You really should follow both of them on Twitter: Philip Bloom, Greg Yaitanes.

You can find the interview here: In depth interview with Greg Yaitanes, Executive Producer and Director of “House” Season Finale shot on Canon 5DmkII.

Since it’s an hour long i thought i’d sum up the – in my opinion – most interesting parts of the interview. I don’t claim that this summary contains every detail of the interview, but i think i captured the essence.

Update: Philip posted a complete transcript of the interview here: Greg Yaitanes “House” Interview transcription

I especially like to hear the hands on experience from a director’s point of view, so here we go:

Why did they use the 5D on House?

House originally is shot on an ARRI system. Greg and his team constantly discuss on what would the best way to shoot the show on a weekly basis is.

The decision to shoot on the 5D was that it was the exact tool they needed to accomplish the story. It wasn’t like “let’s gain momentum in a technical area by shooting the finale on a buzzed format”.

There are some technical challenges, but they where outweighed by the way it helped them to tell this particular story. The show deserves the best at all times, you don’t use a format just to struggle with it.

Every system has it’s own strengths and weaknesses, so every filmmaker and storyteller should use the proper tool to tell the particular story – for this episode it was the 5D.

The Benefits of the 5D

The 5D provides a great look and because of it’s large sensor and incredible depth of field.

The Size

It is immensely useful for confined spaces. On the episode they shot with three cameras very often in dense sets, and the camera provided a flexibility like when shooting in film school, almost an “El Mariachi” style shooting.

Greg wasn’t going for a shaky hand-camera style, so most of the time the 5Ds where on monopods to organically exist in the space. A couple of times it was on the dolly, but mostly on the monopod.

About 60% of the sets where tight settings, the size of the camera was a big benefit.

The Work with Actors

On the first day on set it looked like a bunch of paparazzi’s looking at the actors.

A shooting environment with 5Ds was great for the actors because of the flexibility and freedom the camera provides. It’s not anymore like “either you or the camera”, but both.

It is great to keep the actors “in the moment” and not to have huge breaks to change the camera position.

The Work on Set

For the finale the team used three different 5Ds:

The A camera with an external monitor, off of that monitor the focus puller spread the image to different other monitors. The B camera had the same setup but the monitor was next to the operator. The C camera was operated by a single D.O.P. (Ninja Chris) and he shot different pick ups within the scene.

It was very important to Greg to have an artist behind the lens, not a technician.

Usually the D.O.P. looks through the viewfinder of the camera, shutting the whole environment out. After a day Toni (the D.O.P.) got used to looking at the LCD panel and actually embraced it – he was around the whole environment and was part of the story and whats happening.

The Post Production

A big benefit is that even when you use three cameras with slightly different settings it’s no problem to correct and match them in post production and color grading. It’s also great to just save the cards on a hard drive and immediately start editing.

All the stages of the finale where within 100 yards of the production, so they didn’t have to send anything away.

The Transition from Film to the 5D

The hardest transition was for the focus pullers, they went through a complete season and everything changed in the finale. But nobody was rolling their eyes. They all participated in the change, got involved and loved the ease of work.

During episode 19 (which was also directed by Greg) they let the 5D shoot besides the film camera to see how it would behalf. They’ve been very happy with the tests and the set looked really great on the 5D. They intercut the film footage to see how the both integrate with each other – and it did well.

In the beginning it wasn’t clear that they would shoot the entire episode on the 5D, but during pre-production they wanted to shoot this scene with the 5D, and that one, and this one too. And since they knew that the hospital looks great with the camera the idea evolved to shoot the entire episode with the 5D.

The Network

So have there been any problems or doubts by the network that you could’t broadcast 5D material?

The network approved the workflow since they already knew the outcome from the 5D tests on the former episodes – so no complain from their side. It passed every standard of the show and the previous camera tests showed that it would definitely work out.

Drawbacks of the 5D

There are like 30 things in mind that are great, and a few things that can drive you crazy:

HD Monitoring

It’s not possible to pull a HD feed off the camera while you’re rolling. It would be great to look at the image in HD, also the focus puller would have loved to pull the focus off of HD monitors. Greg and the D.O.P. chose the 5D over the 1D (which would support HD output) because of the larger sensor and therefore the shallower depth of field.

Pulling the Focus

The space between 0 and infinity is just a couple of inches. It’s hard to coordinate when actors AND the camera are moving, it’s very tricky to pull the focus there, it’s almost easier if the D.O.P. pulls the focus by himself.

An actor NEVER wants the feeling that he just gave a great performance but the camera missed it because of focus problems.

The episode was shot with wide open apertures – how did the focus pullers not get a nervous break down?
They are incredible good focus pullers and they understood and where anticipating the camera and actor movement.

Also there have not been any big sweepings and crane movements.

Bottom Line

You don’t want to create a film aesthetic but you want to create your own style.

It doesn’t come down to camera specs, when you tell a story that the audience has an emotional reaction to – that trumps everything.

Facebook, Twitter and Co have become a basic instrument, but what about movie websites?

Really well designed movie websites are nothing new either, but there are some examples that underline the theme so well and are by far more than just a website about a movie – they carry the world and theme of a movie a lot further and serve as an extension and not just merely present some information.

Smashing Magazine compiled a great list of movie websites. Not a list exactly, they tried to answer the question “What if Oscars were given to movie websites”.

It´s a great showcase of incredibly well designed websites, read the full article here.

All my infos where either duplicated or spread between the two, that is no more.

From now on this will be my sole website, merging www.sokolar.com and www.misofilm.com.

The old domains will still be active and point to this new one. Also my email addresses will still work, but my main address will be miso@michaelsokolar.com.

The Pre-Production

My ultimate goal before a shooting is to be as good prepared as possible, especially if you´re shooting on a very tight budget. We´ve been pretty good prepared, it got stressy anyway, but that´s part of the job.

A month before the scheduled shooting one important funding was canceled, but thanks to the already granted fundings from MA7 we managed to pull off the almost impossible and shot a great movie with an incredible cast & crew who all agreed to work for free.

Without the great efforts of the whole team this wouldn´t have been possible, and i want to thank all of them: Cast&Crew.

The Shooting

Dealing with such a heavy topic as human trafficking it is very important to precisely know how you want to show the cruelties your protagonist has to endure. It´s one thing to write a screenplay about that, a whole other thing is to actually direct this kind of scenes.

I´ve been very lucky with the extraordinary cast, way before the rehearsals we sat together and discussed how we wanted to tackle those scenes – and we´ve come to very good solutions.

Shooting with “stars” like Rainer Spechtl and Christoph Grissemann was anything but difficult. It makes your life as director so much easier when everyone brings their own creative impulses and works together as a team instead of just trying to push your own thing. In the end working together counts, not just one great performance – and it just was a pleasure to work with all of the actors involved.

I think you know it was a great team and a great shooting if you´re sad that it´s over, and that definitely was true.

Post-Production

We shot the movie on the RED ONE and it was just great. I found this excellent Final Cut Pro / RED workflow document that made our life much more easy.

Basically our post-production workflow looks like this:

• Backup the RED footage on set on two different hard disks
• Import the RED footage into Final Cut Pro (with Apple Pro Res HQ codec)
• Edit the material (offline)
• Transfer the offline edit onto the 4K RED footage
• Color correction
• After the editing is done: sound design & music
• Put it all together with inserts & credits

Currently we´re doing the offline edit, this should be finished within the next few weeks.

I´ll keep you updated on the progress, you could also join the Facebook page of the movie for the most recent news and photos.

I’ve been involved in a Canon 7D shooting right before, but i wanted to give it a try for myself – and i’m pretty impressed by that little thing.

You can watch the video here (the music is once again from Andreas Grass & Nikola Paryla):

I limited the ISO to 3200 and used the following lenses:
Canon EF 24-105mm 1:4
Sigma 10-22mm 1:4-5,6

Although the lenses could have had a better aperture i’m pretty happy with the results, even in low light situations the noise is not too bad (i have not done any noise reduction).

The camera is really easy to use and with good lenses the result is a really impressive, full HD video.

Besides the ISO and shutter i only adjusted the white balance for the look i wanted – everything else are pretty default settings.

The only issue is that you need to have either a tripod or really really steady hands to avoid a jittery video. There are already some rigs, but i didn’t have a chance to try one out. So for documentary where you move a lot you might run into trouble (also because there is no auto-focus for video).

All in all it’s a nice little thing, and quite affordable too.

Due to some scheduling conflicts we had to postpone the shooting until January, we’ll be shooting from Jan. 12th. – Jan. 15th 2010 now.

But there are very good news as well: we managed to cast the first roles!

Christoph Grissemann will play JOHANN and Rainer Spechtl will be OSCAR.

We are really happy to have these terrific actors for our movie and we’re looking forward to cast the other characters in December.

All things come together pretty nicely, i can´t wait to shoot the movie…

I got enough time until the shooting to prepare everything, meet with the heads of department to discuss all the tiny bits and i even manage to arrange the pre-production between my other projects. But i know two things for certain:
- just one little detail could change everything
- no matter how much time you have to prepare yourself, a lot will change and it will get stressful.

But no matter what, spending as much time as possible to prepare yourself is more important than everything. Prepare for everything that can go wrong (which in fact could be everything) – so you can deal with it in time.

So far so good, this is the status on A Place Of Peace:

Soundtrack

Attending the Film Music Symposium really changed my mind about certain aspects of film music.

The earlier the musician / composer is able to get his hands on the screenplay and think about the theme of the movie, the more the production will benefit from it. Music definitely is a powerful tool to evoke and emphasize emotions, so if the music is available before the shooting you could easily use it for rehearsals or the shooting itself. But most important – you don´t have to use temporary music for editing. It´s really hard for a composer if you´ve watched your raw cut a hundred times with the music of Hans Zimmer.

So my plan is to meet my composer soon and talk about the ideas i have about the soundtrack.

Storyboard

I´m not a great illustrator. Really not. But then again a storyboard doesn´t have to look like a perfect pencil sketch – it has to convey the shots i imagine for the movie and give everyone involved a sense of what i´m trying to achieve. So with the help of Stan Lee (How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way) i´m learning how to bring my thoughts to paper.

I personally very much like the way the movies of Susanne Bier are shot, very close close-ups.
What i´m trying to achieve in A Place Of Peace is to have one moving master that´s almost a one-shot in each scene and cut it with close-ups of the actors emotions. While this looks pretty nice in the storyboard we´ll see if the locations support my vision, but i´m pretty confident that i´ll be able to adapt my ideas to the specific set.

We won´t have the time for a lot of shots within each scene, so i´m working on few shots that provide some eye-candy and convey everything they should.

What Else?

Carola, the stylist, is collecting some moods for the clothings and Joana is searching for locations. Angela is casting and i am drawing, so far everything looks quite good – we´ll see how everything develops.

I got involved into this matter since my last short movie Greener Pastures in 2006, during ongoing screenings for school classes or discussions and the book Joana researched for with the authors.

I had some discussions with Joana about real stories of human trafficking – the different personalities of victims and how they deal with what happens to them, their environment, the madames, the whole system behind Human Trafficking, hard facts, numbers and statistics, etc.

So while writing the screenplay i already gathered quite a solid background on Human Trafficking – but knowing the hard facts and real stories, or convey the emotions without boring exposition, insterts or dull dialogue with a movie is a whole different thing.

As screenplay author and director of this movie i had to do another kind of research – how would others deal with this matter? I had to watch movies about Human Trafficking.

Since I’m a movie nerd anyway it was not a big deal for me “having” to watch movies, films with stronger stuff are nothing new for me either – still these movies i watched have been really heavy – strengthening my urge to do this short movie on that topic.

Besides the three movies I write about here, you can find a list of movies about Human Trafficking here or here.

Human Trafficking

Human Trafficking is a mini series of two 90-minute episodes and was produced for TV. In my opinion it takes some time to get into the first episode, although the first scenes are quite emotional, the movie is somehow torn apart between the different storylines.
After you got into the story and got familiar with the different characters it’s quite emotional to watch what happens to all of them.

Nevertheless i think if the makers would have taken a little more time to introduce us to the characters and their environment this movie(s) would have a stronger impact. In my opinion this should not just be a mini series of two episodes, but a full series of 12 or even 24 episodes.   IMDb Link

Trade

Trade was directed by the german director Marco Kreuzpaintner, and while it is a good movie it is a little bit too “straight”.
The little girl gets abducted and her 17 years old brother and a Texan cop are searching for her.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a good movie and I was emotionally involved, but in my opinion it is for that matter a little bit too “Hollywoodish”.   IMDb Link

Lilja 4-Ever

Lilja 4-Ever was directed by the swedish director Lukas Moodysson and is in my opinion the most realistic movie of the three.
Although Trade and Human Trafficking are really good movies and emotionally intense – watching Lilja 4-Ever was one of the most intense movies I have ever seen.

It´s not because it is extremely brutal – the movie doesn´t feature heavy nudity or brutality, but it simply feels so real. You believe everything you see, the desperate lives of the russian teenagers in their surroundings, the dreams and desires of these young people, and their struggle for a normal life.

Probably the hardest part of this movie is that we are solely following the protagonist – Lilja. Unlike the other two movies it`s not about the people searching for her and trying to rescue her, it`s just Lilja against her miserable life.

After watching this movie I felt like I´ve got a huge weight on my chest, this is most certainly amongst the best and most realistic movies I have seen.   IMDb Link

I would highly recommend watching those three movies, those things happen right next to you in your neighborhood without you even noticing.

We are just about to start the casting and search for locations, i´m really happy with the screenplay and can´t wait to shoot the thing in 5 months.

The casting won´t solely be done through the website, our casting director will start looking for actors during the summer. Since we are searching for black actors around Vienna, every help is very welcome!

As soon as we have our cast and location i will update the background image, but for now this one comes pretty close (thanks to Natalie Egbowon for the layout).

We will keep you posted about the progress with the blog on the website, my lifestream will also contain all published posts.

We solved major story issues, fleshed out the different characters and killed stereotypes, reconstructured the plot and – finally – found a name for our short movie: A Place Of Peace.

Due to some scheduling conflicts we moved the shooting date a month back into December this year, so we´ve got some more time for the pre-production.

The most important next steps will be the website of the movie, casting and location scouting.

I really hope we find a good cast since the characters are very challenging and the plot involves some violence and sex (how else could it be in a movie about human trafficking and sex slavery?). I will provide more infos on the casting as soon as possible.

While our last movie (Greener Pastures) tried to provide some hard facts about human trafficking this one will not.
A Place Of Peace will be an honest and emotional take on the subject and how it affects the victims.

It won´t be based on a real story this time, but we took several real events and stories of victims and created the story within these frame. The character of the madame (so to say the pimp) for example is heavily based on a real person a victim told Joana about.

We also tried to portrait the characters not only as good and evil, so far i think we´ve done a good job and the last few drafts really made a huge difference.

I will keep you all posted on the ongoing development, soon there will be a dedicated blog for the movie.