Californios short film

I recently shot a short western out at Paramount Ranch. This was a super low budget project and I was the DP, my own AC, gaffer and grip. Basically, the crew was myself and our sound mixer/boom operator, with a couple extra hands helping to carry things from the parking lot to the location, but since they weren't film crew, that was the extent of their assistance (other than setting up tents, tables, and crafty).

With this in mind, I shot on a RED V-Raptor XL [X], as the internal ND and wide dynamic range let me make fast changes while shooting under the blazing hot sun. I occasionally set up a floppy so I could operate in some shade, but basically just let the light brown ground act as my bounce fill with an occasional assist from an 8x8 ultrabounce. I certainly leaned into my documentary experience on this, working with the existing light and making the best of it. We at least planned out what direction we'd be shooting during the morning and afternoon to try to maximize the amount of backlight the sun was providing, though we couldn't avoid the dreaded "sun directly overhead" middle part of the day due to our shooting schedule, so I at least tried to do more of the wides during that time. I also shot at 6500K to give the town a little bit warmer feel. The client didn't like working with RED R3D files on the last project I shot for them, so I went with ProRes 4444 files this time around downscaled to 4K (from the sensor's native 8K).

For lenses, I paired the camera with a set of Canon CN-E primes for their clean look and controlled flares. Partly due to me having to pull my own focus and partly because I like classic cinema depth of field, I tried to shoot everything around a T4 and favored the 35mm and 50mm focal lengths, though I chose to shoot nearly wide open and telephoto for one specific character...the one that doesn't belong in this town.

We knocked out 10 pages in a single day and, while I was fairly pleased on location (I could only see the image so well in the glaring sun and relied a lot on false color and the traffic lights for exposure), I am quite happy with how it looks after pulling it into my computer at home and making just basic two point curve corrections: pulling down the shadows a bit and dialing in my higher mid-tones to get the contrast I wanted. The RED held onto highlight detail quite nicely and I'm impressed with how it looks, all things considered.

Though this wasn't necessarily my preferred method of working, as I like working with a crew where I'm not quite so rushed to do everything myself, it was a good challenge to see what I could do with the most minimal of help. I've wanted to shoot a western for years and was pleased to finally make it happen.

Here are some quick snapshots with <1 minute color grade tweaks.

I also gave the director some basic color grade starting point options with a few different LUTs I had sitting around that I thought worked well for this project. I personally like the Panavision DXL2 LUT I used on all the above images (and is the second panel below), but ultimately the director went with the warmer LUT seen in the fourth panel, which I admittedly also really like. The top panel is the LOG image, just for reference.

Devon Thompson - Pillory music video

 

I recently shot a low budget music video that just came out. The premise was simple: a Blair Witch style "found footage" video of a woman being chased through the woods. With that in mind, we utilized a mix of cameras, from a RED Komodo with Dulens Mini Primes (daytime) and a Sony ZV-E1 with G-Master primes on a gimbal (night), to a Sony Handycam for an especially low-fi look.

The whole crew was the director, myself, and a friend of the artist to help carry a few things. For the nighttime shots, I embraced that found footage aesthetic and primarily used a camera mounted light or car headlights (in the road shots). I had planned on using a couple sources to add some "moonlight" to the forest at night, but the director wanted it to fall off into darkness and, hey, my job is to give the director what they want and so that's exactly what I did.

You can see the music video here:

We also shot some late daytime stuff that was supposed to transition us into night, but it didn't make the edit. I think it was some of the better stuff we shot, but I guess they decided that part of the story didn't work once they got into post. Anyway, here are a few grabs from the unused footage.

Shifting Gears driving plates

A recent episode (season 2, episode 7) of Shifting Gears featured driving plates I worked on. We shot all the neighborhood backgrounds and exteriors of the car driving around, and then the neighborhood backgrounds were composited into the shots of the actors inside the car that had been previously filmed on a green screen set. It's always fun filming classic cars.

Process plates were shot using a Toyota FJ Cruiser with a custom build for mounting the Black Arm, Ronin 2 and RED Gemini. For lenses, we used Sigma Cine primes to keep the image clean.