About a month ago I shot a spec Porsche spot at night on the Sony F35 at ridiculously low light levels. Here’s the finished piece.

Director: Ian McCamey
DP: Art Adams
Camera and lighting gear: Chater Camera
Visual Effects Supervisor and Porsche owner/operator: Kevin Baillie
Camera Assistant: Rod Williams
DIT: Louis Block
Crew without portfolio: Alan Hereford
Sound editor/mixer: http://www.chrastkasound.com/

As noted in my previous article about this shoot, we knew we’d end up with a noisy image because of the limited resources used to pull this off. My light meter read “E” when I took light readings at 640 ASA and we found we could see the action better by looking at the monitor than by the naked eye. After initially lighting for a proper exposure, but not liking the resulting look, I decided to light for “pretty” first and exposure later. I’m very happy with the results.

The final spot required a fair bit of noise reduction in the shadows but flesh tones held just fine. The little bit of noise that’s left reminds me of film grain.

If we’d shot this spot for an agency we’d have a few more tools available, but I don’t think it would have taken a lot more to beef up the exposure to a noise-free level. The F35 is very, very quiet and very, very fast, and it was an absolute pleasure to use. I couldn’t have pulled this off with any other single-chip camera.

I’ll be posting some additional versions of this spot in the near future. For my web site I might trim it and make it a little shorter, as well as play with some color correction choices, and I’ll post those here as I develop them. I might even hold an informal survey to see which plays better.

Disclaimer: This spot is a spec spot and has nothing official to do with Porsche or the Porsche brand. (I mention this because this spot was on Youtube for a brief time, generating TONS of traffic before Porsche had it pulled. It is posted here as an educational aid.)

I hope you enjoy the spot!