San Francisco 48 Hour Film shot on 5DmkII
 

Just posted our film from this past weekend's competition here in San Francisco:

Sur Mesure: Journeys in Transpersonal Haberdashery on Vimeo

Shot this entirely on the 5DmkII, lens details are below the video. This is our second film with the 5D, and the first since the firmware update - which made a huge difference in it's suitability for the task.

Evan:

Evan: Great images set up by great lighting.

The Genre is a tough one, but you guys mostly handled it well.... it did get a little tedious at some points, and could have used some slashing-- something you never get to do in these 48 hours things.

The camera showed well !! How did the screening look. That was an issue with my first involvement in the SF 48hour.

Screening was ok but not great - delivery format was letterboxed DV, so right there you lose a lot of the quality the camera produces. Then they burn it to DVD, and the theater projector is 16x9, everything's stretched out a little... so it definitely could have been better.

Didn't really matter though - the audience reaction to the video was incredible, we couldn't have asked for more. I think it's really more of an 'audience' movie - when I show it to individuals it gets a few laughs, but groups seem to really get into it a lot more. I know what you mean about it getting a little tedious at some points but that actually seems to work to it's favor with a big audience - when everyone's laughing it's easy to miss stuff if it's coming too fast, but the current pacing seemed to hit the audience with something new right about when the laughter was dying down... wasn't something that I planned but glad it worked that way, and it's a good lesson in taking the audience into account when editing.

Let me ask you a question, because I'm getting more and more interested in getting one of these cameras. For sound, do you record onto a DAT or another camera? I'm assuming you would on any production anyway, but some of the smaller run and gun stuff that I do requires easier sound set ups than hiring a sound guy with a DAT.

It's so much easier for me to just plug a lav mic into my XL2. What did you guys, or what does anyone, do for sound with these cameras?

I found out about this AFTERWARDS! A friend went and told me it was a good show. I guess I'll have to check this section more often. my bad.

We've used a Zoom H4 for our last two projects (including this one) and I just got an H4n last week which I'm using now. Combined with Pluraleyes, which auto-syncs the audio back to the camera footage in FCP, it makes for an easy dual-system setup which is almost as convenient as single-system.

I've been traveling for a week so I haven't had a chance to try the new Magic Lantern firmware, but it sounds like that combined with a juicedLink may make for a good single system setup - I'm planning to try it out later this week. I can see uses for both setups though - for instance on handheld stuff I'd rather not have audio cables running to the camera so I'd likely use the Zoom instead.

Also, to update the original post - just found out we won the audience choice award for our screening! Unfortunately we have to wait almost a month to hear what the judges thought of it.

Awards ceremony was last week - judges awarded us Best Acting (Individual) for the performance of our lead actress, Brenda Usher-Carpino. She really made the film for us - we just sat her down and gave her a brief description of the character and she took off with it. She gave us so much to work with the hardest part was deciding what to keep in the film.