Where Do You Put the Camera?

For the final video in their current series, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting tackle one of the fundamental questions in filmmaking: where do you put the camera? I was especially struck by Greta Gerwig’s comments about camera movement in two of her films:

Well, I kind of had an image of Lady Bird that I wanted it to be almost like stained glass windows in churches, because it is Catholic school and all of that. I was thinking of everything as a presentation within a frame. But then when I got to Little Women, I had the opposite feeling. I felt like I wanted the camera to be alive and curious and a dancer. Like I almost wanted the camera to start young and then get older, like the girls did.

I wanted to camera to start young and then get older, like the girls did — that’s pretty brilliant. The full interview with Gerwig is available here.

So that’s all for now from Every Frame a Painting…hopefully they will be back soon with a new project because I truly love their perspective on how films are made.

• film school
• Greta Gerwig
• Little Women
• movies
• Taylor Ramos
• Tony Zhou
• video

Tintype Portraits of the Cast of Little Women

Photographer Wilson Webb made these great tintype portraits of the cast of Little Women. Invented in 1851, the collodion process would have been in use during the time the movie takes place. You can read about Webb’s process at PetaPixel.

To capture the actual portraits, Webb got his hands on a 130-year-old Dallmeyer lens that he strapped to a modern large format camera, and set up 25,000 Watt-seconds worth of flash to ensure he had enough light. That’s… a lot of light. So much that Webb says his subjects “can feel a wave of heat and they can also smell the ozone that’s created when the picture’s taken.”

But despite all of this light — which allowed him to capture a much faster “shutter speed” than traditional wet plates — he still had the cast pose in a traditional fashion: facing the camera, stoic expression, sitting still for 30 seconds at a time to capture each individual frame.

You can check out the whole series of portraits at My Modern Met.

• Little Women
• movies
• photography
• Wilson Webb

Retitling “Little Women” So Men Will Go See It

The audience for Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is running about 2/3 women and 1/3 men. Bruce Handy has some suggestions for a title change that would entice more men to check the movie out.

“Star Wars, Episode X: The Rise of Amy”
“Four Girls, One Teacup”
“Into the Marchverse”
“The Jo Supremacy”

I saw Little Women on New Year’s Day and loved it — one of my favorite 2019 movies for sure. It’s idiotic that Gerwig didn’t get nominated for a Best Director Oscar.

See also Kaitlyn Greenidge’s opinion piece, The Bearable Whiteness of ‘Little Women’.

• Bruce Handy
• Greta Gerwig
• Kaitlyn Greenidge
• Little Women
• movies
• remix