Last week I took a day off from working and, well, worked.
My friend was working as production manager for documentary filmmaker Alla Kovgan on a film they were shooting this week in New London, CT. They brought in a DP from Armenia (Mko Malkhasyan) who Alla had worked with previously on her STUNNING dance-film Nora, which they shot in Africa. I am a huge techno-dweeb, especially when it comes to cameras, and they were shooting on the RED One, a new-ish camera that I had only worked with for a tiny bit before but am planning to use on an upcoming project, so I volunteered to go down and help out on the shoot for a day and learn a bit about working with the camera.
The RED One came out about two years ago, but was very hard to get your hands on until about a year ago. It shoots in a very high resolution called 4K, which is more than five times the resolution of my EX-1 (or the Canon 7D), and also shoots RAW images, meaning that you have an immense amount of control over the image after it is shot. While this is certainly true with more “conventional” formats, that you can tweak your footage to give it a different look, there is more control in doing so with RAW images without adding unwanted artifacts or noise to the image. Basically it is an ideal format for filmmaking. The RED also allows you to use cinema lenses, which are typically the best quality lenses available. For this production they had rented an Angenieux Optimo 24-290 zoom lens. The thing was HUGE, longer than the camera itself, weighed about 25 pounds, and has a price tag of (I believe) close to $100K.
I drooled over the camera for several minutes, but then it was time to get to work, and it was great to do so with these very thoughtful filmmakers. There was a decent sized crew, maybe 18 people, and the talent was about 25 middle school students. We were shooting them on the boardwalk of Ocean Beach playing games like “telephone”, “ring around the rosey” and “red light, green light”. (I have to confess I don’t know exactly what the film is about. I know it was commissioned by Connecticut College’s art department in relation to a performance piece they were doing.) It was quickly apparent that Alla is a VERY detail-oriented director, and she seemed to have every shot clearly mapped out ahead of time. She did an excellent job of managing all the kids, some of whom got a little unruly at times after doing several takes of a shot.
I was delighted to see that the camera itself function, more or less, like other cameras. Since it is basically a big computer, it is a little more menu-driven (instead of having a lot of external switches for normal controls) than some cameras, but I have grown fairly accustomed to that. I do not think you’d need an IT-degree to figure it out, as long as you are aware of most camera terminology. There was one problem at the beginning of the day regarding getting audio from an on-camera microphone (which they just wanted as a reference track, as they had the audio recorded separately by the sound guy). I looked at it with Mko (whose thick Armenian accent was a little hard to understand), and when we still couldn’t figure it out, I got out my iphone and got on the RED User Forum, a great online community of questions and answers regarding the RED camera. I found there was a little bug with the current firmware but doing a sequence of menu changes resolved it. (Definitely a smart phone and forums like REDuser or DVinfo can be life savers when on a set!) The images from the camera looked stunning, and certainly Mko and Alla’s very particular framing, lighting, and direction played a huge part in that as well. The entire rig is big, and certainly the lens factored in. This made me realize that lens selection will play a large part in putting together a package for my upcoming project, which may require more handheld work.
I am also looking forward to the arrival of my Canon 7D, as the images I have seen online from this camera, while different, are also quite cinematic. I don’t really expect a camera that is 1/10th the cost as the RED to be equal, but in the end (especially on a smaller screen, like online), the differences might be smaller than expected. I guess it is good that we have all these options. It’s a fun time to be a camera-geek!
