Shadow puppetry matches dreamlike quality of Kate Bush song

"50 Word's for Snow found the elusive Kate Bush at her most stark and stripped-down. The album was the aural equivalent of a single line of footsteps in a snowy pasture. It's no wonder then that Bush, who has always been skilled at pairing her music with their equivalent visuals, turned away from her trademark cinematics for the video of her song, 'Lake Tahoe.'

In the album version of 'Lake Tahoe,' only quiet strings and a piano accompany Bush as she weaves a tale of an old dog dreaming of his owner. And while the full song explains the animal's true situation, Bush - who directed the video herself - has trimmed it down into a more ambiguous excerpt here.

Her use of shadow puppetry matches song's dreamlike quality. The stark contrast between the black figures and the white world makes each set piece seem mystical. The dog runs through phantasmagorical lands filled with spooky woods, looking for his owner. It's beautiful in its simplicity - emphasizing small subtle movements over big extravagance. The elegant design of the puppets mixes fantasy elements like the moving trees with realistic pieces such as the soft sway of the woman's hair."

(Dan Raby, 24 January 2012, All Songs Considered Blog, National Public Radio)

Revisioning La Jetee as a series of video tableaux vivants

"An adaption and reconstruction of Chris Marker's La Jetee(1963) film. Its tells the story about a man who is marked by an image of his childhood in a post-nuclear war experiment on time travel."

(Choy Ka Fai, 2010)

[This revision of Chris Marker's masterpiece transposes the static black and white photographs of the original through a series of video tableaux vivants. In this way actors hold their position as they are photographed using live-action video. The resulting effect is both eerie and evocative.]

Madonna's Justify My Love: beautiful black and white shallow focus

VFX Masterpiece: The Third & The Seventh

"I use V-Ray. Illumination has fascinated me since as long as I can remember: Years ago, it was quite difficult to simulate global ilumination by traditional techniques. So after trying several GI engines, I found V-Ray to be the best solution by far to suit all my needs in these terms."

(Jorge Seva alias 'Alex Roman')

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Avatar: selective rather than deep focus stereoscopic cinematography

James Cameron: "I think it's a myth that you want deep focus in 3-D shots. I find the opposite is true. Selective focus, created by working at low f-stops with longer lenses, evolved as a cinematic technique to direct the audience's attention to the character of greatest narrative importance at a given moment. With 3-D, the director needs to lead the audience's eye, not let it roam around the screen to areas which are not converged. So all the usual cinematic techniques of selective focus, separation lighting, composition, etc., that one would use in a 2-D film to direct the eye to the subject of interest, still apply, and are perhaps even more important. We all see the world in 3-D. The difference between really being witness to an event vs. seeing it as a stereo image is that when you're really there, your eye can adjust its convergence as it roves over subjects at different distances. Convergence is the natural toe-in that the eye does to align the left and right eye images of objects at specific planes of depth. In a filmed image, the convergence was baked in at the moment of photography, so you can't adjust it. In order to cut naturally and rapidly from one subject to another, it's necessary for the filmmaker (actually his/her camera team) to put the convergence at the place in the shot where the audience is most likely to look. This sounds complicated but in fact we do it all the time, in every shot, and have since the beginning of cinema. It's called focus. We focus where we think people are most likely to look. So I've found that just slaving the convergence function to the focus works exceedingly well, and makes good stereo a no-brainer on the set."

(David S. Cohen, 10 April 2008, Variety Magazine)

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