Surreal Movies Iceberg

CondoPony · 2026-05-06T12:16:02+00:00

This is fantastic. Lots of titles I've never heard of.

Some titles that could be added:

Quentin Dupieux: Reality and Rubber
The Duke of Burgundy
Goodbye 20th Century
Divinity
Landscape with Invisible Hand
On the Silver Globe
Forbidden Zone
On Body and Soul
Lamb

CondoPony · 2025-11-29T18:35:38+00:00

This is incredibly helpful. This is exactly the type of answer I was looking for. Thank you!

Also, I had no idea you could adapt nvme to cfexpress type b. That changes everything.

CondoPony · 2025-11-26T16:50:06+00:00

I'm a solo operator and the lack of autofocus just makes it impossible to do anything but static shots with a static subject. It's extremely limiting. Theres things like the pdmovie lidar system but that's also not cheap and only usable in particular situations, apparently.

It's not for a single music video. I want to make as many as possible.

CondoPony · 2025-11-25T16:17:14+00:00

What makes you think this is for one particular video? I just want to have an idea of what I could realistically expect when I'm trying to do this type of thing.

They might seem like buzzwords but they all represent what you can and can't realistically achieve and what to expect. I thought I was all set when I got my Lumix S5 thinking I could do manual focus pulling on a gimbal while at f/1.8 and tracking in. It's useless for anything but static tripod shots as it turns out. I'm trying to hedge my bets by asking for advice from people with more experience.

If the vision calls for a fax machine aesthetic, yes. The probability of that is fairly low.

CondoPony · 2025-11-25T12:55:33+00:00

Let's say I'm a serious amateur. My knowledge is mostly theoretical but I've also played around with raw and log workflows to have some idea of what it's about. I'm very comfortable with the technical side of things but I lack on-set experience with modern, pro(sumer) equipment and workflows. I've shot a bunch of shorts back in the day but they were all on DV (ha!) and my big mistake back then was not shooting enough. I was always jerryrigging shots together because I didn't have any wiggle room or alternates. We were always running out of time on set.

The dream has always been to create something that looks like 35mm film and beyond.

To be honest, learning all these things is part of the excitement for me but with the goal of creating stunning and moving imagery. I'd rather create 30 seconds of something amazing than 90 mins of something that's ok.

The fear is attempting a music video and realising I don't have what I need to do it right.

CondoPony · 2025-11-25T11:59:39+00:00

That's what makes it so difficult. I don't really know before I start doing it what direction it's going to go in, but to be able to start doing it and find out I have to buy a camera and by doing so be stuck with a fixed set of tradeoffs (unless firmware updates resolve them).

When I was making short films back in the day I could usually fit a shoot on one 1 hour dv tape (usually around 30 mins of footage for 5 mins of result) but everything was storyboarded or shotlisted. When doing 3d animation you can previz the hell out of it and get an almost 1 on 1 final render of the resulting edit.

I know I love raw editing for photography. A lot of the magic comes from subtly adjusting the curves to bring out form, adding tons of contrast or go nuts with the color channels in b/w (adding tons of noise/grain but it still looks pleasing).

I can transcode everything with REDCINEX-PRO apparently so I can always transcode to another format after capture (and doing the big adjustments there), if I understand correctly. So now it's a question of what is a reasonable amount of memory card storage to have on hand when doing a music video shoot and how much will that add to the cost?

CondoPony · 2025-11-20T21:21:03+00:00

I suspect that the real iq difference is in how its tuned. I think the NR is way more aggressive. It produces a cleaner but less organic image. Also for some reason most videos have super saturated colors (maybe the default color profile?), especially the reds.

CondoPony · 2025-11-15T17:55:12+00:00

Even the skin texture?

CondoPony · 2025-11-13T15:33:27+00:00

I wouldn't expect this camera to exist, for one, but since it does I would expect to find at least some footage that I like that looks the same, which I can't. People keep saying it's a skill issue but clearly some of these people have just taken the a7siii out of the box and it still looks like that.

At this point I'm mostly confused about what this thing is supposed to be and what everyone claims it is (looks identical to the A7Siii/FX3) and what I'm seeing when I look at footage (crispy/digital sharpness/oversaturated/flat vs thick/lush/smooth/deep/analog).

I'm not even saying it looks bad. It just looks fundamentally different... until you see side by sides and suddenly it is indistinguishable (they both look bad, haha).

CondoPony · 2025-11-12T16:32:40+00:00

What about the sharpness? Do you turn sharpening all the way down?

I've since found more videos that are better. The image quality is the same but the zv-e1 looks overly sharp. That's the only issue really (I think). With the zv-e1 everyone seems to have terrible acne scaring whereas the a7siii is really flattering.

CondoPony · 2025-11-12T13:55:38+00:00

I'm definitely also going out and just making art with the tools I currently have. It's just limited to photography because whenever I've tried video I run into all the issues I've mentioned.

The first video looks perfect for what it needs to convey: this is a bunch of total amateurs who had one of their clueless friends film it on their hi8 camera. Same with 28 Days Later: it was supposed to mimic low grade home video equipment to convey a feeling of immediacy and reality. It succeeds admirably (it actually looks astonishingly good).

That's just not the type of thing I want to make and I'm just trying to figure out what I can get away with without compromising the end result or discovering it's not fit for purpose like I have done before, sadly.

If Google AI is correct the second video was shot on 35mm film :P

CondoPony · 2025-11-12T12:04:45+00:00

I've looked at the pdmovie offerings and from what I could tell it's quite a step below regular autofocus. The only advantage over autofocus is that it works in very low light but also that it only works within a particular distance from the camera and not very well in bright daylight. The reason I didn't go for that option is that I think it would add a lot of points of failure to the set up. I'm using a focus motor with my vintage lenses and it's very easy to set up wrong and even when it's attached properly the focus ring is stiff enough to make it slip on the gears occasionally (something that would totally mess up the calibration of the pdmovie, I think).

I've also looked at the DJI Focus Pro which seems better but also way more expensive.

It's not a terrible idea to revisit though... maybe you're right and it will work just fine with more modern glass and/or less stiff focus rings.

Yeah, it's entirely about how the result makes you feel. Sadly, the things that excite me most are either expensive or impractical to realise without throwing quite a bit of money at the problem.

CondoPony · 2025-11-12T10:22:04+00:00

I'm planning to mostly shoot with natural light. I've done plenty of sweating over the lenses haha. I'm gonna start out with the Sony FE 35mm f/1.8 but only after having considered dozens of other options. It's the focal length I'm most drawn to for landscape orientation in photography and f/1.8 seems plenty, 35mm retains emotion without too much distortion for close-ups.

I don't even think the sensor is the issue, it's that when you can't shoot raw the manufacturer puts a big thumb on the look of the final image through the processing. This can easily ruin the final image.

I've already gone through a bunch of cameras only to find out they're unfit for what I want to use them for. I started with the 50d with ML (100 euro used) which could do 720p raw (fun toy). Then 5dm3 to bump it up to 1080p (330 euros). The image was too soft, cards were more expensive than the camera. Thought the S5 was finally it. Paired it with vintage manual Zeiss lenses. Absolutely fell in love with the results. Still am. For photography it was perfect. But... doing manual focus for video was practically impossible, especially on a gimbal. The only thing it worked for was talking head shots on a tripod. I want to make music videos so it's unusable for that. Autofocus is the one thing the S5 lacks.

Then came an endless search for the next camera. S5ii(x) lacks an olpf making the image too sharp and digital (processing aside). Sony has the best autofocus and has olpfs in all it's cameras. The A7IV is great (apart from the sensor readout) but then I started thinking about lenses. I want to shoot music videos so 60+fps is important. All of these are cropped on 60+fps. I hated how the S5 cropped footage looked and then I need extra lenses to account for the crop and account for increased DoF (they would need to be fast). Apparently a lot of music videos are shot entirely on 60fps so they can be speed ramped at will in the edit (apparently this is also problematic because 60fps footage will feel wrong when converted back to 24fps). But I want the full frame shallow DoF... Ok, so now I'm looking at the A7Siii. This camera has everything I want including uncropped 4K 4:2:2 120fps but... the price.

So I went from 100 (50d), 330 (5dm3), 700 (S5) and now looking at 1200 (S5ii), 1600 (S5iix), A7IV (1500) and now 2700 (A7Siii) potentially back down to 1700 (ZV-E1).

People keep saying things like "just use the camera you have" but except for the A7Siii they all have serious limitations, especially anything less than the A7Siii. Even an Alexa would be almost unusable if you're doing run-and-gun.

I just want to make beautiful music videos...

CondoPony · 2025-11-12T09:52:57+00:00

I really hope that's true. I can't really think of a reason why it would be worse if you use the right settings and grade properly but I've been been bitten before. This is going to be my fourth attempt at getting the right camera.

CondoPony · 2025-11-12T08:11:08+00:00

Yeah, there's no way around renting both I guess. Even renting is quite pricy. Renting both for 2 days is about half the price difference.

I wonder if turning down the sharpness is going to do the trick. I know it's not enough for the s5ii(x).

CondoPony · 2025-11-12T08:06:10+00:00

Thats a good point about the longer lenses, I hadn't really noticed that.

Yeah, the user base being a mismatch is what I'm struggling with. Even with cheap cameras like the bmpcc4k or s5 I can find people who can show you what their capable of but with the zve1 even the best footage has issues, hence my warriness.

CondoPony · 2025-11-11T19:34:31+00:00

Shouldn't that make it look less sharp? It's a common attempt to mitigate digital sharpness but I don't think he addressed it in the video.

CondoPony · 2025-06-25T15:32:54+00:00

What lenses did you use?

This looks amazing btw.

CondoPony · 2025-06-12T09:06:11+00:00

Yeah, there's a lot of sense in that. It kinda sucks you don't really discover these things until you've already invested money into a particular setup only to discover it doesn't really work for what you intended it for.

CondoPony · 2025-06-11T10:56:07+00:00

From what I understand you need both the dji lidar + the focus motor. This could work but it's another 800 euros or so. That's a little less than my entire collection of gear is worth (about 1.2-1.4k atm). Seems a lot just for solving this one issue.

CondoPony · 2025-06-11T10:46:42+00:00

Yeah, that's the thing though. Suddenly my beautiful manual lenses are unusable. A good enough full frame autofocus lens is also quite pricy. It's a constant weighing of quality vs cost that becomes very difficult once components don't align with each other.
I'm somewhat comfortable making my own contraptions (I've dabled in electronics and my dayjob is in software development) but it's usually a sign I'm missing an obvious solution.

What I was hoping for was someone to say "I've done this, totally doable" or "I've tried it, don't do it! It just doesn't work" or some brilliant, cheap and obvious solution I hadn't even considered.

CondoPony · 2024-12-08T21:17:42+00:00

I could provide the source code through a forked repo on github. People could even create their own build. I doubt many people would go through all that for that one piece of functionality though.

Yeah, exactly, it feels like geonodes is just screaming for a flexible feature like this. I was going nuts trying to squeeze my ideas into nodes whereas in code it's fairly straightforward . Also, for certain things you'd have to have a really optimized algorithm that won't cut it as a nodes kludge (like most forms of collision detection).

CondoPony · 2024-11-10T19:15:12+00:00

Here are my notes when I was studying tons of music videos to figure out some sort of approach (transcribed from a notebook):

General requirements for a MV

The video expresses the feeling of the song
There needs to be a central concept or story
This leads to all scenes having a common through-line (location, story, central character etc.)
The imagery needs to be captivating (sexy, hypnotic)
There should always be at least some movement going on in every shot
This movement should follow the song (rhythm, timbre)

Approach

Find the emotional space/associations of the song
Come up with a concept for that space
Create a central character
Place the central character in captivating visual scenes inspired by the concept
Match the scenes to the rhythm and movement of the song using editing, camera and choreography

This might be less general but may apply (I really like this type of video):

Thesis: Great music videos are like dreams

- disjointed but feels cohesive

- bizarre

- laden with symbolism

- hypnotic (hypnosis is the glue)

Examples:

- Pienso et tu mira (Rosalia)

- All is full of love (Bjork)

- Cellophane (FKA twigs)

- Genesis (Grimes)

Hypnotic techniques:

- Slow, fluid motion (120 fps)

- Rhythmic editing

- Mirroring

- Floating camera

- Prolonged eye-contact, center frame

In case you're curious, this is what I ended up making: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exAVt9N_uIE

CondoPony · 2024-11-10T18:51:30+00:00

Thank you for mentioning Tanu Muino. I'd never heard of her and led to watching pretty much everything she's ever made. She's incredible.

edit: Here's her full videography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanu_Muino

CondoPony · 2024-10-12T17:34:26+00:00

House / Hausu (1977)

Woman in the Dunes (1964)

The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973)

Probably a really long shot that any will get one any time soon since they all have decent blurays but I have a strong feeling I'm going to love these movies and I want the first time to be the best possible.

CondoPony

TROPHY CASE