The experimental short film I shot earlier this year finally made it to telecine. I’ve been known to say, things happen for a reason and for this project, the delay meant waiting until The Post Group could do our telecine. In that wait, it was possible to have their DI Colorist work on our project. Doug is a friend of mine and it was great working with him again.
As a recap, the project was shot using a Canon digital still camera shooting bursts of about 9 seconds or about 65 frames. We recorded dialogue along with the bursts as a scratch track. The clips were edited together, the dialogue was recorded and added and then, the whole thing output as an uncompressed quicktime. We color corrected the final cut on a da Vinci 2K with an HDCAM output. I wish I had frame grabs to show you, but worry not, I’ll have a DVD of the project in a couple of days and I’ll get grabs then. It really looks great.
Camera phone – not great, but if you look real hard, you’ll see Doug working the controls.
So what did we learn. Well, I’m not so sure I’d like to use this process again unless there was more money invested in the project. The complete camera package was donated by the folks at Canon and for that I’m grateful. If we had some additional funds, I think I would have preferred to rented older manual focus lenses with focus marks on them or if we would have had more time, mark the lens we did have with focus marks. As it was, I was operating the camera alone with no assistant so marks wouldn’t have helped much. I guess in addition to the lens a camera assistant would be a nice add too.
What I did like and Doug pointed out on a number of shots is the limited depth of field we got from that camera. We mostly stayed on longer lenses and I always shot with the lens wide open. It made focusing a nightmare, but the shots of our actors are beautiful and shallow in focus making for a very pleasing image and what might be considered “technical flaws” of our actor going out of focus made for a very impressionistic frame. In looking at the footage anew, I noticed that the choices I made concerning camera placement were very much dictated by a still camera aesthetic. Camera placement was dictated by what would make for a great still image which incidentally made, for what I think, a pleasing and very dramatic motion image. When you see the footage, you be the judge.
The image was sharp and fairly free of JPEG artifacts, colors we rich enough to be manipulated without too much degradation and the blacks stayed fairly rich but they were the first thing to fall apart when too much grading was added.
I do what to thank Deja for the opportunity to shoot her project and I can’t wait to get the DVD to show you what I saw.
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