I was the star of one of the school plays when I was in Year 10. It was ‘Bugsy Malone.’ There is probably footage of it somewhere.
I saw footage of Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley just hanging out together in Memphis when they were young guys getting started at Sun, listening to records together. That was beautiful to me.
Television is such an evolving medium. When you’re doing a TV show, it’s not like you just shoot for six weeks and you’re in an editing room with all of your footage. It’s like a guitar or a car, you have to fine tune things. You stop doing what’s not working, you work on what is working and you add things that do work.
I wasn’t the most talented player as a kid. Whenever I look back at the old footage, I didn’t swing it very well and I didn’t strike it pretty well, but I managed to score pretty well.
My first narrative films developed out of a documentary process – finding someone who was willing to be filmed, watching, listening, taking copious notes and many hours of video footage.
People always accused me of not smiling like my rival Olga Korbut, but that was just my personality. When you’re balancing on a nine-inch beam, you have to concentrate. But if you look back at the footage, I was always smiling and waving at the crowd after my performances.
Music has done a lot to enhance the emotions of sports. It’s played in arenas. Whenever there is footage cut together they’re always using music. And it goes together, you know.
On ‘Senna,’ it got to the point where there was so much footage that our first editor had the wild suggestion that we only use the archive.
I investigated post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve been to a unit where people are suffering from it, and I read a lot of literature. I looked at footage of soldiers in the combat zone. I found ‘Restrepo’ to be unbelievably useful.
The first thing I wanted to do, as a boy, was to be a skier, because I had seen film footage of somebody skiing.
DVD ushered in this era when you had to have additional footage, deleted scenes, things like that. There was no call for that back when we were just doing VHS cassettes and LaserDiscs.
YouTube is found footage. It’s here to stay, and people will always come up with new concepts that will make sense for found footage.
If you look at the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on ‘Titanic,’ you ask yourself, why on earth would they turn to stock footage? The answer is simple, many scenes used for the narrative of the film don’t need to be expensively shot and can be bought from us.
You tell me that ‘Date Night’ was good? I’m not going to see it. I will debate you on it, having no knowledge of the footage in the film. I was next to someone on the plane watching it, and they were dozing off.
As an Englishwoman, you pick up a lot through osmosis. I’ve been watching the Queen all my life. But, yes, I did watch news footage and was able to pick a couple of little tics. For instance, she plays with her hands a lot and has a certain way of holding them on her lap when she’s in public.
My family didn’t film anything. But then you look deeper and realize, maybe there are photographs, there are things. It’s also context: You give something a context, and suddenly it becomes really deep or meaningful footage.
We have over an hour of footage with Ken Marino. Same with Kevin Smith. Because you never know, when you let people who are so talented at improv go, what you’re going to get. You don’t want to strangle them with your own words, because probably what they’re going to say is way better.
Donald Trump’s interest in Russia dates back to Soviet times. In fact, there’s extraordinary footage of him shaking hands with Mikhail Gorbachev. It comes from 1988, the peak of perestroika and Gorbachev’s efforts to charm the American public.
However wack anyone thought ‘Whatzupwitu’ was, there’s not a lot of people that have footage of themselves dancing around in the clouds with Michael Jackson. I do have that forever.
For this game, we shot it just like it as if it was a film so there wasn’t that much different from doing a film other than some technical things for the costume that had to be done so they could transfer the footage later and make it look animated.
It’s our job to get into the hardest-to-see places and bring back the best footage – we have the best footage of North Korea ever shot. If that’s a stunt, then I’ll keep on doing stunts until I die.
David Beckham is always seen as the thickest man on the planet, too daft to complete a jigsaw puzzle. But then you watch old footage of him playing and every time he plays a ball across the field, he’s intuitively working out the trajectory of the ball.
‘Moonlight’ undoes our expectations as viewers, and as human beings, too. As we watch, another movie plays in our minds: real-life footage of the many forms of damage done to black men, which can sometimes lead them to turn that hateful madness on their own kind, passing on the poison that was their inheritance.
I think the best thing about my job is that I have my life documented, which not many people get to have. They have a photo here and there and maybe some video footage from a birthday. My kids will be able to see me growing up.
I’m not exactly watching my back. Most people, there’s a twinkle when they admonish me. And I’ve watched a lot of footage on YouTube of people’s reactions to watching me.
You have to do a show, an interview, you’ve got to go straight back on the road to another location, make a track and edit things like footage etc. It’s non stop. I really respect the hustle and work rate of Chipmunk, as well as N-Dubz and Tinchy Stryder.
To receive footage that has been shot with editing in mind, it is a blessing.
That is one reason so many of the Japanese pictures are not good, they cannot spare all the footage necessary for that bow, which is repeated over and over again.
I sat down with my agent and went through my youth-team video footage. I saw that when I started, I’d get on the ball and within two touches would turn straight away and look to attack my opponent, but when I got into the first team, I would go for the safer option.
I’m the field producer whose job it is to manipulate the contestants to get them to do what we really want them to do to get the footage to make the show.
Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It’s part ballet. It’s part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.
If anyone has seen the horrific and unwatchable footage of the Chinese cat and dog trade – animals skinned alive – then they could not possibly argue in favour of China as a caring nation. There are no animal protection laws in China and this results in the worst animal abuse and cruelty on the planet. It is indefensible.
Footage of people camped out at Best Buy or elsewhere is not remotely a celebration. Rather, it’s a reminder of just how economically distressed a large percentage of our populace is.
Like anything, I think there are some wonderful found footage movies, and there are some less good. Certainly when it’s done well, I really love it. I really love it as a genre.
An effective found footage movie is much harder to make than an effective traditionally shot movie. A crappy one is much easier to make because you take your camera, and you shoot the scene, and you’re done. But to make it effective, they’re actually much trickier.
Occasionally, I hanker for the time when I sold more records, but I don’t sit and drool about it. When I do look at early footage of Talking Heads, I realise I was just a wreck.
I don’t want to be one of these guys who sits in a room watching old footage of himself, reliving old glory. It’s just not me. I want to create new adventures. I’m not trying to live vicariously through my own past.
There is a scenario where AI may keep U.S. soldiers off the battlefield entirely, by using AI as a strategic advantage to prevent conflict or using it to find the critical piece of information within surveillance footage.
It’s a disadvantage when there is not enough footage of an opponent.
I would just take dolls around the house – there’s old VHS footage from my dad, who was an early adapter and had this RCA camera – and it’s me taking a Michael Jackson Barbie doll and putting on a show with that.
Jay-Z called me onstage during my song that I produced for ‘Watch the Throne?’ That was surreal, man. One of those situations I’ll never forget. I’ll be able to show my kids the footage of when Jay-Z brought me onstage.
The amazing thing about Bob Marley is that there is no moving footage of him at all for the first ten or eleven years of his career. From 1962 to 1973, there’s nothing, not a single frame.
Movies, to a large extent, stand or fall on the strength of their scripts. But a documentary is a collection of found objects: fragments you’ve collected, accidents of interview and happenstance, pieces of stock footage that surface in the course of six to nine months of research and production.
When we get to what happens when we die, we don’t have any video footage. So let’s at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are.
My mantra is, ‘Don’t be afraid of color.’ What did it do to you? Do a color testing in alternate kinds of light you desire in the room because the pigment will change. And I refuse to believe that pale pale or white colors in a small room will buy you more square footage. Go with color all the way.
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