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Kristopher,
Here is a little info I know of.
First, filmakers know the importance of stills.
There are two types of stills commonly shot on movie sets, the action and behind
the scenes of the crew.
It is not unheard of to charge a minimum of $700,
remember these stills are used for documentation AND promotion, lots of
promotion.
Here are a couple of websites of
experienced on set movie photographers;
Here is a quote from Connie Warrack's website for
the movie Leprechaun:
>>>>> It's customary in the movie industry to have a still photographer on the set to take pictures as the production progresses. These pictures serve as a record of what happened on the movie, and are also a source of publicity photos that can be used later on to promote the film. Most production stills fall into one of two categories: photos that recreate the action that appears onscreen, and photos that show the behind the scenes activity on the film. Most of the pictures presented here fall into the second category. The ones that fall into the first category are mostly little bits of action that never made it into the finished movie. Naturally, the number of pictures taken greatly exceeds the number that will end up being used for promotional activities. After a while there's no longer much point in holding onto all this material, so it's customary to destroy the production stills and most of the other production records after five or six years. Trimark's copies of these stills are long gone. Fortunately, official Lep 1 photographer Karen Ogle made a duplicate set for her own use, and I was able to obtain a large number of these stills for my personal Lep collection. Some of them are quite recognizable because they were used in the movie's publicity campaign, and copies of some of the others were given to cast and crew members for resumé purposes. But for most of these pictures, the only copy still in existence is now in my hands. The pictures presented here are just part of the collection, and were chosen to illustrate the moviemaking process. The on-set photographer has to work under very adverse conditions. It's frequently a low-light situation and flash photography isn't allowed, so specialized RGB film is used. This film is the same as motion picture stock and has a lot more latitude than ordinary film. The movie crew's lighting setup disrupts the lighting conditions in a major way, adding a pronounced glare in some areas and accentuating the shadows in others. Considering all these problems, the quality of these pictures is really impressive. Originally, the production stills were to be shot as black-and-white photographs, but early in the process they decided to switch to color slides instead. I've only got one of the black and white photos, and it's shown on this page; the main behind the scenes gallery consists almost entirely of scans of the color slides, although I occasionally introduced other material when the situation called for it. <<<<<<<<<< |
