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It's Come to This: What Does it Matter Anymore?
American Cinematographer can work for you or against you. I started a five year relationship that has recently ended. At the time about to attend film school, I needed all the help I could get to always be one-step ahead of everyone else. <
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>The magazine did wonders. I knew more than the professors. Cinematography is a craft that should be practiced as well as read, of course, so my knowledge never reflected what I could actually do behind the lens. Reading specific articles while following along with a DVD copy of the article's movie is a wonderful exercise. The photographs in the magazine never quite live up to par with the real deal. If I wasn't concerned with spoilers, I wouldd read AC, then skip over to the theater and watch the results play out on film. <
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>Unfortunately, I was part of the generation where high-definition started becoming ultra popular. To fit in with Generation Star Wars, the magazine slyly changed. Articles naturally went the same direction as cinematographers went: video. The advertisements (which have grown so numerous that I feel I am flipping through these more than the articles) all extoll how clear and wonderful the product is for video. <
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>Kodak began phasing out the EXR stocks, which included 5293 200T, quite possibly one of the most beautiful film stocks. I also preferred using 5245 50D that had a golden sheen, and shooting either 93 or 48 100T with an 85B outdoors (not corrected in post) resulted in an outside daylight look far more superior than any daylight stock I'd ever seen. Kodak's new Vision stocks are made for the computer age. The color layers can handle that extra over-saturation that gives today's films their low-grain, high-con, oil-slick look. <
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>Film school was about experiences. Every one of us who cared spent hundreds on every film stock we could find. We all shot film; we developed our own footage, as well as processed it professionally. Some of us, to this day, continue shooting or work in the camera field in Hollywood. (I went by the way of post-production sound, but I will always love cinematography.) <
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>In the end, everyone I knew was reading AC to get a grasp of what cinematographers were like, not how they were handling film. It became about lighting for a genre rather than lighting for a stock, or a lens. The more old-fashioned filmmakers, including myself, would haunt the stacks of the library and read OLD American Cinematography issues that actually faced issues we no longer have. <
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>You see, everyone has slowly become a digital timer. With the digital intermediate, anything is possible. Want her eyes more green, but leave the scene with so many points of magenta and cyan? Easy, push a few buttons. Cinematography has slowly become the art of getting a good healthy negative, not too dense, so as to transfer all that visual information to the computer. <
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>What has this world come to that Kodak has to market its film stocks on glossy commercial magazine paper with fancy photographs that all look the same? Since when does a page from American Cinematographer remotely resemble the diaphanous nature of tri-acetate, emulsion, and light?! <
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>Lighting is still important, obviously. And to this day, a good eye will notice what has been done in-camera. (We have to resort to the new dictions of cinematography: in-camera or post-cinematography.) <
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>And while the current issues have fallen to the wayside at the fault of its corporate greed (more advertisements) and video ramifications, I still find myself falling back to the articles of the seventies and eighties. <
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>Slowly, like anything else these days, cinematography is becoming a lazy man's art. Even Steadicam camerawork is getting shoddy. Don't believe me? Compare the rock solid handheld shots of The Shining (labyrinth or hallways, although the hallway shots required the Steadicam operator to sit on a motorized cart), and compare it to any modern movie. The cameras are hardly horizontally level anymore. Compare Ivan Gekoff's Steadicam craft (e.g. the tunnel sequence) in Tarkovsky's Stalker versus the slanted, dizzying work in the Prisoner of Azkaban. <
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>A good article from a recent issue is about the film Elf, which used wonderful in-camera perspective control and other trickery to fool the audience regarding Will Ferrell's human size. The article actually details the camerawork far better than the DVD featurette! I haven't been able to find it, but Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula would be a great read, if they did an article on it; that film, to my understanding, didn't use any CGI. And in an article regarding the Phantom Menace, special effects crews found the video (hi-def) format so awkward, they resorted to shooting MOS film! <
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>With today's advent of the DVD phenomenon, cinematography doesn't always carry through to your television/projector. Compare The Thin Red Line (1998 version) -- which looks as stunning as it did on the big screen -- to the DVD of Big Fish (2003). Anyone paying close enough attention will find that Big Fish looks as if it were shot on video, the way the subjects move, the coloring, etc. My research shows this film was shot on 35mm. Perhaps too-modern too-sharp lenses aided in the coloring, but the transfer to DVD has destroyed the film entirely. Was Mr. Rousselot there to supervise the transfer? If so, someone made a huge mistake. I've been in debates about this, but Big Fish is not the only film to look like DigiBeta. <
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>I suppose I keep digressing. American Cinematographer is no longer the premier magazine I believe it once was, but because it is the only magazine, by definition, that has such exclusive access into today's cinematography field, then there really is no other choice, which is a shame. Should you want to know the specific types of lights used on a film, AC is great to read. Should you want to understand color timing and exposure, I'd fall back a decade and help yourself to the days when experience mattered. <
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>When all else fails, trust your eyes.

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An absolute must for any serious filmmaker
Whether you are a technical guru or someone who's emphasis is on the words, any serious filmmaker who takes his or her craft seriously will love American Cinematographer. The official magazine of the American Society of Cinematographers, this magazine gives you in depth interviews with DPs and Directors on the technical approach towards the shooting of the picture. They cover not just lab soups and lighting techniques, but also the approach to the script, design notes on how to visually approach the script - in other words, a great detailed overview of how this particular crew of filmmakers went about creating the visual language of the film. And not just film - as technology advances, and more films are shot on video, this magazine gives the same great coverage to those pictures as well - from Star Wars to Anniversary Party. While it's true that there are only so many films that AC can cover each issue but I think you'll end up feeling like I do - that I wish they could cover them all!