Phil Holland

𝗛𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗵𝘂𝘀 𝗔𝗻𝗻𝘂𝘂𝘀. Hilariously unfortunate name for the common sunflower, but nonetheless, an impressive one. About my height, photographed near a cafe I frequent last month while it stared straight into the sun with the awareness of it's life-giving rays. I gave the fireball a look as well to see what the fuss was about. Pretty cool, hot, bright, yet gassy. Such is life. Mind your head. Happy Monday.

☀️🌳🌬️

𝗩𝗶𝘀𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗘𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘁𝘆. We end the week on a very, very high note. I am pleased to announce I have been accepted as a member to VES. Likely a bit overdue, but one of the few societies out there that I'm rather suited for. For those not following me for a while, my career in feature films more or less began in VFX working at Rhythm and Hues Studios then doing freelance for many others while working there. ILM, Digital Domain, DNeg, Weta, and many others along the way. To say I wore many hats would be an understatement. Scan, Record, OG Colorist, Concept Art, Modeling, Animation, Lighting, Texture Painting + Pipeline, Matte Painting, HDRI/IBL, hardware development of various cameras and devices, lots of software coding; leading to plate, reference, and visual effects photography and cinematography with a few dashes of VFX Supervision. Within this time and beyond even more opportunities blossomed. This all transpired during the maturing days of film and beginning era of digital, which I certainly benefited from. I had unbelievable access to tools of the trade, the people who created them, and leading to me doing the same. My professioanl career began in the mid/late 1990s and the first 12 years of my career are something I will cherish forever. It was a playground for somebody passionate about the art of visual storytelling and every aspect that brings it to life. My studio, the major motion picture studios, Directors, and Producers put a great deal of trust in me and in return I worked hard, with a sense of urgency, and in an extremely detail oriented way to provide efficient and creative results that propelled me into the career I have as a full-time filmmaker today. Most know me know as a Cinematographer or Director, but I am still very much still doing much of what I have been doing along the way. Notably color, story, development, and making compelling motion pictures for audiences to enjoy. Looking forward to contributing in the ways I can while making and creating. #VFX #cinematography #filmmaking

@NZXT Well I gotta say you guys did a great job with the Player 3 Prime builds. Case is beautiful.

Who wants this message from us?

@JoshStrifeHayes Congrats!

Thank you for watching my silly videos.

@lexfridman If you're still in China and have the ability to get to Zhangjiajie, I strongly recommend seeing it in person. Unique landscape and nothing like it on Earth. Filled out the form. Get to Iceland if you can as well. Happy travels!

I'm traveling the world for a bit, starting with China but then hopping around the globe, anywhere. Open to any adventure. No plans, only a backpack. Hoping to meet & get to know humans from all walks of life. The pic is from a long hike on the Great Wall. For me, as a fan of history, this was an epic experience. In China, first I'm visiting a few big cities & talking to engineers at the heart of China's AI revolution. After that, if feeling crazy enough, I'm hitchhiking (first time) across rural China for a few weeks. Hitchhiking because I think it's the best way to meet rural folks who I would otherwise never get the chance to meet. I hope to do the same in US and other places. I have a request, if you have a travel recommendation, fill out the form(s) below if you feel like it. Or share with folks who might have advice about such travel. Form 1 - travel recommendation: If you can, recommend to me an interesting place I should visit anywhere in the world. For this, fill out form 1. Not touristy stuff, but something off the beaten path, that tourists may not know about, but is legendary. It could be as remote as meeting a herder in the mountains who is a local legend. Asia, Middle East, Europe, India, South/North America, Africa, Australia, anywhere. In China, I'm hoping to visit maybe Heibei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Sichuan, Yunnan, etc, so recommendations for spots to visit are helpful. Form 2 - coffee: If you want to grab a coffee with me anywhere in the world, fill out form 2 (please don't use form 1 for that). Anyway, I hectically tossed stuff in backpack. Realizing I don't have a clear plan of any kind, which is probably the only way to do it. LFG. Love you all ❤️

𝗡𝗶𝗦𝗶 𝟱𝟬𝗺𝗺 𝗧𝟭 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗲. Spending a bit of quality time to get more intimate with NiSi's upcoming entry into ultra high speed cinema glass. T1 aperture on RED 8K VV is indeed bokeh rich, beautiful, and the iris is very pretty on this gem. LPL only, but that may or may not impact anybody in how they work. 95mm front and small body does keep it smaller than expected for such a fast lens however. Coatings here are very thoughtful and mitigate some of the expected flare and glare you may come across filming in situations actually kit for T1 as well. I've been using very fast glass for a long while, and that sets these apart for sure. But really, I'm digging what I see stopped down at say T2.8 a lot too. They ha e two additional focal lengths in the works, but doing my best to twist their arm to make that 4 additional focal lengths. Certainly doable, but also certainly not easy. Really impressive low chromatic aberrations wide open too. Wild stuff. #lens #cinematography

𝗖𝗮𝗻𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗦𝗼𝗻𝘆 𝗠𝗶𝗿𝗿𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗖𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗮 𝗗𝗮𝘆! For those of you with a fondness for letters, numbers, and small cameras; May 13th is your day! Two compact cameras announced today from two large companies. First up, the Canon R6 V. Hybrid compact, 7K-ish 12-bit RAW motion w/ 3:2 Open Gate and 14-bit RAW stills. Second up, the Sony a7R VI. An 8K UHD 10-bit motion w/ Dual Gain, nearly 10K still resolution (66.45 megapixels). Different strokes from both companies. Sony's new camera features a new stacked CMOS sensor and the camera is a bit more stills-centric. Interesting comparing all of this to current offerings to see where the gains occur, if they occur. I've added preliminary format information for each to PHFX | tools, will add more at launch in case of any sneaky firmware updates.

𝗢𝘂𝘁𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲. A sliver of a slot canyon within the Grand Canyon for IMAX's Asteroid Hunters.

🚁  🎥

𝗛𝗮𝗽𝗽𝘆 𝗠𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿'𝘀 𝗗𝗮𝘆! Yes, indeed more overalls. Much love to the mothers and mother figures today. Thanks for making womb for us all. Having lunch with mine shortly to exact revenge for whatever is happening here ❤️.

@stephengraves A reminder that the world of the matrix maintains a somewhat greenish color tint to separate it from the real world. That print was likely scanned and white balanced from what I can tell and isn't correct. 2004 Blu-Ray wasn't far off from original release.

1999 35mm print is clearly the best. I wish they'd release a home video version with that colour grading.

@vashikoo I need mics. Lots of mics!

@phfx Boom mic at 1 minute 30 seconds! x.com/KD6_3_9/status…

The original trailer for THE MATRIX (1999) and the theatrical film prints were much less green than the DVDs and the Blu-rays. Cinematographer Bill Pope: "The original timing was much more subtle." Here's a 35mm film scan of the first trailer⬇️

𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆. Been posting more recently and with this level of frequency I like to finish weeks off with thoughtfulness or humor. Much is transpiring in the world as well as within our own lives. So here is a bit of both categories. If you can, open a dialogue with your younger self. It's well worth doing. To recall where you were and where you are and where both of yous would think about all of that. And don't judge them on their fashion sense. Such freedom of thought is hard to maintain. Overalls are official ocean attire, and you'll have a hard time convincing me otherwise. Also on my mind, I was early to the social media game and I was even blogging before either of those terms existed. Had a snazzy instagram-esque site I coded when I was a little monster with "news updates". Balancing my desires to share thoughts, professional happenings, and general creativity is a tricky thing as "this thing" in itself isn't exactly one thing to me. There certainly is an occasional desire to make this all singular in focus, but that wouldn't be very interesting at all. Have a good weekend. Enjoy some cheese, fluids, sunlight. You choose.

𝗭𝗵𝗼𝗻𝗴𝘆𝗶 𝗭𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗧𝟭 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀! This is an evolution of what Zhongyi has been working on since last decade, now in the form of a trio of focal lengths with improved mechanics and optics, which I can certain verify. Designed to cover the RED 46.31mm VV format with actually slightly more coverage, we now have 35, 50, 75mm primes with an extremely fast T1.0 aperture. They are PL mount, available in EF too, LPL probably possible if needed. They feature 114mm fronts, but with a larger 132mm lens body diameter. Very interesting flare and character with these. Pretty much zero breathing when pulling focus. About 3000 grams a lens, manageable. Close focus is decent for such fast glass too, between 1.8' - 2'4" across the three. 16 bladed iris and stopped down at say T2.8, rather pretty IMO. Their original 50mm T1.0 lens, which I still own, was used to pull off a nearly impossible shot a while ago and I'm pleased to see an entire focal range to allow for more field of view and composition opportunities. I suspect high speed, and high quality optics will be a emerging trend for a bit. Not long ago, glass like this was a fever dream of shallow depth of field, bokeh beach balls, and dancing candle light. #lens #cinematography

@ID_AA_Carmack I suspect to "go further" in semiconductor fab, we'll need to divert to a slightly different strategy. We aren't done yet, new materials showing promise, but the real leap is when we move away from wafers, lithography, etc. Physical limitations of the medium are the dead end.

Space launch was a clear case where there was a large difference in efficiency between what was possible and what was done in practice before SpaceX. A large part of that was due to everything being locked in to what (just barely) already worked, with huge risk aversion. WIth national prestige or a half billion dollar geosync satellite on the line, speculative engineering ideas that might result in a public debacle were not welcome. When failure is not an option, success can stay very expensive. You need to experiment to improve, and that fundamentally means being comfortable with failure. If you know it is going to work, it isn’t an experiment. I have long believed that nuclear power today is in precisely the same state as space launch two decades ago, but the even more pressing question now is if semiconductor fabrication might also be. On the one hand, Moore’s Law has been a sequence of heroic miracles of technology at the wafer fabrication level, grinding out hundreds of compounding small improvements. On the other hand, fabs are “too big to fail”, and there are elements of extreme conservatism at play. Intel’s “Copy exactly!” fab development exemplifies that mindset – instead of every new building being an opportunity to explore and optimize processes, it was deemed more valuable to just replicate. While each individual machine may be straining against physical limits of technology, it is possible that the systems orchestrating them all together could be far from optimal. The explore / exploit axis is fundamental to all decision making, but human risk avoidance probably biases away from optimal exploration.

@chrisramsay52 Lots of people will be distracted by the flare and reflection, artifacts derived from image acquistion, but the key thing to look at with this clip is the trails and actual movement of the object.

Excuse me??

𝗗𝗭𝗢 𝗔𝗿𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗮 𝟭.𝟱𝗫 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗽𝗵𝗶𝗰 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀. For those looking for a little squeeze in their life (and in frame), my production set of the new Arcanas arrived. Very interesting which lens flare and coating they decided on. Bold choices all around with this series including distortion. Coke Zero can for scale, they be small y'all. Currently filming flat on my latest film, but I'll take these out for a spin for fun. For my RED V-Raptor 8K VV brethren, I'm using a custom squeeze and crop from the full 8K format of the sensor, which will allow for a lot of control after the fact, the main reason is to hit 2.39:1 exactly with some reframing or extraction possibilities. #lems #anamorphic #cinematography

@Peter_J_Beck That's intense and beautiful. When's the next burn?

for your enjoyment