Sunday, November 16, 2008

My First Shoot with the Sony F35

In which a series of tests becomes the fastest spec spot shoot in history

About a week and a half ago I received an email from Leigh Blicher, partner at Videofax in San Francisco. “Just wanted to let you know our F35 has arrived.” My response read something like this: “Ooo! Oh! Oh oh oh! Ooooo oh oh OH! Oh! OHHHHH! Can I come over and PLAY?”

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Friday, November 14, 2008

The RED Outdoors

This spot would have been hell if I hadn’t used the RED

This spot was part of a web campaign for California’s No on Prop 8 campaign. In my previous article I wrote about another No on Prop 8 that we shot in four hours on a Sunday afternoon. This is what we shot in the morning. It’s all one take, which is pretty rare for a spot.

The contrast was fairly extreme. I’d say the actors were a stop underexposed at EI 160 (which is how I rate the RED) and the background was four or five stops hot. A polarizer took care of a lot of the heat coming from the swaths of sunlight raking through the background, and as long as I only clipped one channel (typically green) I found that I didn’t lose much detail.

When we scouted this location my big concern was light. We had no lighting instruments that were big enough to back way off and light an 80’ walk. I’m not sure we even had power for a 1200 PAR in this beautiful Oakland park. The director, Tom Donald, wanted the women to walk around a bend in the path, and when I stood on that spot I couldn’t see any source of light other than sunlight hitting green leaves. Green sucks up a lot of light, and leaves are green. Not a good combination for flesh tone against a sunlit background.

I walked a bit further along the trail and, lo, the branches parted before me and I saw a big patch of blue sky. Sky is a light source, and it’s far enough away that its exposure isn’t going to change over an 80’ walk… hmmm.

I talked Tom into letting me shoot this with the patch of blue sky over the camera position and, once I told him my reason, he readily agreed. I was a little worried about the color of the light (skylight being blue and all) but I figured I’d “fix it in post.”

On the day of the shoot the only tweaking I did was to have two grips walk along the side of the hill with an 8x8 silk, following the actors. Some of the sunlight they walked through was too intense, and the moving 8x8 smoothed all of that out nicely.

We shot this on an 85mm lens at about T4. I tried white balancing at one point and the camera maxed out at 10,000k--so I put it quickly back into 5600k preset.

When I did the rough cut for this project I simply picked the take Tom wanted and ran it through RedCine, white balancing using the color picker on the white timecode slate. Then I exported the take into ProRes, brought it into Final Cut and did the rest of the color correcting in Magic Bullet Looks.

The flesh tones look very good to me. There are some blue reflections here and there but that feels natural. Whenever I’ve shot under extreme color conditions and tried to bring it back to normal, it’s not unusual to be able to correct the skin tones while the reflections in the skin skew toward the color of the source. Maybe that’s because the sky itself is bluer than the light it emits by the time the light reaches the actors.

One other interesting thing: as the background highlights went out of focus they dropped in brightness by about a stop. The only explanation that comes to mind is that the highlight loses intensity as it blurs and spreads. It certainly was a welcome accident in this situation. (The lens was an 85mm Zeiss Super Speed.)

My camera assistant, Phil Bowen, nailed every single take.

I’m glad we used the RED for this. Director Tom Donald is completely sold on this camera now, and in the past he’s been a hardcore film buff. It’s nice when technology catches up with expectations.

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Thursday, November 13, 2008

Lighting Simply for the RED

Two PARs, a couple of bounce cards and some grid cloth make this spot shine

A while back I posted a Quicktime movie of this project, shot for the California “No on Prop 8” campaign. At the time I promised that lighting diagrams would be along shortly. I lied. I just got around to this today.

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Monday, November 03, 2008

The RED Camera and Green Screen

What you need to know before you learn the hard way

After working in this business a while (this year was 21 for me) I find that I don’t worry about venturing into the unknown. And three weeks ago green screen with the RED was certainly an unknown for me.

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Training • (4) Comments • Most recent comments by: flydoghead, Rob, Rob, Rowland, • Permalink

Monday, October 27, 2008

More Fun with RED

In which a four day corporate shoot for Sunpower goes exceedingly well

I just finished a four day shoot for solar energy company Sunpower where we used the RED for three days of location shooting and one day of green screen. More about the green screen later--here’s how I did all the live action shots.

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Monday, October 20, 2008

What I’ve learned about the RED in the last three days

My tips, direct from the set to you

Tomorrow I finish a project that has shot for three days already on the RED, build 16. Here’s what I’ve learned and discovered:

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Friday, October 17, 2008

The HVX-200 Strikes Again

In which I present the results of a spec job that I wrote up a while back on PVC

A while back I wrote an article about a spec shoot I did promoting an as-yet unfunded motion picture project. For various reasons the project wasn’t finished, so I took it upon myself to cut the footage into a short piece for my reel. I mixed in some footage from a light drawing test that we did for the same project using a Canon DSLR.

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Thursday, October 16, 2008

No on Prop 8 (California)—shot on RED

Another successful RED project on a shoestring budget

I’ll revisit this next week when I have more time to write (I’m about to go into a four day RED project that will shoot over this coming weekend) but I’m very proud of this spot and--as it was just released onto YouTube--I wanted to show it off.

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Production • (2) Comments • Most recent comments by: Steven Bradford, Scott Gentry, • Permalink

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