Day One of Three – “Prozak”
To paraphrase Yogi Berra… this short is half experimental, half narrative, and half something completely different. “Prozak” is a story of a woman on the road to self-discovery through Buddhism when psychology fails to help her find her way. The narrative portion is easy enough. What makes this experiential is that we’re shooting this sync sound project with a still camera.
The Canon EOS 1D Mark II N is an SLR camera with the ability to shoot roughly 48 frames at 8.5 frames-per-second. This translates to roughly 6 seconds per clip. Ultimately, we’re hoping for a film finish since the files we’re shooting with are larger then 2K or (2048 vertical).
Today we shot the first three scenes of the short in an office in Beverly Hills. It’s a funny process we’re shooting here. Neither still nor motion. I have often been reminded of Andy Laszlo’s book title, “Every Frame a Rembrandt”. (One of my favorite cinematography books by far.) Almost all the footage today was shoot at the M2 setting which translates to 2,544 x 1696 pixels and with the JPEG compression rate set to the highest quality.
To make the best use of the medium, I decided I’d control certain aspects of shoot ing in the following way. Limited depth-of-field was something the director (Deja) requested. I opted to shoot with mostly an ƒ2 and adjust the shutter speed to fit the narrative. Slow shutters for dialogue and shots where the movement of the actor could use some blur. Faster shutter for shots shat required a crispness to them. To accommodate that, I adjusted the ISO from roughly 100 to 1000. Artifacts from increasing the ISO do not appear to significantly degrade the image.
After taking color temperature readings, I also adjusted the White Balance preset from 4200K to 4600K.
We’re composing for 1.85 with a little wiggle room on the sides for post repositioning of the frame and plenty of room on top and bottom. I’ve placed masking tape on the LCD to mark the to and bottom of our 1.85 frame (center extraction).
One last note about the project, we’re shooting with two lenses. A 50mm and an 85mm. With the 1.3 conversion factor, the focal lengths work out to 65mm and 110mm.
FYI – The chip on this camera is slightly smaller (20%) than a standard 35mm film frame (36mm x 24mm film vs a 28.7mm x 19.1mm CMOS).
Note to self…
BELOW Here are some test frames from our location scout earlier this week. I’ve touched the photographs up a bit in a color corrector just to see what could be done with just primaries.
(Slight desaturation of all colors and a slight increase to the contrast and brightness.)
(Boost to brightness and contrast.)
(Addition of blue and green in the mid tones.)
(Increase to the blues and greens in the mid tones and slight desaturation overall.)
(Slight increase in brightness and a decrease in contrast as well as a increase in the red to keep skin tones fairly true.)
(First shot of the day is a frame chart.)
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