EVIE Premiers in LA!
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Working with the RED ONE
This is a post by Aram(Spike) from a filmmaking forum we belong to. I’d asked him to talk about the settings we were shooting with.
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We were keeping all the candle lit scenes extra orange through white balance keeping the blue channel down to minimize noise. I think we shot it daylight balanced with Tungsten lights at 100 iso.
The bedroom was shot daylight balanced with daylight balanced lights at 320 iso to keep the image as clean as possible since the RED sensor is a daylight balanced one and anytime you can keep it fed with blue do so.
We shot on build 16 with 3 8 gig cards without a hitch. I think we hit the end of the card twice during a take but only because we had other shots on the same card.
We used Zeiss primes and 95% was shot on the 50mm and 95% was shot hand held.
Mike busted his ass with that camera on his back but since time was short it wasn’t worth it to switch camera ops after he got the flow of the scene down so Mike had to take it for the team and did it well. We usually switch up between us and also use Omar since he towers over the both of us and can get taller actors better.
The one thing that was a pain was that we sent our EVF back to RED for a fixing and that made the hand held work much much harder since we had to use the LCD. Mike had to bend his neck back all the time to be able to see the monitor. With the EVF you can adjust it in any direction because it sits on your eye so the eyeball focus distance isn’t a problem. I could never hand hold with the LCD since I can’t see that well close up and wouldnt be able to keep things in focus, at least not with the RED arm’s short distance.
We borrowed Kwan’s top mount and were able to mount the battery on the top of the camera giving it a shorter length for the tight spots so the batts didn’t hit any walls or furniture. Another thing was we didn’t put the follow focus on to save weight on the cam since we had to have the wireless units on there. We took the mattboxx off also in the tight areas to save weight and to keep it from bumping into things. The jump from 4K to 2K for the slo-mo was a little bit of a pain but lucky the slo-mos didn’t require wider angles since the sensor gets cropped a ton. We had just enough room to get the shots at 2K.
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Aram talks about us doing 95% hand-held. That wasa true for the scenes we were shooting those days. A lot of hand-held with some specifically chosen dolly shots.
On the next shoot date, we will be doing mostly dolly shots with a few jib shots mixed in.
The “Look” of a Film
When it comes to color correction, It seems that a lot of filmmakers work out a “look” they like and CC the footage to that, without much regard for what that look actually means to the film. Actually, this seems to be the case in a lot of Cinematography as well. People like cool shots, or cool lighting, but very often don’t think beyond that to what the shots and lighting mean to the content.
I am working really hard this time around one this aspect in my own film. I’ve done this to varying degrees in the past. In R.P.D.M., obviously I tried to represent the effects of the drug in a visual way, by slowing the footage down. In my film, BLOODY MARY, I developed a distinct look for the “Nightmare” sections, and a look for the “present.” Beyond those “looks,” the viewer was not given any real indication of which was which. Perhaps a little too obscure, but the point is, I was working on using the look of the film to communicate content. When the color was “X,” it was a nightmare, a vision brought on by the ghost. When the color was “Y,” it was the “present.”
Well in this one, I am going to be doing the same, but taking it further. The visuals will be important to understanding the story in this one, as I am going to be trying to represent a character’s various emotional states visually. In addition, representing transitions between a character’s emotional states visually. So what I am working on now, is how visual transitions work between emotional states. I do not want them to look digital, or like an effect, but more like a photographic, in camera effect.
I”m very drawn towards this kind of thing. To some degree it is very basic filmmaking; using the visual to communicate content. For instance, in 12 Angry Men, as the movie went on, the camera got lower and lower, so that the ceiling started to show in shots. This was to help emphasize visually the feeling of being trapped.
That’s the kind of thing I want to keep working on in my films.
Anyway, just some ramblings as I was working on this tonight. I will blog more about this as we go…
Here is a test: CC TEST
Thoughts on all of this?
