I thought you might be interested to know about a film I directed called "Silicon Valley Timelapse" It is the first full length feature film to be shot mostly in 3 frame tonemapped HDR. It's similar to Chronos or Koyaanisquatsi.
I used Photomatix in producing about 1 in every 3 scenes in the film, though some I processed through photoshop hdr batching and others.
I Shot HDR 40 hours a week for 8 months so if anyone has questions about assembling larger animated HDR projects feel free to ask.
This is the first time that I've seen HDR implemented like this in video. It's quite a neat effect. The HDR effect lends itself much better to video than one would at first think.
Looks interesting. I have followed HDR stuff for long time in 3d apps but I'm very new to HDR in photography and I never thought about HDR for film before. Strange not been done sooner since a lot of recent PC games use HDR as does rendering/raytracing applications. In rendering it's been around for long time, it has the same use as in photography to display higher ranges and use in making light maps to use in normal renders, and become even more popular since ILM released OpenEXR.
I like the painted look to it, unusual and surreal feel to it. Most tracers and game applications use HDR go for a more realistic style so it's interesting to see actual video go the other way and become more "unreal". Game HDR is also usually closely tied to real style effects like cube mapped reflections (realtime actual environment reflections) and unrealistic realworld camera effects like decreasing depth of field, bloom lighting (including making fringing that would make a photographer cringe), producing airy disk diffration effects etc. so the resultant image looks less perfect, the pursuit of perfecting imperfection if you will.
The final result is most the realtime 3d generated stuff looks more like this film because it's made in realtime high realism is compromised for performance, prerendered stuff is more real looking (some stuff you can't tell) as doesn't compromise processing for speed.
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