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.

Lost Ollie train yard scene

With the new Netflix series Lost Ollie now out, I can finally share some BTS stuff I worked on as a camera operator. This has been a long wait as it's a very VFX heavy show, which takes a long time in post. As a native 4K pipeline, we used the Alexa Mini LF in open gate mode with Arri Signature Primes.

On this project, we shot several parts of the train yard scene, which takes place in episode 2, with the animated characters as they try to catch a ride on a train. We would shoot a pass with stand-in dolls for lighting reference (as seen in the photo below), and then shoot the scene without them so they could be added in post by Industrial Light and Magic.

With the characters only being about a foot tall, we sometimes had to get creative to get the camera low enough to be on their eye line, such as by digging a hole so the camera could get just a few inches lower.

From down in a hole, to up on the roof of our production cube, we got a lot of coverage.

We even put the camera on a truck that drives on the tracks to shoot a shot from "inside the train car" as the characters try to catch it. You'd think it would be pretty smooth, as rails look nice and level. It definitely was not!

We also did a bunch of train drive-by shots as well as dollying shots next to moving trains, where the CGI characters will be inserted running as they try to hop on the train.

This one was a lot of fun to operate, though it was an interesting challenge framing for character movement that we couldn't actually see and only had to imagine was happening. I also enjoyed helping to find shots for characters that were only a foot tall, as it's a little more unique perspective than I'm used to.

RED Komodo in the house

Well, it's going on about a year and a half since I got my Komodo, and I've been using it on a variety of shoots, including as a b-cam to an Alexa Mini LF for a large FCA series of commercials, driving and location plates for a bunch of TV shows, and lots of commercial and product spots. I really like this small form factor (which makes the Alexa Mini feel huge!) and how it sips batteries. It's lightweight enough that I can toss it on a small DJI RS 2 gimbal and fly it around. No need for a giant Ronin 2 or Mōvi Pro all the time (though they certainly still have their place and get used!). This is a nice system and I'm really looking forward to shoot a bunch more projects with it.

Having come up as an AC, I make sure that the accessories are ones that work well, even if they cost a little more than the competitors. So I've ended up testing out a few different components before settling on my current kit. It's not worth the frustration of dealing with a sub-par piece of kit just to save a few bucks.

CURRENT KIT:

RED Komodo

(4) 256GB ProGrade CFast2 cards

Angelbird CFast2 reader

(4) BlueShape BP-955 batteries and charger

(2) Bebob Micro 98Wh Gold Mount batteries and charger

(2) Core SWX Nano 98Wh Gold Mount batteries and charger

Tilta Gold Mount adapter

Core SWX Gold mount adapter

Canon RF to EF adapter

Hot Rod Camera RF to PL adapter

Kondor Blue cage

Kondor Blue 15mm lightweight bridgeplate and 12" dovetail

Smallrig 16" 15mm iris rods

SmallRig wooden hand grips

SmallRig shoulder pad with dovetail

Bright Tangerine Misfit Atom matte box

Arri LMB matte box

Formatt-Hitech Firecrest Ultra Cine Superslim IRND set (ND 0.3-2.1)

Sigma 18-35mm F1.8 EF mount lens

Tilta Nucleus-M two motor follow focus

SmallHD DP7 Pro monitor

Portview BM5 iii WR 5.5" high bright monitor

Manfrotto 509HD head on Manfrotto 536 carbon fiber sticks

DJI Ronin RS 2 Pro

DJI Ronin 2

The Gray Man SDCC experience

The other week was San Diego Comic Con, which brings in a lot of the big television, movie and streaming studios. This year Netflix went big for their movie The Gray Man, with a giant set and interactive experience where attendees find their way out of a crashed train car, unlock secret briefcases, and end up running across the top of the train car to activate their final token. For the last part of the experience, with them running across the top of the train car, Netflix decided they wanted a camera to fly along with the person as they race along, which is where my job came in.

This gig came through my connection with Industry Sherpa, who has provided us with the Blackarm on most of our driving plate shoots, as well as the rear-mounted platform for the Hacks job earlier this year (and detailed in one of my recent posts). They had a wire-mounted camera system called the Eagle Eye. If you've ever watched an NFL game and seen the camera floating above the field on wires, that is the type of system we were using. We had a specialist from Germany and a Los Angeles based Eagle Eye operator running the wire-mounted system, while myself and one other camera operator were responsible for the payload attached to the Eagle Eye, namely the Mōvi Pro and Sony FX6.

We mounted the camera sideways, as Netflix wanted it social media friendly (aka, vertical video). The iris, focus and zoom were all adjusted through motors run off of the Mōvi and controlled through their console style controller. The Eagle Eye operators programmed in the moves and were responsible for throttling the speed the camera flew through the air while myself and the other operator (switching out for breaks, etc) would operate the camera off of the joystick, as operating was fully manual which required us to frame the shot each and every time, for hundreds of takes.

It wasn't too hard to operate, with the biggest challenge being the dance between the incredibly varied speeds people would traverse the train car top and the speed of the Eagle Eye moving through the air, with us camera operators repeating our moves with slight adjustments to compensate for variances between those two variables. I typically do narrative and commercial work, not live events, so this was an interesting departure from my usual, as there was no such thing as a second take! But it was a good time and definitely helped me sharpen my remote gimbal operating skills.

Rutherford Falls season 2 inserts

I suppose they must have liked what I did in season 1, as I got brought back to do some insert shots for episode 3 of season 2, as the first unit must have ran out of time or they decided to add some shots when they got into the edit. This was a pretty simple one, with some handheld shots of preparing food in a kitchen. They were all closeups, so the set was literally 8 feet wide and only a couple feet deep, so basically just the stove, counter top, and some walls behind those.

We shot on the RED Gemini with Zeiss Super Speeds and I built it on my handheld shoulder rig. Lighting was matched to the first unit shots (recreating a big window with daylight behind and overhead tungsten lights). After completing that, we finished up the day by shooting some afternoon and evening car drive-by shots on sticks.

If you watch the opening scene of episode 3, almost every single "cooking" shot was our second unit shoot. We shot with doubles since you don't see their faces.

And then a few simple car drive-by shots for episodes 6 and 7, such as this one.