The Dream Gig

Soterion: Your Adventure Awaits from James Knightly on Vimeo

Now this was a fun shoot. How could it not be?

My mission was to create a commercial for a 57-foot catamaran that does private week-long charters in the British Virgin Islands. Good start, right? Oh also, the owner graciously gave me almost unlimited creative freedom with it- there were no stipulations. The video would play on the boat's website and possibly other chartering companies' sites. He wanted a 2 +/- minute version and a 30 second version.

As I began thinking about how I would approach it, the two most important things to me were:

1) I didn't want the Islands to seem unreal, I wanted them to feel "attainable," almost "relatable." Growing up, whenever I saw pictures of the Caribbean, I always assumed the pictures where doctored- the green picturesque water, the palm trees, the hammocks on the beach. Nothing could really look like that. When I traveled there a year or so ago on a separate trip, I realized that the water was actually that color. However, the pictures I had seen were always overly saturated and contrasty.
I wanted to earn the viewer's trust from the very first shot by being honest about how things actually look. I shot Canon Log, so I had to add back in the contrast and saturation in color grading, but I was very careful about how much I dialed in. Accurate, not enhanced. I hope this comes through in the overall look.

2) I wanted this to feel like the boat was a character- the viewer's "noble steed" or tour guide. It enables you to take this journey. I was nervous about this approach because I purposefully did not shoot much of the boat's interior. On the last day, I shot one of the cabins but knew I'd never use the footage. It felt way too much like a real estate video with slow tilts and pans. "Here's the dining room, here's the spacious living room, etc." It had to be about where the boat could take you, what it enabled you to do. Time will tell if this approach drives business or if I should have made a cheesy sunset montage instead :)

Technical Info:

I shot with my Canon C100 and Nikkor primes- 20, 35, and 55 macro. I also had a 70-200 2.8 is. More than half the shots were recorded to a Pix 240. When I was concerned about weight or speed, I'd forego the Pix and just shoot internally. Most underwater shots were done by my great friend and collaborator, Kenny Abbott, with his GoPro Hero 3. I shot Canon Log, he shot in ProTune. The GoPro footage required a good deal of grading to match color, but the 2.7K was a joy to have.

As far as other gear, I brought a Cinevate Atlas 10 slider, a Manfrotto tripod, monopod, my 7D for time-lapse, and my MacBook Pro. 

This was the first job I did with the C100 and I definitely put it through the ringer. The temperatures were high and the sun was blazing. At one point, we were shooting a beach for an hour in the sun and I was recording to the Pix 240 and internally to SD cards. When we watched dailies that night, some of the Pix footage had crazy digital artifacts (see picture below) because of the heat.

Digital Glitch in Pix 240 file

Of course, the artifacting began at the worst possible time- right in the middle of a hero shot.  Luckily, the SD card footage was fine and thus had the shot. The funniest part was, I never heard the C100's automatic fans turn on once during the whole week. This is reliability. I could not have shot this piece with a DSLR and not run into issues.

The lowlight ability of today's cameras always amazes me. The dinner scene was lit with a small LED light I had, a flashlight and a fluorescent lamp we found on board. I think we shot at 3200 ISO.

Key: Flolight Microbeam 128. Kicker: Flashlight

We had a lot of fun with the GoPro. We mounted it to the anchor, the mast, the wakeboard…it was great. Plus the underwater capability is incredible. I love the shot of the yellowtail snapper feeding frenzy- so sharp and bright. They almost look like they're CG.

Yellowtail Snapper

I owe so much to the boat's crew- Sasha and Tara know their stuff and were always thinking about good spots to be for sunset/sunrise, the quietest bays, the best hikes, etc. I would not know what I was doing without their guidance. Thanks guys! 

Planning the route

Setting up the Pix with Kenny

Geronimo!

Scared of heights?

The human head: best slider support

Dailies

Sasha gave me the hat

Conclusion: The C100 rocks. It just works. I felt the same way about the C300, having used it on a handful of shoots. I was happy to see the little brother live up to the same high standard. The GoPro Hero 3 is also a great camera. We had some issues with it freezing prior to recording, but for the most part it performed very well. Definitely a huge improvement over the Hero 2. I'm looking forward to using both cameras on upcoming shoots.

Thanks for reading!
Questions? Ask away.


- James

A lovely C300 Shoot

Wow! I had an absolute blast shooting some interviews for Johnson & Johnson today with two Canon C300s. We set up shop in the lovely Lambertville Station Hotel after moving every piece of furniture around in our suite (the bed weighed as much as a juvenile elephant) and then rolled right into shooting. The interviewees were experts in the rapidly-evolving field of neuroscience. Translation: very, very smart people! Here are some video stills from the uncorrected Canon Log & then a quick & dirty Color pass.

As this was shot on a white cyc, the C300's wave form monitor was such a blessing to have. I could tell precisely how even the background lighting was at any time. I exposed the cyc at right about 85%, wanting to reserve the option to control its precise brightness in post without clipping. We used two 4x4 Kinos to light the cyc, a 400 watt Joker through a chimera for key, a 4x2 Kino for fill, and a 1x1 LitePanel for the kicker.

The interviewees needed to be entirely in focus, and I also wanted to make the most of the camera's dynamic range, so I set my exposure for 800 ISO at f/5.6 at 1/48 sec for the majority of the shoot. For lenses, we had a Canon 70-200 2.8 L series ("A" Cam) and a set of Zeiss ZF primes ("B" Cam). "A" Cam stayed right around 70mm most of the time, while I used the 35mm for "B" Cam.

It was fantastic being able to put this exciting camera to the test. Since we've just begun post, I can't make any definitive statements yet about the footage but I will say that the camera was a joy to operate. It just makes sense!

Thanks to John Draus of Draus Productions for his lighting expertise and the BTS photos, and to Steve Gifford of Pretty Damn Sweet for allowing me to DP!

The two beasties

Hamming it up with Steve

Sometimes editing looks like this...

Beginning an edit for an infomercial. Yep, that's almost 8 hours of footage...

Fun with Frames

I recently shot/edited these pieces for a fantastic local company called NatureScripts. Lisa Ochwat, the founder, is a one-woman band. She shoots letters she finds in nature, designs words with them, and then frames them using handcrafted wooden frames made by an Amish artisan out in Lancaster county. 

For the videos, we wanted a light table look, but couldn't find an actual light table large enough for her longest frames. Solution: we made our own. The table was constructed with a metal Ikea frame and a translucent sheet of polymer. I placed an Omni with a white umbrella underneath the table and used a 1K chimera for key. The camera was mounted on a c-stand overhead and we used a small monitor for framing. The exterior footage was shot at a farm in Exton, PA. 

Enjoy and be sure to check out her website here.

Signature Video:

Holiday Video:

My Bolex Ate My 7D

Today was the day I reconnected with my roots. One hundred feet at a time...

When I took 16mm Filmmaking in college, everything changed. I fell in love with cinematography, and it was a Bolex H16 that pointed the way forward. It was a dream of mine to own one someday, and a few weeks ago it happened. I purchased a Bolex SBM, complete with 400' mag and motor. Made in 1971, it lived through everything from Apollo 14's moon landing to Jim Morrison's tragic death. Forty years later, it still looks and runs like new. Honestly, I think it will outlive me. In fact, in the event of a worldwide nuclear catastrophe, I wager it will be the cockroaches and the Bolexes that emerge from the rubble unscathed. 

Now, electronics have their place, but personally I don't think I can ever fully appreciate a camera that 1) I can't take apart, 2) I know will become obsolete in a few years, and 3) can't function without batteries. Enter the Bolex. It can run at 7 different frame rates with Zero electronic circuitry. Completely tangible, mechanical operation. You know another great thing about it? It also doesn't try to tell me how to shoot. Completely and beautifully manual.

Today I put a 100' spool of Kodak 7222 through it for testing. I performed a few low-light tests and also tried out the different frame rates. Everything ran great and I'm stoked to get the film back from the lab.

After the test shoot, I decided to hook up the motor and 400' mag and see how that ran. Now before you call me on it, this does run on a battery. The MST motor is powered by a 12 volt battery, made up of 10 cadmium-nickel alkaline cells. However, it's not a battery that has disappeared into the archives of planned obsolescence. You can still buy them from Bolex. Plus, if you really wanted to, you could hook a car battery up to the motor instead. Crazy, right?

So I hooked up the motor and all the connectors (you have to unscrew the hand crank and rex-o-fader), and held my breath. Thankfully, the motor purred immediately. So the next step in the testing will be to buy a 400' core and run that through the camera. The pictures below are of the beast on its roost. That's a Cinevate Atlas 10 on top of a Manfrotto 503HDV head, attached to a 536 tripod.

So there it is. Would anyone like to shoot something? I'm dying to break this out! :)

An Experiment in 3D

3D. It's a pretty polarizing topic in the film biz these days. I myself am not sure what to make of it. Yet when I was recently invited to help shoot a 3D short, I was eager to jump in.

As of today, we have completed the 3rd day of production. And let me tell you, it's been quite an adventure so far. Calibrating cameras, aligning mirrors, using remote flash triggers to genlock DSLRs...it's craziness. We're fortunate to be shooting with the awe-inspiring Zeiss CP.2s - 28, 50, & 85mm. Image quality aside, their large size has presented some challenges. Our 3D Film Factory rig has a difficult time accommodating them so we've had to ghetto rig some things. In particular, we replaced the normal 1/2" 1/4-20 bolts in the camera plates with much longer ones (plus 6 or 7 washers), in order to raise up the cameras so the CP.2s don't bump into the darned plates.

Then there's keeping the mirror clean. In uncontrolled situations (ie, outside), extreme diligence and vigilance are required to ensure a spotless mirror- which is critical for every shot. Using black wrap to cover the openings in the top of the rig is not ideal. I've been praying constantly to the Duvetyne gods for intervention, but they remain silent.

Now granted, our rig is not the most advanced 3D machine money can buy, so it would be unfair for me to draw any final conclusions about 3D production from this experience. But I do miss the warm 2D production world with its simpler calibrations and mirror-less matte boxes. However, despite all the added steps and difficulties, it's exciting to walk on a new frontier. I'm interested to see if the end product justifies the means...

the beginning...

Thanks for checking out the blog! New posts will be coming soon.