The Nashville Film Festival, which closed Saturday, provides a generous portion of screen time each year to films shot in Tennessee, so every April, the state's film industry is on a lot of folks' minds. ABC's Nashville has been a boon for a lot of area film professionals, but there are still major concerns about Tennessee's meager film incentives (see "Show Us the Money," April 17).
Still, there are plenty of people eager to do whatever they can to grow moviemaking here, among them the students in Columbia State Community College's film crew technology program. And the program's recent acquisition of an ARRI Alexa camera demonstrates the school's commitment to fostering Tennessee's film industry by creating a pool of local tech talent.
"The ARRI Alexa camera is one of the latest technologies in digital cinematography," says Read Ridley, the program's director (and brother of Scene editor Jim Ridley). "That's a huge deal. This is what's used to shoot Game of Thrones. It's what was used to shoot The Campaign, Gravity, World War Z, Iron Man 3. We're one of only a couple of schools to have this camera system available for undergraduates to train on."
Digital cinematography really took hold when the Red One camera was introduced in 2007. "Red came on the scene, saying they had a camera that replaced film, and everybody said, 'You're crazy,' " Ridley says.
In 2010, ARRI, the world's largest supplier of film equipment, introduced its digital camera, the Alexa.
"[The Red] is a good camera, but a lot of hardcore cinematographers like the look of the Alexa better," Ridley says. "The nice thing about the ARRI is it gets a really crisp image, but it doesn't get it so sharp that it looks garish. So it has this soft, warm feel to it that film gives you. And the biggest thing with it is it captures so much information that when we bring the footage in after our edit to the color correction system, we have so much control over the image because we gathered so much data with the camera. We can really dial our images in."
Columbia State's Alexa system, which includes two high-end Zeiss Ultra Prime lenses, set the school back about $180,000, a significant investment, but one Ridley is confident will pay off, for both the school and Tennessee's film industry.
"Since we've brought the Alexa into the curriculum," he says, "it's been amazing to see how the skill level on the crew has just skyrocketed. Now they can see such a pristine example of what they're training to do."
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
