Click here to view the embedded video.

I put together a little selection of shots from my first project with the Canon 7D. This shoot was for a web series called “The Romeo Files” for the non-profit Our Spirit.  All footage was shot 1080/24p and the primary lens was the Canon 17-55 2.8 and a few were shot with the Canon 70-200 2.8. You can read more about the shoot here.

Our biggest challenge technically was the audio.  The farm we were shooting on was right next to a fairly busy road, and we had A LOT of street noise.  I pretty much knew this from scouting the location, but when it came to shooting time, it seemed worse.  I think in the end it will be fine, but it was definitely a pain, as we would try to do pickup lines in between road noise.  This doesn’t make for a great situation for the actors to really get INTO their scene or the director to necessarily know if he got a good take performance wise.  In this case, the location was so great visually, and since the production needed a donated location we were probably limited to this farm anyways, but it just reiterates the point to ALWAYS THINK OF AUDIO.  First and foremost, really.  Again, Dave Manahan did an excellent job, though, and I think we have plenty to work with and even if there is background street noise, the dialogue is clear.

I got an opportunity on this shoot to work with some new gear.  The 7D was still great to work with.  In my previous post I went through the pros and cons based on the first shoot and I think most of those still hold true.  One major difference between this camera and a “proper” video camera becomes apparent when working in daylight.  Every video camera I work with has built-in ND (Neutral Density) filters to help control the light entering the lens, but photo cameras do not.  This is not really an issue usually for photographers, since they can adjust the shutter speed in order to keep the aperture where they want it.  When shooting video though, you typically want the shutter speed in a certain place all the time (typically 1/48 of a second when shooting 24fps) as the change in shutter speed effects they way motion is rendered.  So when shooting in bright light or day exteriors you typically want to incorporate ND filters so that you do not have to stop down the lens aperture a ton.  I have a few square 4×4 NDs that I can use with my mattebox, but what I just bought and used on this shoot was the very cool Fader ND.  This screw-on round filter adjusts the amount of ND (from 2 to 8 stops) as you spin it.  I don’t know exactly how it works, although I assume it has some type of opposing polarizing filters, but it worked and it was great.  I could set up my shot and if I wanted to be at say F4, and there was too much light I could just turn the Fader ND until I achieved proper exposure.  Too little light and I could turn the filter the other way or take it off.  This saved a ton of time over swapping out square filters and was much more tunable.  I think this type of filter is a MUST BUY ITEM for video DSLR shooters who plan to shoot outdoors.

I also got to use my rented 70-200 f2.8 Canon lens.  This lens costs about $1300 and I may buy something in this zoom range but renting for $30 for the weekend (from Calumet Boston) might be the way to go if I don’t often call for this length.  It’s an impressive looking lens to say the least and adds a bunch of weight to the camera.  I only used it a few times so really did not get to put it through it’s paces but I did use it for what ended up being one of the harder shots to do.  It’s a shot that seems simple, but getting focus proved to be a challenge.  I wanted to do a shot of two of the actors walking together down a path.  I knew I wanted this to be a long lens, shallow focus shot and the shot needed to last about 25-30 seconds to cover some voice-over.  I had the aperture at f4 and was almost at 200mm.  My fabulous assistant camera Will Cavanagh set about 6 or 7 focus points on the follow focus to correspond to the actors’ position on the path.  It took us about 7 or 8 takes and I think 3 times we had to redo our focus marks to get the shot right as it was a challenge to time the focus pull perfectly.  It’s the kind of shot you see on TV or movies all the time and looks rather easy, but I assure you, it is not.

So I thought I would put together a little video of some shots for people interested in seeing how this little camera works for filmmaking.  I am not using the recorded audio here, but just some of the video with music.

I am heading into a busy week working for 4 days on Cape Cod shooting stock footage with photographer Jack Hollingsworth on the 7D and Canon 5DMk2.  A different type of project for me and I am looking forward to it, and will definitely blog about the experience.

Here is the video.  Enjoy!

We had a pretty slimmed down crew yesterday with just a director, DP (me), producer, assistant camera/gaffer, sound, and three PAs.  With our three cast members and our makeup person the entire film had 12 people on set which seemed to be just the right number.  Everybody seemed to have something to do and I rarely felt like we needed another hand.  (This size crew is sort of the norm for me on these types of projects and I often wonder what the purpose is of the seemingly bloated sets of much bigger productions.)

This was also the first real shoot I was doing with my 7D.  I’ve had it for about a month and spent a lot of time testing it out, but this was the first time it was on the front lines.  The verdict?  I think it’s great.  It’s not perfect, but no camera I’ve used is.

Here’s what I really liked about it:

-The size is great.  Even with rails, mattebox, and follow focus (my new RedRock follow focus arrived the day before the shoot, and it was pretty essential) the whole package is small and light.  If I wasn’t using this I would have used the EX-1 with the Letus Extreme which is so much bigger.  That certainly would have worked for this shoot but I just liked not having to lug around such a big rig.

-Filmmakers are picking up these DSLR video cameras because of the depth-of-field control, and I loved having that.  I was not going for ridiculous, razor thin DOF on this shoot, but I certainly had more control than I do with the EX-1 alone.  And I did not miss the finicky-ness of the Letus adapter which I would have used to get a shallower DOF.  I think the image is cleaner and I don’t need to worry about separate focusing elements, edge sharpness or ground glass patterning.

-This was a case where I loved that recording quality sound on the camera was not really even an option.  I had a great sound guy in Dave Manahan, and he recorded sound separately on his recorder.  I never had to be connected to him, which made things much easier.  Obviously if the camera had better sound options that WOULD be better, but I liked not even having to worry about it.

-I used one lens all day, the Canon 17-55 2.8.  I have always used primes with the Letus (and I have a Nikon/Canon adapter so I can use them) but this lens was all I needed for the interiors we were shooting.  I rented a Canon 70-200 2.8 for some of the exterior shots, but we didn’t get to use it today.

-The pictures look great.  Steve and Robert (the director and writer/producer) came over today and we went through it all.  It’s pretty amazing that these pictures are coming out of a camera that costs only $1700.

Here’s what I didn’t like so much:

-Monitoring is a pain.  I have a small component HD monitor and a larger HDMI/SDI monitor for the director/client that I use, but on this camera when you plug in one of the video outputs (HDMI or composite) you lose the picture on the built in LCD.  That means that I would have to view the monitor too, which logistically for this shoot was not going to work.  I needed to have my eyes on the camera, so while we tried that setup for the first shot, we just stuck with the camera alone, and the director would watch the LCD with me.  I have a Zacuto Z-finder which is great for helping to set my focus marks, but I did not use it too much so Steve could see the LCD too.  It worked fine, but it’s not ideal for every shoot and I am looking into some different monitoring options so I can send HDMI to a small on-camera monitor and my larger director’s monitor.

-Another note on monitoring: I am used to my EX-1 where I what I see on that LCD is pretty darn close to what I see when editing.  That is not entirely the case with the LCD on the Canon or even the through the HDMI output.  Fortunately a lot of my tests with the camera have helped me to get more confident with what I am seeing on the screen.

-While the picture is great, especially at this price-point there are some limitations to the codec.  Most of which will not be noticed by 99% of the viewers but there are some things that a user needs to know are triggers.  Plus I think the images from the camera need a little more tweaking in post.  While I sometimes grade the EX-1 footage to give it a different look, many times the footage straight from the camera is perfect on its own.

But all in all I was very happy with the cast, the crew, and shooting with a newer camera.  Here are some frame grabs from what we shot yesterday.  Enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is a PSA I shot and edited for a non-profit organization called Our Spirit, a web-based spiritual resource for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) youth.

Produced by Robert Guthrie, Directed by Kent French, Music composed by Russell Wolff.

For more info check out my blog post.

This video, entitled “I Like”, is going to be used as part of the site and organization launch later this fall.  Robert had the script a while back, and we discussed several visual treatments for the piece.  In the end we decided on an extremely simple approach of just a stark white backdrop.  My initial concern was that this look could seem too “corporate” or too “clean”, but we did some tests and it seemed like the right approach.  In the end, I couldn’t have been happier with how it came out. The bright, young, colorful faces go perfectly on the clean, white background.

Robert worked with the Maura Tighe casting agency to find the majority of our wonderful actors. The rest we found through a local gay-straight alliance.  While Robert worked as producer/writer on this piece, his partner Kent French, a Boston-area actor, (and now a minister) directed our actors.  The location was donated by the First Church of Cambridge, who gave us use of their theater space.  It was a large, empty theater, but was quite “live sounding” and had large windows that we could control.  So we ended up shooting on the stage with the heavy curtains drawn to help drown out the Harvard Square traffic (which was problematic at times, but we were able to work around it) and deaden the sound of the room.  We had “just” enough space on the stage, but you can see in the pictures it was a fairly simple setup.

Robert and I have two other projects in the works for Our Spirit.  We are in pre-production now on a web series called “The Romeo Files”, which we are going to shoot and release this fall.  Next Spring, we hope to be working on his featurette entitled “God is Gay”.

You can check out the “I Like” video here (with music wonderfully composed by my friend Russell Wolff, a Nashville-based songwriter/producer).