Kingdom Workers – Shot on Sony FS100
Back in October I had the pleasure of working on a promo project for a local client, Christ in Youth. CIY projects are always a pleasure to work on, because they understand the value of well-produced content that tells a clear message with compelling visuals. They have a very creative team that actively scripts, produces and edits all sorts of content for their nationwide event tours. It’s refreshing to work with people that are willing to put in the pre-production time and effort. They are a client that Get It. For this project, they brought me in as Director of Photography. I also operated the camera on most of the shots.
The creative brief for this particular project called for a way to creatively showcase stories and footage from previous attendees of the Move conference. They had footage and compelling stories of high-school kids who had started community projects, raised money to assist with third-world aid, etc. They wanted to intercut these stories with a scripted narrative, delivered by the Move team leaders. I had several conversations with director MD Neely, and he pitched the idea of using a 16mm projector and film reels as a visual prop to help us transition from narrative to video and back. We settled on using a livingroom-type scene, where the Move team would be gathered to view these stories projected on the wall. There were a lot more details to work out (more on that below), but this was the overall creative idea. CIY’s Eric Epperson scripted the narrative, and Jon Hill was the visual effects post wizard.
Here, check out the finished promo video. Notice how we worked with static, lockoff shots for the narrative in the first few minutes, and then picked up the pace with camera movement when the stories begin. Below, I’ll dig a little deeper into the production and technical side of how we accomplished this project…
In pre-producing this project, we had to choose between filming the attendee stories projected live during the shoot, or doing greenscreen and adding them later in post. After much discussion and some testing, we eventually settled on doing it in post; the main reason was that some of the story footage hadn’t yet arrived, and there was also concern that it would be a very difficult setup to light properly…not to mention timing issues with our scripted lines! Doing it as greenscreen was something of a safety net…we could adjust the look of the “projected” footage, and swap out clips to better suit pacing of the piece. It was going to create more post-work, obviously, so I had some conversations with the VFX guy, and we made sure he was on-set the day of the shoot to help supervise VFX shots.
This project’s budget was tight, and that generally means a DSLR camera shoot. But I had some worries about keying our more complex moving shots from Canon 5D MKII footage, and also the brick walls and texture in our location. With fine brick detail on in basically every direction of our set, it was potentially a moire artifact nightmare. I knew that I could use shallow depth-of-field to throw the walls out of focus in the background, but our shot list called for some wide shots that would show the brick walls, so that was a major concern. What tipped us over the edge to choose the Sony FS100 camera instead of DSLRs, was the fact that we could not use a 1/48 shutter speed on the 5D.
As I mentioned, we planned to use a very cool looking 16mm film projector in some of the shots, and we planned to let the light from the projector flare our lens at times. In testing, it became obvious that the projector was synced to 1/48th, and with a DSLR locked to 1/50th we were going to get rolling sync lines. You can see that clearly in this test footage. That was the final nail in the coffin for the DSLRs; CIY scratched up more in the budget, and we got a local FS100 camera rental. I also rented an Atomos Ninja recorder along with the FS100, so we could utilize the cleaner 4:2:2 HDMI tap out of the back of the FS100 to record straight to ProRes 422. The FS100 internal AVCHD encoder is very, very good…but the Ninja recorder was an option available to us, and I wanted to make things as clean as possible for the VFX & post team at CIY. These are the types of issues that experienced shooters will identify before a shoot.
I provided the lens package for the FS100, my set of five Zeiss Contax primes; 21mm, 28mm, 50mm, 85mm, 135mm, as well as a 2x extender for the 135mm. We mainly lived on the 135mm for talking-head closeups, and the 21mm for wides. (I’ve since added the 100mm Macro to my lens set, which would have come in handy for some of the projector b-roll shots). The lenses are all f/2.8 or faster, but we lit the set for f/4.0 so we could limit missed-focus, and show more context of our beautiful set space. I was going to be operating on most of the shots, and with some dolly moves I didn’t really want to pull focus on a wide-open telephoto lens by myself. I can do it, and I do it a lot on a regular basis, but I’d rather that not be a slowdown, when we needed to concentrate on getting solid performances and lines from our talent. So I had our gaffer light the main area of the set for f/4.0 on the FS100 at 0dB gain, and we used 3dB on a couple shots in darker areas of the set, and once or twice dropped the stop to f/2.8.
Production called for a pre-light on the afternoon of Day 1, and a full day of shooting on Day 2. I knew in advance we would want a pool of light around our talent, providing soft, flattering frontal light, and then falling off into darkness around the “livingroom” set. So I spec’d the lighting with a big Joker HMI in a large china ball overhead, so that we could shoot in all directions, and augment our setup with Kino Flos providing rims and fill for the closeups. Since we were shooting with speaking lines, and the projector makes quite a racket, we simulated the stuttering light of the projector by aiming a 250w tungsten head through a box fan, and spun the fan blades manually. We only used this effect on a few closeup shots, for the people that were sitting near the projector. To accent the deep space and warm wood & brick tones of the warehouse space, we placed ARRI 1Ks and 650′s kicking rims back towards the set, and also playing in cuts across the walls and floor. The warm tungsten lights were a nice color contrast to our daylight balanced key lights, and that color contrast helped define depth in the space.
One of the biggest hurdles we ran into on the day of the shoot was discovered about 30-minutes into the first audio take…it turns out that our location was loading in a semi-truck full of furniture in the warehouse space directly below us. With forklifts and workers banging around downstairs, it was a deal-killer for audio. These are the sorts of things that always bite you…the owners who rented the space to CIY didn’t think to inform us of that minor detail. So we had a little pow-wow with the crew loading furniture, and were able to get them to commit to being finished by a certain time about halfway through the shoot day. We then flip-flopped our production schedule, using the head of the day to shoot all the MOS b-roll shots and coverage while they happily banged around downstairs. After lunch, with the crew downstairs finished unloading, we managed to push through our audio takes in blessed silence. Audio crisis averted. This is what pros do…work around the issues and get the shoot day wrapped on schedule.
We hooked up a SmallHD DP6 monitor to the FS100 HDMI output, because the FS100 stock monitor is rather soft, and hard to pull focus on. I then used SmallHD’s HDMI splitter accessory to tie in the Atomos Ninja recorder. The Ninja does not trigger start/stop automatically with the FS100, due to some issue with a non-standard LANC protocol that Sony is using on that camera. So when we rolled, I manually rolled both the FS100 internal record, as well as the Ninja recorder. We used SSDs with the Ninja, and had no issues with it in terms of performance. However, I would say that the Ninja monitor is subpar and not even close to useful for monitoring and pulling focus. It’s acceptable for reviewing footage, but it desperately needs some UI fixes and a few useful playback features. Also, Atomos offers basically no options on the Ninja for file-naming and folder structure on disk, which makes organizing things in post annoying. And there’s the little annoyance of having to do pulldown removal before you can edit with the Ninja files. With those caveats, the Ninja did a fine job and provided clean ProRes 422 footage. The FS100 was configured with AbelCine’s AB_RANGE Picture Profile, which they’ve demonstrated shows the full dynamic range of the FS100′s sensor, and has filmic contrast and color.
For the greenscreen shots where we dollied with talent in the foreground, we used tracking markers on the greenscreen, and there was a lot of hand-work in post with multiple tracks and parenting tracks to other tracks. I’m not an After Effects guy, so I’m thankful that post wizard Jon Hill was on-set to help us with that aspect of the shoot. We did what he said, and I’m told that the post process was about as seamless as you could hope for. The lesson there is, know what you know, and call for help when you don’t. We weren’t sure how hard it would be to key in projected footage if the greenscreen was thrown out of focus, so I filmed those foreground dolly shots both ways…with the talent in focus, and then with the greenscreen in focus. It turned out that Jon found it much easier to key in the projected video shots when the greenscreen was sharp, and talent was thrown out of focus. I’m really happy with how those shots look, they’re visually seamless to me.
For the low-angle dolly moves of our brick wall and greenscreen, we used my Kessler Cineslider. We also used the slider up on the KPod legs for the tight b-roll shots of our projector as it wound through a reel of film, and ultimately rolled out of film (seen in the final edit). We used a rented dolly on straight track for the talking-head closeups, which all were moving shots in the second half of the edit (when pacing picks up). For the jib moves, we used CIY’s AdvantaJib and dolly/track setup.
So that’s about it…that’s how we did it. It was by no means a perfect, flawless shoot…but I’m delighted with how it turned out, and it’s going to serve CIY’s needs perfectly. The last thing I wanted to note; this project was completed almost exactly as it was conceptualized, scripted, and storyboarded. I personally believe that is the mark of professionalism…not just making pretty images, or technically sound images…but in delivering a specific look that the client wants, and executing that plan with precision and within budget.
You can learn more about CIY and Move at ciy.com/move
