Fair Fight part II: A DC Comics fan film

This past weekend I helped out some of my friends who were shooting their DC Comics fan film, Fair Fight. This was part 2 of the project, with my fellow DP Scott Baker handling the first installment. We utilized the same location and camera, a BlackMagic Pocket camera. While I've shot with BlackMagic cameras before, this is the first time I've used the Pocket Camera. The one I used had a speed booster and included a set of Leica still lenses with a Duclos Cinemod.

I shot handheld primarily on the 25mm and 50mm, with a couple shots on a 100mm and a single shot on the 24mm. The B-cam shot on a 14mm or 35mm Rokinon on a small Glidecam-style rig. Matching the settings from part 1 as closely as I could (ISO 1600, F2.8, ProRes 422, 120° shutter), we shot pretty much everything with two cameras at a time. I'd occasionally shoot ISO 800/F2 when I could, but tended to stay at a 2.8 to give myself a little extra leeway since I was pulling my own focus off of the tiny Pocket Camera screen.

Since the original shoot was unable to recall if they shot with the flatter "film" profile and then graded, or shot straight to the "video" profile, I opted for the flat "film" profile, as it's easy to get the video look from that footage, while the reverse isn't true. They were also unsure about the color temp, so I went with 4000K, as the first part had pretty orange tungsten while the blues were fairly blue. By splitting the two temps, I gave them warmer than average tungsten and kept my blues nice and strong.

I believe these grabs are off the ungraded screenshots. I kind of like the muted color scheme, as it fits the darker and grittier nature of the content. Part 1 has a lot more saturation and contrast, so these will probably get graded to a crunchier look for the final product.

The Resistance: additional screen grabs

Here are a few other screen grabs from the action short, The Resistance, I recently completed.

The nameless "men in black".

Letting the shot go Daredevil dark.

Since we only had one side to our "alley", we flipped our set and lighting to reuse the one wall we did have, playing it as the other side.

A little water is always nice.

Since we didn't have a real alleyway, I let the background go black and added in some haze to help hide what was really back there. Also, the atmospheric haze picks up some of that back light and helps pop the actress off the dark background.

A7S shot. It's a little mushy, but for the quick edit it'll do. I really like the color difference between the two practical lighting sources.

The Resistance

I just finished up action short for an actress looking for some additional material for her demo reel, as well as getting a story concept developed. While I had tons of gear at my disposal, the time we had to shoot was short and the crew extremely small, so I tried to keep it as simple as possible.

Keeping in mind that we'd be shooting night scenes, I opted to use the Sony FS7 for it's clean image at higher ISOs, though I ended up running it at 800 the whole time, with only a single shot at 1600. The other reason I shot FS7 was due to us also using a DSLR on a Ronin. Knowing that the A7S offers great low light capability and matches well with the color science of the FS7 (this shoot isn't getting a color grade, so matching in camera was fairly critical), it made sense.

Since I knew that we'd be a small crew (myself plus two others), I wanted to avoid swapping lenses, so elected to use the Zeiss 28-80 T2.9 Compact Zoom. That would cover the full range of what was needed and would also match nicely with the Zeiss 18mm ZE lens on the Ronin/A7S setup.

This shoot was made possible by local rental house EVS: http://www.evsonline.com/

This is what we used for the alleyway scene.

Our alleyway created in the area pictured in the previous photo.

Top lit with a 650W fresnel through 4x4 opal, with another 650W top lighting the far background and a Source4 dimmed down and shot through 1/2 CTB for a back edge and to bring out the boxes on the shelving. A 1x1 LED lightpanel bounced off a 2x2 foamcore provides some front fill and an eye light.

Don't mess with a girl and her knife.

A7S on Ronin, utilizing practical lighting.

Same lighting setup as the third picture, just flipped.

Anomalies teaser

A friend of mine was working on a sci-fi/action webseries idea and needed some help developing it a bit further.  I gladly agreed to help and we got to the point where we decided to shoot a teaser trailer to help potential investors get an idea for the look and feel we were going for.  So we put together a one day shoot and shot a bunch of little scenes.  The short teaser turned out pretty well and should be useful as my friend pitches her idea.  The working title is Anomalies, though the actual title may change down the road. I directed the trailer and shot on RED Epic MX with Canon EF lenses.