CYA music video

I recently shot a music video for Alice the g00n, called CYA. It was a studio shoot that was incredibly VFX heavy, which is always a concern on a moderate budget. In this case, I had to rely heavily upon very specific storyboards and framing to keep the amount of VFX work in check (framing shots to keep us off what would be a CG background as much as possible). The director had a very dialed in vision for exactly how the edit would work and what framing would be, so I had a lot less leeway for picking shots than I'm used to. But at the end of the day, I'm there to deliver on the director's vision, so it's a bit more of an execution of the shots kind of job.

For the project, we shot on Atlas Orion anamorphic lenses on RED Komodo @ 6k. I didn't use any diffusion filtration to keep things as sharp as possible to help post with their background replacement. The director wanted a Lady Snowblood inspired look, which was fairly low contrast.

The Gordita Chronicles establishing shots

Wrote this up a while back and forgot to hit "publish." Oops, better late than never I guess.

A bit different from my normal shoots, this one was establishing shots from a jib. We hired a jib operator for this one, as that's a fairly specific skill set. No Ronin this time, which was a nice break from having to tech that piece of gear, leaving me more time to think about lighting the building (we had some nighttime shots) with very limited options for light placement.

Fortunately, the weather was pleasant and everything went off without a hitch. I got to put some of my new Amaran LED lights to use, which are very convenient for their low power draw relative to output, as well as having color temperature and output intensity options that can be controlled directly from an app.

B Positive driving plates

Quite a few of my driving plate shots are done at nighttime using a RED Gemini on a Ronin 2 mounted to a Flowcine Black Arm. The Gemini has great low light for these situations where we can't light and the Sigma Cine 14mm is pretty fast for such a wide lens, coming in at a T2. We also use Zeiss Super Speeds, but they have pretty strong purple fringing wide open at T1.3 so I usually stop them down to T2 for a much cleaner image. In this one we filmed a police car picture vehicle, which is different, as normally we're trying to hide the police cars/bikes that escort us when filming on public roads.

A month later, in a change from our usual driving plate shots, it was requested that we shoot on a hard-mounted setup rather than the Ronin 2 on Black Arm that we normally use. Easy enough. We built out an extra wide high-hat base for stability and bagged and ratcheted it down in the back of a van. The angle was set and the camera car driver would determine the framing by maintaining speed, accelerating, or slowing. It's decidedly low tech, but got the job done. We were just getting car to car (or I guess "van to van" is more accurate) and then did some van drive-bys with the camera on sticks.

Like usual, shot on the RED Gemini with the Sigma Cine 14mm and Zeiss Super Speeds.

Call Me Kat plates

Worked a couple jobs recently for Call Me Kat. One was some driving plates at night. Single camera (RED Gemini for it's great low light and high ISO abilities) using the Sigma 14mm on a Ronin 2. Pretty much the go-to setup for our driving shots. The other shoots was a bit different, as they wanted some ~180° plates (from a tripod). For this we used 3 RED Komodos, with the outer cameras positioned 45° off of the center camera. Again, we utilized the Sigma 14mm for its wide field of view. This gave us good overlap between the cameras while also seeing a lot of real estate.

To trigger all three cameras at the same time, I utilized the Tilta Nucleus, with each motor (1 per camera with a run/stop cable) set to the same channel so all three would trigger off of a single hand unit. Normally I would also mount the motor to be functional on the camera (controlling the iris so all three would match), but due to not having a prep and how the cameras had to be mounted, we had to remove the iris rods to make the cameras fit on the plate, so the motors couldn't be mounted to control iris or focus. I thought that might be the case beforehand, but wasn't worried since all the cameras were easily accessible and I could set the iris and focus by hand.

I do enjoy doing some of these less common rigs. Like I said, we didn't have a prep but I planned ahead of time to make it work with as few hitches as possible and except for not being able to mount iris rods, everything worked as expected, though there were some paper-thin clearances between cameras! I have a few ideas for next time to make things even more efficient and simple, so hopefully more of these camera array jobs come up!

Setting up for night driving plates.

Triple Komodo array with cameras set to 45° increments.