Tech Thoughts from the Set

It's been a while since I've done some filmmaker tech talk - so here's a bit of tech talk for the filmmakers.  I warn you in advance this is a bit scattered. I'm not sure the angle is doing justie to how high up that ceiling is. 

The greenscreen  alone is 37'. 

That light in the center pointing down is being held up on a forklift.

I was directing a commercial on Friday and I took this snapshots because Patrick told me I should try to include more pictures in my blogs.  Normally I can't show anything until the product is released, but I figured, you can't see it, so it was okay.

This moment struck me simply because of how much equipment was there.  Sometimes when I shoot it's just the bare minimum.  Minimal crew, minimal equipment.  I usually shoot with just a gaffer, AC, grip, swing and a PA.  Obviously this shoot had many more people - maybe four times more than you see in this image.

I'm always struck, though, by how much you can do with a smaller crew and still yeild professional results.  The " Fallen" spot had the minimal crew and minimal equipment.

However, sometimes time becomes such a huge factor that you simply must get 8 lights raised and four frames built and so on in a short period of time and, so... for that... the crew grows.  But during the shoot, there is not much for them to do and it can actually just end up slowing you down to have so many people around.

In a future blog I will try to make a list of the ways you can shoot with a smaller crew and still retain high "commercial" production values.

Here is a shot of the camera.  While I own a RED, mine was out on a rental, so we rented one from a rental house.  I've never actually used such a crazy looking head before.  It was used to kkeep the camera on the dolly but get low.  However, I didn't like it's instability.

The RED camera is a 4k camera which is just about the next best thing to 35mm film - especially for greenscreen.  It's a relatively affordable camera at 17.5k - but that's deceiving because by the time you add everything (except lenses) that you need for it to work, it becomes closer to 30k - then if you do add lenses it would be from 10k to 90k depending on what you buy.  However, there are some cheaper solutions - there are fixtures for using still lenses on a RED which many are using which brings the price down below 2500 for a set.

These might sound like big numbers, but for a feature film, the minimum someone would spend on stock and processing would be 60,000.  For major features it can bein the millions.  So - you figure that you're avoiding that cost - then you can see where the savings of using a sensor based camera comes in handy - even for independents.

RED has a camera coming out next year WITH a lense, though, which they say will cost 3,000.  (Expect to pay another 2k in accessories).  Now - that I think will be the camera the independents adopt.  The Depth of Field will be like 16mm film, not 35mm though.  It's called " Scarlet."

As you can tell, it's a greenscreen shoot......  I have to admit that shooting on green screen is not my favorite thing.  I like the fact that because I own a VisFX company, I know the nomenclature and that makes people more comfortable with having me direct (and therefore might get me a few extra jobs)... but... it's a very sterile way of shooting.  I actually prefer locations to studios as well.  It's hard to recreate the history and life that a real location will hold.

The downside of locations though would be the noise that can accompany them... especially airplanes.

There you go - some scattered tech thoughts about filmmaking.  :)