosnia, Palestine, South Africa. Velcrow had no clue what was in store for him, he used whatever cheap-ass home video camera he could get his hands on and he intuitively found the aesthetic that medium had to offer like he found the beauty in every disaster he wandered into.

I shot This Way of Life by employing all my experience as a dramatic cameraman, but only to bolster the story I was trying to tell. No lights, no retakes, no back to ones, as little technical impact as possible. My bias came into play when I asked a question or when I chose a position from which to see the world my story was unfolding in.
Now my goal is to make dramatic films in a similar way – to set up a dramatic situation, get cast & crew wound up, set ‘em free and film it. That’s the way to beat he big boys at their game, the way to tell a honest and true story in a direct but still beautifully crafted way.

and furthermore…
here’s a camera I think perfect for the kind of work I was talking about – affordable, tiny & lightweight and capable of making a picture good for big screen projection.

The ikonoskop A-cam dII