Big Budget HDV filmmaking.

Another feature film is being shot with standard prosumer HDV cameras: The sequel to the 2006 action thriller Crank is being shot right now Canon XH A1 camcorders. The first Crank was shot on HDCAM Sony F950s, and the co-directors have recently completed a movie using the Red One camera system. Unlike previous HDV movies, like Searchers 2.0 or Once, which were low budget, independent productions that used HDV cameras for budgetary reasons, Crank: High Voltage is choosing the system for aesthetic reasons.

The point was not trying to emulate film: says co-director Brian Taylor, "[...] This is an A.D.D. movie, so we should have A.D.D. cameras. So, you know the idea of moving the camera in outrageous ways and being able to destroy cameras without blinking an eye is more important to us than, you know, sort of having this filmic image."

More info here: www.collider.com

Found via freshDV.com

Red/Che

I've not posted much about the Red One as it seems far above the league of most true independent/no budget filmmakers (after all, Alex Cox made a whole feature for about the cost of three properly kitted out units.) Fitting with this, on the website, a lot of the interviews and promotional material is aimed at/comes from big budget filmmakers (Steven Soderberg, Doug Liman, some other full time Hollywood artists/craftspeople) so rather than a revolution, it seems the camera is more likely to cause something more akin to a cabinet reshuffle.

However it is interesting to note that while the first work is in on Soderberg's Che Guevara Biopic(s) which had it's (their) première at Cannes, very little if any commented on the digital production (e.g. from Salon.com, the New York Times, Village Voice, and the Guardian). Only one review I found, from Variety, even mentions Red, and only to describe the look as "highly promising", a couple of others, another from Variety and this from Cinematical simply mention that it's HD, though cinematical does add "Che doesn't merely look wonderful; it also delivers on the long-promised but rarely delivered potential DV [sic] offers real artists..."

This could be down to Soderberg's publicity department not mentioning it; David Bordwell points out that a lot of the discussion by critics of the digital look of movies like Collateral, Miami Vice or Apocalypto would have been because the publicity packs they received would have pointed it out exhaustively. So this means that either critics really aren't interested in the visual look of a film unless a publicist points it out for them, or the Red cameras really do look as good as the same as film.

Which is great, but so much for the revolution: Meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss!

Demystifying camera specs,view in online flash

FreshDV has been given permission to host the Panavision/Canon talk I mentioned earlier. The films are lower (but still good) inline flash movies you can easily watch in your browser. Some of the detail if the powerpoint presentations is lost but it's still worth a look

 Watch online here. The first five videos are online, the next two to follow later this week.

Demystifying Digital Camera Specifications

Found this via Mike curtis' new Pro Video Coalition blog. It's a presentation given by Larry Thorpe of Canon and John Galt of Panavision (the direct link to part one is here) and a lot of the terms regarding digital imaging technology and what this all means. The big sentiment of the talk seems to be to debunk the idea that a camera's pixel resolution equals its imaging resolution.

Beware the download is a monster, It's been broken down into seven chapters, you can get each in 480p. 720p or 1080p but the server doesn't seem to be very fast. It would have been nice if Panavision could have release these clip's on Bittorrent so those interested could grab the movies from peer to peer and watch at their leisure.

It's actually a great primer on image and optics and how video imaging video systems work, so worth the work of getting it down, especially for ANYONE interested in cinematography.

Feature film making in HDV

ALex cox's latest film Searchers 2.0 is a comedy road movie, with nods and references (as usual with Cox) to Hollywood's past, especially westerns. It was filmed in Monument valley, but most interestingly was made in 50i HDV on a sony Z1.

The budget for the film was a measly $175,000 (less than £100,000) but this was a fully professional production, with veteran DOP Steve Fierberg head of the camera department, in a production that was backed by the BBC and low budget legend Roger Corman, and produced Robocop/Starship Troopers producer Jon Davison.

An interview at DV.com with Fierberg and gets the lowdown on why the Z1 was chosen over other more glamorous cams like the JVCs and Canons, and how the Z1 performed (quite well, apparently to the DP's surprise). One useful tip, to judge exposure, Fierberg set the zebra stripes to 105% and then tried to get everything under that, skies were darkened with a polarising filter and the final show was colour corrected in Avid Nitris. Cox also spills some of the beans on the production in an interview on his own website. He also talks about the production on his blog, though there are no links to the relevant articles, so you have to scroll down articles around mid 2006 and ending about 2007 for the relevant entries. One encouraging quote on the film's 2007 Venice Film Festival showing, "The screen is huge, and our film - shot on my funky Z-1 video camera - is in perfect focus, and the film sounds ten times better in the larger space."

Fierberg has also written about the film in the April 2008 edition of American Cinematographer, though the article is not available online.

The BBC will broadcast the movie this June, as it's a BBC co-production, hopefully it will also be available online via the iPlayer.

Another feature shot on the Z1 in 50i was the Irish low budget (€100,000) hit Once.

Extreme Indie Small Crew Filmmaking.

Two stories here about some low budget feature films with one-person crews. The first is on new animated Sita Sings The Blues, a strange blend of 20's American Blues and Hindu mythology. The 80 minute long film was animated entirely by one artist, also the writer , producer and director Nina Paley. After six years of production, for a budget of $200,000, the film received its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film was made mostly in flash with some hand painted images scanned an animated in After Effects. The project started on a lowly Powerbook Laptop, but was finished (in HD) on a Intel Mac Pro (story via www.wired.com).

While obvious it is a tremendous achievement to design and animated a feature length film on your own. Sita is made with the necessary support of voice actors, a sound designer and a composer. The Lone Filmmaker on the other hand is trying to make a film entirely on his own: writing, acting, directing, costume design, makeup, cinematography, editing, composing. While one can't doubt the commitment and enthusiasm of the filmmaker, Robert Hindle, this seems a pretty cart-before-the-horse project.



Inspired by the video-blogging success of Four Eyed Monsters, the gimmick of a true one man feature is designed to garner attention on Youtube rather than produce a really great film. (also, one would think it advisable to make a normal film first before embarking on this extreme sports filmmaking style project). Four Eyed Monsters started as a film and became a blog about distributing the film. It seems the films that his girlfriend is making about him are the starting point for this project (Some have already hinted at a Lonelygirl15 style fakery). Unfortunately his audience in the regard is dropping off. After getting around 400,000 views for his inaugural video post, his subsequent video views have dropped to around 15,000-30,000 per video.

That said there is a lot of useful info buried in these blogs for those not on such a low budget, low manpower project (like what insurance cover you can get), though it often is swamped out by some rather cringey LG15 style goofing around with his girlfriend.

Previous Single Handed (or as-near-as) productions of note are the very professionally produced Lisa Gerrard documentary Sanctuary and the truly bizarre experimental animation We Are The Strange. by M.Dot.Strange.

The Future of 3D.

It's not news that 3D (or better stereoscopic) film is making a return to cinemas (of course it's been a mainstay of Imax for nearly a decade). However it is hotting up and starting to make roads into the feature film mainstream beyond CG animation projects.

A three good articles to read:

From Variety Online, this interview with James Cameron, who has made a number of 3D films (the two undersea documentaries on HD for Imax and the Terminator2: 3D ride for Universal studios) talks about the challenges and opportunities of 3D (or stereo as he prefers to call it) while he is shooting his first 3D feature film. Cameron is at the very top end of the filmmaking spectrum, commercially and technologically. Almost every feature film he's made from Terminator 2 on has been the biggest budget movie to date. This latest project , Avatar, STARTS with a budget of $195m (and I don't think Cameron has brought a movie in on budget since Aliens!)

Second. two articles on Lower budget production. Also from Variety online: The Mortician (a British film) and Dark Country have single figure million dollar budgets and are thriller/horror films, genres more traditionally have been associated with gimmicks like 3D. An interesting quote from the article: "For 3-D evangelists, this is both good news and bad. Good news: There is growing acceptance of the digital 3-D format. Bad news: The arrival of low-budget 3-D indies could undermine efforts to position 3-D as a premium format that can command higher ticket prices." There is another article here, from Showreel Magazine specifically on the making of Dark Country (which is also using the new RED ONE cameras). Dark Country is interesting as it is specifically the sort of situation Cameron discusses in his article, of low budget character centered drama by a first time director, previously an actor ratherthan someone from aVFX or technical backgroud, that stands is contrast to Cameron's own position as a filmmaker with a huge budget and resources as well as a phenomenal understand of the technical processes of film production.

HD versus film for TV

This is an old article but an illuminating one. This is a report (in word doc format) from the august British Society of Cinematographers, on a BBC HD day in September 2006, where the message was sent out by Alan Yentob no less, "Drama on Film has got to stop!" (here it is in google HTML format). The reason is, apparently that the MP4 encoders that the BBC will use for HD cannot handle the random grain pattern of film. However (as pointed out in the article) this will also count for pseudo film effects added in post, or in low light situations where gain has to be used for HD. Basically the BBC (in the guise of chief technologist Andy Quested) is decreeing to producers how shows have to look in order not to annoy picky license fee payers who've just bought expensive HD ready TVs and get grumpy about things like a grainy image. So more Hotel Babylon gloss, less Life On Mars grit.

Life on Mars incidentally, and its follow up Ashes to Ashes are both shot on Super16 specifically for aesthetic reasons. (ITV's twinned shows Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach are shot of film and HD respectively for similar reasons). It would be interesting to know how Kudos, the production company behind Life On Mars and Ashes to Ashes managed to get that one past the boffins at the Beeb. Has policy changed since again 2006? This document from Kodak (PDF) lists Ashes to Ashes as using stocks from fine grained 50D all the way to grungy and fast 500T ASA stocks. Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes do use a lot of slow motion effects that may have compelled them to use film over HD. Bear in mind that all this time, Dr Who, one of the Beeb's biggest shows is still being shot on 576i SD and deinterlaced in post.

Guardian's "Making a Video" guide online

The Guardian included a handy guide to "Making a Video" on Saturday. It's aimed squarely at the amatuer and beginner (no bad thing) but still contains a few useful tit-bits for the no-budget filmmaker. The whole thing is available online at the link above.

Probably the first thing any aspiring film maker should read is Peter Bradshaw's "How to make a Bloody Awful Video (it's easy)".

"Lenny's Luck"

I have completed my latest short Film "Lenny's Luck". It's inspired very loosely by a story about the great jazz guitarist and recording technology pioneer Les Paul, though I've jazz up the "facts" so, you should consider all elents of the story as purely fuctional, and any similarities purely coincidental.

The film was shot in 1080i HDV on a Sony Z1E. We used Cineframe 25 mode and recorded the sound on camera. I directed and recorded sound. Karen Savage did lighting and camera, Aysegul Epengin produced and was responsible for art direction.

Anthony Tivey served double duty as Gaffer, and then needed to be drafted in to play "Lenny" when our lead actor failed to turn up. He did a fine job, despite the fact that he never saw the script, and about the only meaningful direction I gave him was "can you do an American accent?" In fact all the cast we great and I'm thoroughly grateful to them all.

The film was largely shot in one day in a Studio in Chichester University with a few pick ups filmed at Portsmouth University a week or so later. Post production was done on iMovie and in Garageband, using the great new feature of being able to play music while watching the video. Titles were done in Gimp.

The film was premiered at Portsmouth University's Wiltshire Studio 1 on the 29 October, and was projected in High Definition. The video will be posted online in the new year. In the mean time here is a link to a gallery of behind the scenes stills.

HDV Short: Production

well, the short film is finished and here are some points. I'll split this into two posts with this one concentrating on the actual shooting.

The shoot went quite well as both actors were very professional and worked well with the director. While this post will deal with the technical side of the production I should obviously emphasise that without a good story and decent performers, then great technical proficiency is irrelevant. we had a small crew, of four, with Karen and myself swapping between camera and lighting and sound, and a friend Grace acting as continuity supervisor and general PA. Four really this wasn't enough, especially as one crew member at a time was required to baby-sit my daughter (Ayşegül, my wife, was directing, and little Leyla was actually one of the actors, very good she was too)

Lighting. Karen Savage who is co-credited with lighting takes the credit for the success of the lighting in this project. We used 1000w open face lights ("redheads"), which worked well for general overall lighting but were hard to use for lighting close ups or detail. Really even for low budget productions, it seems that some low power Fresnel units would be required. The Z1 is not a particularly light sensitive camera, and in even reasonable light interiors, we found ourselves always on the edge of under exposure. We tended to be around the 1.6 - 2.2 stop area. This is fine as really we wanted an open iris to achieve shallow depth of field.

We tended to bounce the light a lot (direct light with the redheads would have been to harsh in the confined space. This softened the light nicely but made modelling tricky, especially backlighting. One of the advantages of the location was the way from the dining room and living room, and to the kitchen was semi open plan which meant we could get backlights a healthy distance so the backlighting effect was subtle. In my opinion, backlighting is REALLY important in video, it helps alleviate that flat video look, but needs to be subtle.

Gels on the light made a big difference. Even just a little blue made a redhead resemble daylight, while a 1/8 CTO on a key-light would punch up skin tones nicely. Again, it's GOT to be subtle or it looks like bad mixed source lighting.

Focus. Well, this is high definition after all, and what's the point of shooting HD if it's soft? Focus is MUCH more critical in HD. Some sort of monitoring system is essential. We used my ibook, taking a firewire line from the camera, downscaling to DV, and then playing the results live through a programme called BTV pro. It's just about acceptable for judging SD focus but not even close for HD. We have several shots that are just a little bit soft. the Z1 has peaking in the viewfinder( peaking finds sharp edges in the image, and highlights them in the 'finder - as sharp edges must be in focus) and expanded focus (zooms in the middle of the image but only in the 'finder), though CF25 softens the image somewhat so peaking isn't as effective. The expanded focus feature is OK, but still, the little monitor isn't sharp enough for HD focusing. You can try the old zoom in/focus/zoom out method, but then you won't be able to use the cameras rather nifty shot transition feature for pull focusing. What's the point of pull focuses (pull foci?). Also, faces tend not to have sharp edges, so focussing on them isn't as easy. One solution might be a target card of some sort, that could be focused on when setting up shots.

Additionally I have noticed on some of my other footage that there seem to be better areas of the lens. Fully wide open (1.6) or at either the widest or longest ends of the lens, the image loses a bit of sharpness, but the image really pops out as being high definition in the middle range of the lens. Now this is not based on systematic testing, but one looking at rather off the cuff shooting. Maybe some later tests will confirm this, but I need to get my hands on a proper testing chart AND access to a proper HD broadcast monitor.

Highlights: HDV (at least the Z1) does not handle highlights any better than DV. Really, for a truly film like image you need to keep large areas below 100IRE. White walls, windows, skies etc. need to be controlled! (How do you control skies? I'll get to that...). In the past when shooting mixed light I would have recommended gelling lights to match daylight coming through windows, now I could recommend going the other way. To get good results, either invest in plenty of CTO and ND gels, big, 1.5 metre wide sheets of the stuff, on 100 metre rolls! Expose for highlights, and then add fill in order to balance your contrast ratio. Sometimes you might get good results shooting after dark and simulating light coming through windows with a couple of 800w or a 2K light, maybe gelling them with ½ or ¼ CTB to give a subtle mixed light effect. We did that for one scene and it worked well, though you can see if you look in the final shot that we cheated and placed the light indoors.

As for skies, which look rather ugly when blown out to white on video, i think the best bet is either to plan exterior scenes where you can see the sky, or ALWAY shoot with the sun at least 45° behind the camera. I've got some nice blue skies and cloud patterns to expose well when following this, but as soon as I pointed the camera at all towards the sun's direction, even when the sun had dropped below buildings, the sky was an ugly blocked out white. There might be something that can be done with Sky replacement in after effects, but that of course limits your freedom with camera movement, and requires extra time with After Effects or something similar in post.

I would also recommend shooting as much as possible towards the even, or heading as far north (or south if you're in the southern hemisphere) as you can. I remember seeing Richard Attenborough on an BBC show about British film in the 60s waxing lyrical about "that northern quality of light". What that refers to is that at ANY given time of the year, in the north, the sun will be lower in sky (the same is true the further south you go in the southern Hemisphere) and at lower angles you get a better quality of light because the sunlight has to travel through more atmosphere, and is therefore slightly softer. Anyway, long and the short of tit is, try and use the sun as a key light in all exterior scenes, and not as a backlight unless you have a truckload of HMIs for fill/key lighting, or want a specific cameo light effect.

I'm trying to figure out exactly which Picture Profile settings really get the best out of the Z1 - I'm leaning towards sharpness set to 7-8, Black stretch on, Cinematone setting 1, though the added contrast of Cinematone is a little scary (lots of fill required) it does strengthen the blacks, while black stretch also gives you a bit more leeway in the shadow details. We dialled sharpness back to 2 for our film and it really does look soft in general.

One of the areas I think Low budget filmmakers using HDV must think about is using filters (polarisers, grads, NDs, diffusion, etc.) on the cameras to compensate for the formats shortcomings.

Cineframe Initially I was suspicious of this mode, and I still won't recommend it to others wholeheartedly, but I must admit I'm coming around. It does look very film like (especially when transferred to SD) and it does get rid of some of the MPEG compression artefacts. When converting 50i to 25p in post, the de-interlacing seems to leave behind artefacts from both the 4:2:0 colour sampling issues AND the extra detail from the interlace jaggies. Going CF25 seems to avoid this, though it IS noticeably softer. I notice that while CF was poo-pooed initially in many blogs and discussion boards, a few are coming around to it now, particularly David Newman, of Cineform. However I've not used any really highly rated de-interlacers (magic Bullet, Nattress Film effects et al) so I've not really have the chance to see what the best that can be achieve. I've used some free FCP de-interlacers, or the ones in Virtual Dub or MPEG Streamclip, and after all you get what you pay for.

Conclusions With HD, Everything shows up. The odd cables in the background, lights reflected in shiny surfaces, crew reflected in glass, creases and stains in clothes. On Standard Definition, these things could be got away with, but NO MORE. You MUST double check constantly whether crew members' coats, make up kits, cables bits of light stands are in shot or not. you must take much greater care when shooting HDV. It just shows mistakes up much more clearly, even when down-converted to SD. When the image is sharp clean and well exposed, it does sort of pop out at you, and other less precise shots will suffer by comparison. The much ballyhooed compression artefacts aren't really an issue unless you're REALLY going the Saving Private Ryan path, but de-interlacing does throw up the odd hidden things. You really have to pay attention to set design. Us DV filmmakers have been dealing with the deep DOF for a while and to be honest it's not the deal-breaker for me that it is for some. I'll just back away and zoom in, keep the iris open and maybe go for a slightly cleaner set and background than normal. For outdoor shooting think about where you're pointing it in terms of how the background looks. - I can see polarising filters making a big comeback. Should I ever get a Z1 of my own I can see myself wanting to invest in a set of filters (polariser, a variety of NDs, a few grads, some tints) in order to make the image as pretty as possible before it goes to tape.

Next entry I'll deal with Post Production.