About
Welcome to Metro Film, New Zealand’s only family owned camera rental company.
We provide camera and equipments to TV commercials, TV dramas, music clips and short films for NZ and overseas clients. Our camera inventory consists of HD camera – Arriflex Alexa, RED MX, Canon 7D and Film cameras – Arriflex 435, Arriflex 235, BL and 16SR III, high speed SRII model cameras augmented with the finest Cooke S4, Angenieux Optimo, and Zeiss lenses, backed up with state of the art accessories.
We don’t cut corners with our equipment. All our cameras and lenses receive the same top class maintenance from our overseas trained technicians that you would find only in the major filming centres of the world.
We don’t think we know it all. If we can learn from you, our business benefits; if we can show you something to make your job easier, we all benefit.
Please call us on 09 360 1428 for a competitive package price on your next job
Profile
Metro Film, established by Andy & Marjorie Roelants in 1987, supplies camera, lighting and studio facilities to the New Zealand and overseas film industry.
Andy & Marjorie Roelants invested in state of the art Arriflex Camera equipment and studio premises, based on 44 Pollen St, Ponsonby, Auckland, NZ. Over the years they have consistently built up Metro Film camera inventory to the present comprehensive catalogue and have the capacity to service TV commercials, TV series, Music clips and small features.
Andy Roelants is a perfectionist with a technical background. He has been supplying and servicing camera equipment since 1966. He set up an impressive record in TV & Film as an award winning cameraman for TVNZ (1970-1982), producer of TV commercials & Short films (Matinee Films 1983-1988). Andy has worked and produced with great success Australian, American, European and Japanese productions, whilst building an enviable reputation for energy, commitment and professionalism in New Zealand.
Andy Roelants is one of the original founding film makers in the New Zealand film industry. He heads an expert term of designers and craft people with the highest standard of excellence, he also personally trained more than 20 young cameramen to professional status over the past 10 years, whilst establishing Metro Film as a family based 100% NZ owned company.
The Roelants have formed another company, Amigos Film Co which specialises in providing mobile lighting units for the production of commercials and feature films. This has occasioned the purchase and customised fit out of a lighting truck complete with all lighting equipment, and one mobile generator truck unit to service them in out door locations.
The painstaking in house maintenance department headed by Nigel Le Breton, who has been especially trained by Arriflex Munich in the service of Arriflex cameras and associated equipment, has greatly improved the speed of service to our customers.
Metro Film is dedicated to supply the best technical facilities to our industry and providing top service for many years to come.
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Polished Rocks and Silver Ribbon
One thousand years ago Viking navigators held up polished translucent emeralds (Sun stones) that allowed the polarised light that passed through them to determine the position of the Sun in the sky when the Sun was obscured by cloud. Three thousand years ago artisans were manufacturing toroidally ground (varying curvature) plano convex lenses of rock crystal as eye-pieces to correct astigmatism [ Robert Temple-The Crystal Sun].
It therefore seems amazing to me in this high tech age that a new camera such as the Sony HD 24P cannot see polarised light (see April issue of In Camera magazine for comprehensive comparison) Amazing also that the hype surrounding this camera might lead someone to believe that this new camera is capable of achieving results on a par with film when clearly 16mm film beats it hands down.
The optical principles that applied to the ancient artisan are the same today as they were then, the physics of reflection and refraction. In Film camera’s we still essentially use polished rocks and silver ribbon in a light tight chamber (or camera in Latin) to see and record images optically.
Obviously over the last 100 years since cinema began there have been huge strides taken in the development of cameras ,lenses, film and filming technique. I think this is where Sony have missed out because they weren’t involved in the process. Arriflex by comparison have been involved virtually since its [cinemas] inception and have been through the evolutionary process and as a consequence produce a comprehensive range of products that cover every aspect of film production. Also the standard of engineering is at that razor edge that we have come to expect from the Germans whereas the 24P camera is devoid of a simple thing like a 3/8″ mounting screw in the body to attach it to something else.
The Arriflex 435 camera, by far the worlds finest MOS film camera, has 150,000 filming speeds ( 1 to 150 frames per second subdividable to three decimal points in forward and reverse) whereas the HD 24P has three speeds, just like my old Ford Prefect.
Film cameras have no electronic interface between what the lens captures and how it is recorded and optically viewed which is a very important issue. The most important part of the camera to the Director of Photography is the quality of the viewfinder because his work is visual. Unbelievably the HD 24P has an electronic viewfinder which is black and white and of dubious quality!(I’m being kind) There is no comparison to that of say the “Evolution” viewfinding system on our Arriflex BL 4 camera here at Metro Film, which really is something special in terms of cinematography.
Another quality film has all over Video is films ability to reach 2.5 dimensions. A picture on a piece of paper is 2 dimensional, it has length and breadth but no depth. Computer buffs talk of 3D graphics but it is really 2D using perspective or a vanishing point to create the illusion of depth. Film on the other hand is not 2D or 3D, it’s somewhere in between which I call 2.5D for lack of a better term. It has that subtle ability to draw you partially into the image or draw you into what you perceive that image to be and thus creates the illusion of at least partial 3 dimensionality.
I think Sony should go back to the drawing board and redesign it from the ground up. Give it an optical viewfinder, even if that means including a spinning mirror-shutter, give it a greater selection of filming speeds so it can over-crank and under-crank and do time lapse. Do the things to it that will make it the hardworking tool expected in today’s market because you can guarantee Arriflex will be working on one right now.
So from someone at the bottom of the ruck a plea to the all the fast running backs out there! lets not drop the ball just as we are scoring the try.
Nigel Le Breton
Service Manager
Metro Film
New Zealand
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Polished Rocks and Silver Ribbon II
The Death of Video as an Artistic Medium
Albert Einstein paved the road towards video with his Nobel prize winning paper on Photo-electrics in the early 1900′s. He discovered that light is not just a wave of energy, it has substance to it (photons), particles which when they strike certain substances that substance will give off a voltage. This is the basis of video, light meters and solar panels.
Digital video is a misnomer. Like film, the one volt video signal can be digitally enhanced, but it can never be originated digitally. Being digital is about zero’s and ones and zero’s and ones is an abstraction, it is man made and not of nature. After all what material is it that gives off zero’s and ones when light falls on it?
What film has that video does not is depth, what I call the 2.5 dimension of film or 2.5D for want of a better term. Film has three or four colour layers to the emulsion that are applied to the film base which carries those layers through the camera or the projector and this is where the extra 0.5 D resides.
Every cine camera engineer knows to set the focus of the camera into the film, into those three or four layers of emulsion. We have been doing it for decades. The reason for this is simple, if you set the focus of the camera onto the front surface of the film half of the focus (the circle of confusion) is wasted, lost , because half of what is tolerably sharp is in the film and the other half is in fresh air doing nothing. The circle of confusion is the tolerance of focus, what is tolerably sharp to the eye. In engineering everything has a tolerance because nothing can be made to an absolute dimension or size because there are no absolutes!
To the cine engineer there is no confusion, we punch the focus into the emulsion of the film along with what is acceptably sharp or tolerably sharp on either side of the “sweet spot” and this is what gives film its unique depth, the 2.5 dimension of film.
Video by comparison is two dimensional, it has no depth, only length times breadth and no ability to absorb the circle of confusion because the C.C.D. is a flat non-porous charged couple device. When you set the focus in a video camera you are setting the focus to a point on the surface of the
C.C.D. And a point has no depth, no third dimension characteristics, it has no tooth or bite… it just is.
What also distinguishes film from video and hence gives film it’s 2.5 D potential is that it is chaotic by nature and in science we know that chaos rules and equilibrium is temporary. The grains of silver that make up film are not layed down in grid fashion or in honeycomb fashion, they are random and chaotic. When filming with a cine camera the film is transported through the gate very fast so the gate has an allowance to it (0.01 to 0.02mm) so that friction is reduced to avoid scratching or jamming up. The same is true of the gate in the projector, the film can and will float minutely forward and back in the gate and once again it is random and to a degree chaotic. Watching this occur 48 times a second also enhances our perception of depth at the cinema.
What we should be looking at now after decades of neglect is not a new medium (video) but a new screen for the cinema. It should be porous in nature and have some depth to it to give it the ability to soak up the image being projected on it, soak up the chaos and randomness and reflect that image back to viewer in a more three dimensional nature. But what do I know, I’m just the camera mechanic.
Nigel Le Breton
Metro Film
22nd July 2003
