ProVideo Coalition.com: Stunning Good Looks by Art Adams

There’s so much to shoot on a project like this that it’s crucial to design lighting setups that can be used for a lot of different things. The hanging and swinging Vista Beam worked well for the end shot of the video, which is a night exterior lit by “tungsten” lamps (although all the additional lighting was daylight balanced) and for the ship’s interior. It was a fairly simple setup, and for a while the goal-posted Vista Beam lived alongside our brighter, bigger daylight setup, allowing us to switch between them as needed.

The vast majority of what we shot, though, was lit by the big broad daylight setup, and once set up it never changed. We just moved the camera around as fast as we could and focused on shots and performances instead of lighting.

Setting up for a high angle on the ship’s captain, who’s desperate to shoot an albatross—possibly over a bad debt or excessively high phone bill. [TB]

For example, we had a lot of shots of the ship’s captain searching for, and eventually shooting, an albatross. First, the search:

The ship is a model that Mark shot in his studio using a home-built motion control rig. The lighting isn’t a perfect match, but Mark says that the entire image will be a lot softer by the time he’s done with it. Here’s an example of the look he’s going for:

This is a temporary comp, where the captain was shot with the RED and a stock “eye” was dropped into the end of the telescope. We re-shot this on our last shoot day (day three of three) with the telescope sweeping from side to side, along with a shot of the actual actor’s eye.

The captain takes a break after a hard day of hunting albatross and beating his crew:

The green screen on the floor was a scrap, as we didn’t want to mess up the pristine and heavily-discounted green screen in the background.

What you don’t see in the shot above is the crew floating just under the surface of the water. Rather than stay aboard and tolerate their abusive captain, they offed themselves. (I felt like that the one time I worked on a reality TV show.) They were shot separately, in a small pond built in a corner of the stage, by the stills crew, so they’ll appear perfectly motionless under a layer of animated water.

Left to right: Director Mark Holthusen, me, and the ship’s captain. Adam Wilt is hidden behind my girth. Blond hair by Alan Steinheimer. [TB]

Mark and his crew had a great method for figuring out whether an angle would work: I’d line up a shot and they’d shoot a still of it off the director’s monitor, a 17” Panasonic LCD. Then, using Adobe Photoshop, they’d comp it into a still of the background plate. I seem to have a latent talent for determining the correct camera angle from rough story boards: Mark would hand me a storyboard page, I’d place the camera, his gang would check my shot against the background plate, and nearly every time I was dead on.

Although I used an O’Connor 2060 for the high shots off our scissor lift, I used a Gearnex gear head for everything else.

I really enjoyed working with it, although I don’t think it has yet reached perfection. There should be a bit more of a difference between the two gears (one is twice as fast as the other) and the head can bind a bit when a heavy camera is tilted all the way down or up. Also, the size of the cradle is so small that it pays to make the camera as short as possible—in the case of the RED, that’s aided by mounting the battery and hard drive off the side of the camera instead of off the back.

For the most part, though, it was a joy to use, and I operated a number of shots with it, including closeups. There is definitely something unique about the look and feel of a gear head, and I’m thrilled that someone has finally found a way to make such a head that is affordable to the HD crowd. I’ve had very few chances to use one over the course of my HD career, and I miss them terribly.

And last but not least, let’s talk a bit about the RED ONE. I really do enjoy using the camera, in spite of its many shortcomings, but it is still a major cause of headache and heartache. While ultimately not that big a deal, as we didn’t lose any footage, we had a number of hard drive faults that prevented us from rolling on a number of occasions. It only took a few seconds to clear the fault, typically by hitting the record button a couple of times until the camera rolled again, but it certainly does make one’s heart sink to see that big red warning message pop up in the viewfinder. Fortunately it’s fairly fast to play back the last clip in-camera to ensure that it actually exists.

There seemed to be no reason for it. The fault never happened when the camera was moving. Strange.

Then there was the saga of the RED 18-85 zoom. This is, in theory, a great zoom: it encompasses the entire range of a normal prime lens set, and it opens up to a T2.9, which is quite handy when shooting with a slow camera like the RED. Unfortunately accurate focus marks are an as-yet unrealized upgrade option: when horizontal, the markings on the RED 18-85 lens that we used were fairly accurate, but they drifted severely when the camera was tilted at a severe angle. For example, while shooting off the scissor lift at a 45-degree down angle and with the zoom fully wide at 18mm, eye focusing on a subject 20’ away yielded a distance of 50’ on the lens. Under such conditions one can’t zoom in, focus and zoom out as the focus doesn’t track properly; one has to pick the proper focal length and use the RED’s focus-checking digital zoom to verify sharpness.

We shot a fair amount of high-angle footage from a scissor lift, and the zoom was a lifesaver as it saved us a lot of scissor lift drive time, but the lack of focus integrity made me nervous.

Adam Wilt’s employer owns three RED cameras and two RED 18-85 zooms. Adam told me a story about how one of the zooms, the one we used, was fairly accurate out of the box—at least when fairly level—but the other was completely off. Focus marks weren’t even close to accurate. He sent it back to RED for adjustment, and then called a while later to see how it was doing.

“But the focus marks don’t line up at all!” said Adam. “How can this be okay?”

If RED isn’t able to repair it Adam may have to dedicate one of his company’s RED cameras specifically to that lens, mis-adjusting the back focus in order to make it usable. But I guess one can’t complain too loudly. The lens costs 30% of what a real lens would, and you get what you pay for. It is usable, but it’s not camera assistant friendly. For what we needed, it was fine: I needed to find the proper camera height and angle first and the proper frame size second, and having a zoom for those high-angle shots sped us up considerably. Fortunately we didn’t have to follow focus on any of those shots.

It’ll be interesting to look at some still frames down the road and see how the RED zoom compares to our earthbound lenses, a set of Zeiss Ultra Primes.

I can’t close this article without saying some nice things about Adam Wilt. As well as being a friend, and my local guru of all things electronic, he served as my camera assistant for this project as a condition of using Meet’s the Eye’s RED package. I was a camera assistant for about five years and I consider myself to be somewhat “old school” in my expectations of camera assistants, having been whipped into shape (literally, in some situations) by several well-seasoned IA veterans who didn’t let me get away with anything, and I knew we were going to have some tough shots to do. Adam surprised me on every level. Not only was he superbly detail oriented, he was also calm and cool and after a while didn’t blink when we threw a tough shot at him with very little rehearsal. He tackled some very tough focus pulls and did remarkably well. I’m glad he chose to stick in there with me rather than kill himself and float, hauntingly, next to the dolly for the duration of the shoot.

Someone shot behind-the-scenes footage that appeared recently on Youtube. The music video coverage starts at about 2:15.

Photos marked [TB] are copyright 2009 by Tim Blackmore/Meets the Eye Productions. Photos marked [AW] are copyright 2009 by Adam Wilt. Thanks are due to both of them for allowing me to use their work in this article.

The Best of Stunning Good Looks

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A directory of my best articles, sorted by topic.

This entry is a guide to my best articles, sorted by topic. Enjoy!

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Outstanding article, Scott, thanks for taking the time to document the shoot and explain your artistic decision-making process.

Posted by Mark Spencer on 11/10 at 10:26 PM

Hi Adam,

Enjoying your posts.

Two questions (for now…):
- What instrument for your “fill from the key side”
- Why the flag between your key and fill, as seen
in your first picture of the setup or the
YouTube video say @ 2m58s?

Best

Igor

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 11/11 at 05:48 PM

Hi Igor-

The fill was a 1200w PAR bounced into the 12x12 muslin-over-grifflon assembly.

The flag between the key and fill was most likely just to keep light spilling off the 4k and 6k PAR lenses from flaring the lens or blinding the operator (me!).

-Art

Posted by Art Adams on 11/11 at 06:17 PM

“Hi Adam” ?!?

Sorry Art bout that!

While i meant Art, maybe it has to do with the mentioning of Adam Wilt in your article.
Two persons with ‘Adam’ in their Name/Surname,
and it somehow stucked ...

BTW, being at your site http://www.artadams.net/ long time ago, and seen your posts at CML.

No hard feelings?

Thanks for your reply.

Cheers

Igor

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 11/11 at 07:03 PM

Art says, “I can’t close this article without saying some nice things about Adam Wilt.” I find this odd, because I didn’t get him coffee even once. Aside from that, I just tried to behave professionally and do my job; why should that be a surprise?

Tim has posted a slideshow of more behind-the-scenes photos for those who might be interested.

Posted by Adam Wilt on 11/12 at 04:38 PM

Don’t worry about it, Igor. You’d be surprised how often people call me “Adam” even when I’m not around Adam.

Posted by Art Adams on 11/12 at 04:40 PM

Adam, I don’t take anyone for granted. I was very happily surprised, as it’s not a job that one normally picks up easily. It sure took a while for me to learn it, back when I was doing such things.

We’ll work on the coffee thing.

Posted by Art Adams on 11/12 at 04:48 PM

What fun read! I really look forward to seeing the final product. I’m a little curious about your RED workflow on set. You say you had some problems with the drive, but did you transfer/preview anything on set?

Thanks,
Bjarki

Posted by Bjarkovic on 11/13 at 10:19 AM

Whenever we accumulated a half hour worth of footage the drive was taken away for backup. While shooting we limited ourselves to in-camera playback as the problem occurred when we rolled, which is not a great time to stop everything and check data integrity.

Any clip that played back in-camera seemed to work fine, and although we ran into drive errors four or five times we never lost any data. But your heart sure does sink when that big red message appears in the finder as you don’t know whether this is a transient issue or if your drive just crossed the River Styx, and without paying the ferryman.

Otherwise we backed the drives up in three different places and I checked footage at lunch and at wrap in RedCine. I believe Adam was also scanning through footage during/after backup.

Posted by Art Adams on 11/13 at 10:27 AM

I see. I haven’t run into those drive failures (yet), but I can almost feel the stomach-wrenching astonishment of reading that message.

Thanks again!

B.

Posted by Bjarkovic on 11/13 at 10:33 AM

I never ran into them until recently. I’ve heard rumors that they are related to early Build 20 releases, but I don’t know that for sure.

I’ve never lost a bit (byte?) of footage from a RED shoot, but recently I’ve had a lot of situations where I thought I might have. For quite a long time RED camera issues were things that happened to other people, but starting with a shoot I did in August I’ve caught up.

I do like the camera, but it’s an odd duck…

Posted by Art Adams on 11/13 at 10:50 AM

We were running build 20.1.3, and seeing the occasional SATA error on playback and/or ROCKETIO error on recording. The SATA errors typically cleared themselves with a retry or two. The ROCKETIO error once required rebooting the camera before we got around it.

There is a 20.1.6 build to work around SATA-TRANS errors during recording, but as our errors were different and infrequent and we were able to proceed with, at worst, a reboot, I didn’t want to stop production to load new (and untested by us) firmware.

I also had a backup RED ONE we could have pressed into service had our primary camera gone more severely pear-shaped.

As to backups, data-wrangler Michael Horevaj would dump the footage to a G-SAFE (I think) RAID 1 drive and verify playback. Then I dumped the footage to our ReadyNAS RAID and verified that all the clips played in Redcine. Then, with Michael’s and Art’s permission, I put the drive back on the camera cart for re-use.

At the end of the day I also rsynced our working ReadyNAS to a backup ReadyNAS in a different part of the building (not waiting for the automated midnight backup, grin). So we had two RAIDed copies before the RED DRIVE was returned to use, and three RAIDed copies by the end of the day, and all copies were tested for proper playback.

Posted by Adam Wilt on 11/13 at 11:02 AM

I particularly liked Adam’s method of making damn sure we were good and ready to reformat the drive before actually doing so.

Posted by Art Adams on 11/13 at 11:08 AM

Virtual double-bagging. Impressive.

Posted by Bjarkovic on 11/13 at 11:09 AM

Great stuff Art. Love it.

Posted by Kendal Miller on 12/09 at 10:01 AM

Great work, thanks for showing the “meat and potatoes” behind the scenes, really helps to understand the end results.

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