Here's a few grabs from today's adventures. A rough grade only.


Lenslist.


Actual Airbournes - Kinoptik 5.7mm at f4-f5.6

On ground emulation - Noct-Nikkor 58mm at varying from f4 to f1.2 as light was lost due to time over-run.

The framing/composition of the ultra-wides is a bit off. This was forced on me by the confined workspace and the wide view of the Kinoptik which would otherwise pick up the camera/lighting pole I was using. The shots were effectively locked off with only limited range of movement available. When pilot and passenger were looking ahead, the composition was fairly okay.

Due to my mismanagement the wides were .mov files and the close-ups were .avi files. The .mov files were given a hasty colour/gamma adjustment, the .avi files got the quick Kodak 250 print look applied.

Now I need to rest my weary bones and sleep.


FOOTNOTE:


Here is the bit of vision grab 3 was extracted from :-

http://exposureroom.com/members/DARANGULAFILM.aspx/assets/6e540d13ebbe4de5928714d445c8a62f/

Here are a few pieces from last weekend. The SI2K again was operated in a "split" configuration. You may observe a bit of fixed pattern noise. One needs to remember to redo the "set black" after the camera has been on for a while. - I forgot.

FOX FEATHERWEIGHT TWENTYEIGHT SCN6 SHORTFIELD LANDING By Bob Hart On ExposureRoom (http://exposureroom.com/members/DARANGULAFILM.aspx/assets/6584ba69ca0f42a3a352405949b62c92/)

FOX FEATHERWEIGHT TWENTYEIGHT SCN6 EXTRACT By Bob Hart On ExposureRoom (http://exposureroom.com/members/DARANGULAFILM.aspx/assets/741fae0ddf2c4b6cbb115689d0d42e0e/)


Yes. - I know there is no trigger on the prop gun and I have been told it is smaller than the real thing. It was made in haste out of bed iron, chair tube, tractor pins, poprivets and other scraps and apparently the cocking lever is on top not the side. Well I can't always get it right and we don't have the real things running around in Australia to borrow or copy from. We are probably all the better off for that fact.

My DP and I have had a discussion on grading and post with SI2K footage.


Our question is, what is the correct or best way to grade the footage.

Not knowing better, our sense is that one applies the grade to the cineform raw file then render this out to the exhibition format.

Should the looks be used to final grade from or are they intended only to be a quick previewing tool?

Our situation is that because we are lacking computer horsepower, the SI2K footage is being given a fairly good preliminary grade over the raw image with cineform 32bit levels and colour correction tools with no look file applied. Then it is being exported to blackmagic codec for assembly/edit and final finesse of the grade.


Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Hi Bob,

The post house that I've a bit of work with here doesn't use the .look files but does use the white balance information. They cut on FCP, once the edit is locked down they export the cut to Pro Res and do their grading in Apple Color.
These jobs have mostly been TV commercials & a couple of music clips.

With Cineform releasing FirstLight I'm hoping to convince them to keep the .looks and just do their final little grading tweaks in Color instead of trying to recreate the whole look of the shot.

Ofcourse the best option would be to have a grading suit with Iridas Speed Grade that can work with the RAW and .look without having to bake in the white bal or colour.

For those who have an interest, here is a preliminary assembly of SCN5.

FOX FEATHERWEIGHT TWENTYEIGHT PRE-PRODUCTION TRAILER SCENE 5 ASSEMBLY By Bob Hart On ExposureRoom (http://exposureroom.com/members/DARANGULAFILM.aspx/assets/b32d389c3fc7455f8df597bc917c0c0b/)

(Aircraft enthusiasts and sound purists will pick the background FX sound of a Lycoming powered Cessna 172 instead of the Lycoming powered Maule M5 it should be. Still, this is no less legitimate than mainstream sound designers sexing up the sound of a Bell Jet Ranger with the signature heavier rotor beat of the Bell UH1.)

You may observe a fixed pattern artifact in the ground-to-airs - my mismanagement of the system. Firstly, make sure you set your black levels. Secondly, make sure you set your black levels. Thirdly, make sure you set your black levels and when setting black levels, don't be a nidiot and forget to cap the lens.

Am hoping to do a short Australian scene for the international shoot of the US based feature "Seeking Closure" on one day of the weekend May 30th-31st in Malaga.

Went on a recent shoot with SI2K owner in wet and rainy conditions. Obvious precautions apply as with any camera system. After an overnight shoot we found an artifact in low light conditions (early am twilight), switched heads and on later test of the original head after it had been relaxing for a while in a drier environment, found the problem was gone.

We suspect it may have been condensation built up on or near the sensor as there was a bit of a patchy dark blue sheen visible on the sensor from outside which later was gone.

The system seems intended to be weather resistant to the odd drops and splashes from rain covers being removed. I found myself becoming more concerned with protecting the lenses.

This leads me to wonder how the proposed new RED system, which appears to be stackable modules on rods, will cope with the wet with all those thin gaps in between modules for stray water drops to wick into. Unless they introduce overlapping faces with grommets or grommet the piggyback electrical conductors between the stackable modules, there will be a serious problem in the conditions we faced this past two days.

Also got to play with some real bells and whistles, big jib arm on Elemack on rails for an indoors location.

The project and location have to be kept discreet for now but hopefully I can advise of a website in the not too distant future.

Thanks for keeping us informed on your progress. Don't feel bad about the black balance problem. I soon discovered that doing a black balance without lens cap and with iris open can give some 'interesting' results. Thankfully in my case the result was so bad it was obvious in the viewfinder.

Slightly alter-topic.


Gavan O"Sullivan, who has generously DPed for me on the Fox Featherweight trailer scenes shot so far, had in his shed some left-overs from his days of owning and operating a 35mm ARRI BL film camera which he sold a few years ago.

The lenses had originally come with this camera but he had updated to Zeiss Ultras which departed with the camera. The lenses in the shed had been stored long term as backups but never needed.

He passed them to me to try on the SI2K.

These are Cooke "Speed Panchro Series II" 50mm T2.3 and 75mm T2.3.

Both were inhabited by fungus from living in Indonesia and Singapore for some years. As old cine lenses they exhibit the wear and tear of being workhorses with cleaning marks on the 75mm quite severe, which is why he had not used them on the high-end commercials he had then been shooting.

I took the 50mm apart and found that all the stains inside were removable from the glass, an unexpected bonus. The cleaning exercise was fraught with one or two perils.

The periphery of the glass elements is not chamfered and you need to beware of loose motes of glass coming off and getting into your polishing cloth. The fungus is now gone but there are a couple of faint scratches in its place, fortunately not critical.

The assembly method for the lens is "different" and there are some contrary fitments, so do not attempt to force anything. The lenses appear to be largely handbuilt so don't expect to be able to swap barrel components

The iris mechanism is not built into a self-contained module but is part of the centre barrel containing the centre and rear lens groups. If you decide to home-renovate, take care because all the little bits and pieces fall out and it is a monkey-puzzle to re-assemble, a three-hourer to nut out.

I put both lenses on the SI2K expecting the resuilts to be quite mundane. These are old tech, small in physical size, in appearance more like old 16mm C-mount lenses.

The lenses are idiosyncratic in function. I can't fathom why but I suspect the ergonomics share something in common with British car manufacture for the masses in the early 1950's and some of their aircraft cockpit layouts as well. Comfort and convenience for the human were not always part of the equation.

They have ARRI wing-style focus handles but these are prettys which serve a different function this time round. The ARRI mount does not have the key or bayonet channel to lock the lens from turning in the mount.

The focus is found, not by attempting to turn these wing handles, but by rotating the very front of the lens body. The wing handles in this instance are simply used to anchor the lens barrel from turning in the mount.

It gets a bit confusing because the lens barrel has witness marks and the ring they are on appears to be able to turn but it is not free to do so and is part of the machining.

To my surprise, the vision from these lenses is better than I expected. The image is crisp and the colurs faithful in spite of the marks on the front element of the 75mm.

On the chart, they don't test quite as sharp as the CP Ultra T* lenses but are sharper than the Nikons except the 58mm Noct-Nikkor, 55mm Micro-Nikkor and 28mm Nikon f1.4 which they are on par with. The 862line resolution block "pops" nicely and the 1080line block shows a moire pattern which means the camera sensor sees the lines.

There were of these a few among the ex-Boeing items listed on eBay a while back. If they are relisted they might be worthwhile at a cheap price but don't expect them to be flawless or easy to operate from go.


FOOTNOTE:

I can't post images as I now have Internet Explorer 8 and it won't open another web page like IE7 could.

Here is a link to a frame.

25 points of sharpen were added to provoke artifacts. - there is a trace of CA towards corners.

FURTHUR COOKE SPEED PANCHRO SERIES II ON SI2K FRAME 1 By Bob Hart On ExposureRoom (http://exposureroom.com/members/DARANGULAFILM.aspx/assets/e4ab33c0c0b44d98b06de58ebedd1a45/)

Steve Rice's SI2K got a workout last weekend on a short feature "Trespass" being shot at night by film school graduates.


Power ended up being an issue for us. There was a big lighting tower but no access to mains power, one outlet restricted to RCD testing only. A second smaller generator was also being used for lighting so we were wary of transients and surges and stayed with batteries.


First question.

Given that the SI2K is essentially an XP computer, has anyone an opinion on whether a mains power isolator - uninterrupted power supply for computers would provide adequate protection for the SI2K on a small generator.


Second question.

I was seriously embarrassed during a recent home-visit demonstration when a potential client requested we patch the SI2K in to his huge great home-theatre HDMI screen and I was not able to do it.

It seems that the ability to do so had disappeared with the upgrade to the latest firmware. I caught myself out badly as it had not entered my feeble brain to check. Previously I had just plugged one in and it had simply worked.


So in great anxst, I have since ventured into the forbidden zone in the operating system and enabled the second monitor, a bit like crawling into the lion's cage to set a mousetrap on the floor to test the lion's forebearance and hoping to be out again and the gate locked before the trap goes off. I was lucky and things seem to be in good order.

I find that the displayed image is underscanned inside a wide frame on the HDMI monitor screen. This is fine in the sense that things like booms in shot or vignettes when using a 35mm adaptor do not sneak into the frame undiscovered.

However it would be better to be able to use the full display area of the HDMI screen for image alone. Does anyone have any advice on whether this is possible? I tried all the choices on the HDMI television itself and did not reach a happy ending.


Any advice will be greatly appreciated.


Yes. The images below are a bit grainy, shot lenses wide-open which is not ideal and gain added.

Bob,
In answer to your first question, I would say the best way to protect the camera is running off batteries and let the charger run off the generator. But, what you ask is fine. A good UPS would protect the external power supply very well. What goes in on the 12V XLR connector should be clean.

The second question is a bit more problematic. We had a number of customers who had difficulty providing a proper on-set video feed to the secondary monitor. To avoid overloading the CPU, we restrict this output to 1280x720 during recording. This became the default in the latest released version.

What you tried - display of the clip player at a higher resolution when not recording - is OK. The clip player's deBayer algorithm is not ideal so a better preview would be using QT player or WMP using Neoplayer on another computer.

I'm not sure what you meant by underscanned. The data in the recorded file should be at the resolution you set the camera to. Any aspect ratio issues should be addressed by the video card control software and the display setup.

-Steve

Steve.


Thanks for your advice. My personal preference would be as you suggest, use the batteries. Steve Rice has a five hour battery and two v-mounts good for about 35 minutes each.

On the shoot the other night, there was a lot of standby time due to intermittent rain and we went way overtime. There was insufficient time before the next call to completely recharge the batteries.

I tried running a 12v power feed from a car into the location which was in bushland however the cable run was too long and too much voltage drop.


In regards the use of the term "underscan" I may be misusing it.

The SI2K image which the HDTV displays is a smaller rectangle inside the available screen area. This may be due to limited choices available on the HDTV. I won't know until I test on another display. As long as a director can have a video split, it is all that matters.

For those with an interest in things Western Australian, here is a link to a rough grading test of some footage shot for Steve Rice's project by Jim Frater yesterday. These are not the better shots but ones which I copied to my computer. (See Below).

"I BELONG TO THE SHADOWS" - PRE-PROD PROMOTIONAL TRAILER ROUGH GRADING TEST. By Bob Hart On ExposureRoom (http://exposureroom.com/members/DARANGULAFILM.aspx/assets/67daf742e2fc4444be7c2dd3db987675/)

The shakycam imaging of the first shot is intended to represent the view through a sniper's telescopic sight or binoculars and would have a vignetting effect added.



Maxtor compact "One Touch" USB drives are proving to be a bit cranky. Out of three, one no,longer works at all, one seems to abort out of copying an entire directory and one is satisfactory. Two do not work at all on my XP computer or another computer at work, but are okay on another and also a laptop tested.

The "My Book" style drives which require separate power seem to be fine, with no failures so far - touch wood.

The only thing I can spot is that it looks like he's already hit the ground and died (and completely still on the feet/boots) by the time the food tray drops to the ground.

Apart from that, nice work.

Andrew

Bob,
Very nice. I would find it interesting to see the same shots after grading.
Steve

Andrew.


The clip I posted is only my own rough assembly of some of the shots. I think Steve's directorial intent is that the girl remains frozen until the officer hits the floor then drops the tray. The sniper has sent a bullet past her left ear. She has been expecting it but is still shocked. In retrospect, she should have reacted even if having expected it.

I have not seen the other shots. These include a bullet injury painted into the officer's forhead, so all this is likely to have been covered.


Steven.

My "grade" as such, consisted of applying default look and bringing the whites up in the waveform. I am not the editor, who will likely work from the raw image. The lighting in the mirror shot was daylight spill through wide stable door and window plus one overhead camera lamp covered by a plastic cup.

For those interested, here is the pole rig we used for the in-air shots a while back. In this instance it was used for in-car shots.


Camera operator, Steven Rice.

Driver-Actor, James With.


Pole front-end locates in a large foam wedge in the gap between windscreen and coaming (dash). The operator holds the other end.


FOOTNOTE: Image changed for one of better quality.

Hi Bob,

That's quite interesting. And I realised after typing that it was a rough edit for the purpose of grading. (slaps self on forehead)

Actually, I thought what must have happened is that the girl was the assassin with a gun held under the tray ... which is why the baddie gets shot when he has opened the door and is facing the girl.

I do appreciate the clips that you post. It's all very interesting.

Andrew

Due to the smaller cams being committed to other projects, I took an SI2K out to chase aircraft last weekend.

It was the full camera/recorder unit assembly. After using the lightweight cameras I found it a bit of a handful and was lagging behind the action or overshooting a lot more. I am inclined to think I was unaccustomed to the mass and a whole lot of reflexes have to be re-learned.

Also, the Sigma-for-Nikon 50mm - 500mm f4 - f6.3 zoom is not a good choice for the SI2K It is not because of optical issues. The images are nice enough but the two-piece design of the lens is the achilles heel.

It breathes, not the image but actually. When the front section moves out during a zoom movement, there is a lot of air sucked into the body of the lens through the mount.

The lens picks up dust very quickly in its life and blows dust onto the sensor cover glass when you pull back to wide view. When you use it on an older Nikon FM2 SLR film camera, you may get dust blown into your eye through the viewfinder eyepiece or the doorseal gap.

The Mini head operated remotely on the cable is the next test for ground-to-airs.

Hey Bob,

The couple of times I've done in aircraft shots I've split the SI-2K - kept the recorder at my feet and had the smaller/lighter set up on the shoulder. It gave me more room to move in a small space but still had enough weight to help keep steady.

Rohan.


Yes. That's what we did for an in-air scene. I thought about it for the ground-to-air but was concerned about the cable as I have a tendency to wind them up around the tripod when chasing aircraft overhead.

Here is a link to a finished product, a music video which culminates in a car blow-up which was shot I understand with JVC GY cameras and the SI2K for 1280 x 720 slow-mo. I posted a link to the "kaboom" a while back.

YouTube - Slow Gun (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKCdBmxO_V8)

The 2Ks have been used on two 2009 Tropfest shoots so far over here. Both are pro-bono which means no money, just lunch, however it does achieve a profile of sorts.

If you look closely you will see the most bars---d elevated camera rig in the entire universe.

Due to no budget but a request for high overheads and a in-tree shot, a Photax light stand was turned upside down, the shaft inserted into the spare panhandle hole on the Miller tripod and the camera head remoted, lackied and safety-gaffered onto the other end, then the light stand elevated.

A dog to pan, tilt and trim focus but a good solution on the day. Let's see you do that with a RED or a Cinealta.

Both shoots trouble-free except for the second when I hung a toe in a power cable just as the camera finished writing the file.

The clips are still being recorded to files okay but something changed in the settings and I have confused them even more relating to time-code. So it is probably a reflash of the C:\> drive needed to fix it. Any hints as to how I may be mismanaging the timecode settings will be appreciated.

The clips now do not lay out in sequential order, so the last clip is hard to locate for on-set playback - my mismanagement most likely.

Here is a link to some behind-the-scenes stills of the most recent effort, worktitled "First Person Shooter" by Ed Love who also directed. It is a story of a teenager coming to grips with the death of his somewhat estranged father and their reconciliation when he comes back to put things right.

MobileMe Gallery (http://gallery.me.com/christoph.tylor/100016)

The stills were shot by the father of the teen actor on the most amazing mobile (cell) phone I have ever seen. It can surf the internet and it has a Garmin style GPS looking screen in it as well.

Hey Bob,

Had the same issue on a music clip that I shot last weekend.
Whenever the camera was powered down the windows clock would reset to a different time, meaning that the timecode would also reset. Thus the last shot wasn't the last shot when it came to playback & checking. A moment of great panic ensued before we figured out what had happened.
I'm assuming that there is an internal battery that has gone flat but I haven't pulled the camera apart to find out.
There is meant to be a new version of the camera software coming out shortly - I'll re flash the drive then.

Love the high camera rig - it's what makes the SI-2K so much fun.

Rohan.


Thanks for that lead on a memory battery. It never even entered my head but makes sense now. The camera has been at rest for a few weeks since I did the ground-to-airs at Serpentine and Murrayfield.

Going back over the order of those clips, I also found them to be randomised.

This camera body has to be one of the oldest of the current series body style as it was P+S Technik's demonstrator, so an expired battery makes perfect sense.

It has that well-used look, all corners polished off and a few dents, which took me to the manufacturing method when I decided to do a bit of panelbeating. - Even those little side vents which look like pressed grilles are CAD machined.

Our original scheme for the high shots was to use a boom pole but the soundman did not have a spare. Now a little hot head unit to go on a boom pole would be the duck's guts. I shall have to get on it.

Nice shots in your clip. What lighting scheme did you use?

Here is a link to the unlocked trailer clip.

REVISED TRAILER VERSION By Bob Hart On ExposureRoom (http://exposureroom.com/members/DARANGULAFILM.aspx/assets/a0130da30d1448e79e077cb1c092e8d9/)

To the purists, - yes the forest shot is softer. It was shot on a Sony HVR-Z1P with AGUS35 35mm adaptor and 135mm f1.8 Sigmatel lens.

To the audiophile, the 78rpm record recoveries were aquired via a modern Stanton electronic disco turntable with Ortofon 78 stylus and given some cleanup in Syntrillium Cool Edit Pro v1.5, which is still a favourite audio program for me. ( Cool Edit was aquired by Adobe and became Audition and now seems to have disappeared. )

As far as was possible, de-RIAA, then the original equalisation curves were applied. Parlophone recordings in particular come up very nicely if they are not too damaged.

Tropfest 1 was locked off last night and will be submitted today.


The director Andrew Pheasant is very pleased with the ability of SI2K footage to be graded. His wife, an artist was moved to comment favourably on the tonal range.


Tropfest 2 is offering a bit more of a challenge. The time limit is 7 minutes and there is 10 minutes of fairly tight assembly. Director Ed Love is anguishing over taking the scalpel to it and yet retain the pacing and emotional essence of the story.

The vision looks heaps better than I thought I had any right to expect, given the limited indoors lighting resources - available daylight spill and two 450watt tungsten equivalent household CFLs in old Photax photoflood parabolic reflector lamps with gels.


10/10 SI, though our skills and resources do not match.

First the sad news. The two shorts did not make the cut for Tropfest. 2010.

Second. We have been having a play with the SI2K system for 3D at its most basic, two camera heads on a bar, two recorder units mounted onto a plate which has a leg on it which goes into a vacant seat hole on the Elemack.

The Mini heads and bar and just one VGA touch screen went on the end of a Movietech crane on the Elemack. The other touch screen stayed with the second recorder unit. The single screen was there for viewfinding. Control was via a handgrip run button and the sync box.

Two quick and dirty versions of a clip rendered by me from Premiere Pro 2 are on youtube here :-


YouTube - 3D TEST ANAGLYPH.wmv (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B-5iMPoEZM)

YouTube - 3D TEST 50LB.wmv (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG_dU_h_8wo)


One is double-view (crosseyed) viewing, the other an anaglyph render.

There is very much a lot to learn about post with 3D.


The camera heads are not matched, one is an early version (LEDs in row across top of rear), the other about 12 months old, (LEDs on rear in a row down right side.


If you mount two recorder units near to each other like we did, take care to separate the airflows around them with a dividing panel between them otherwise they may ingest each other's hot air and overheat. This also happens with through-wall mounted airconditioner units.

The Darling Films SI2K got a workout last weekend on a short feature shot over two long days last weekend, the worktitled "Two Minds".

The factory unit was hot and lots of water drunk. The camera temp went up to 72 degrees but the only problem encountered was a corrupt clip due to the camera being double-buttoned on button-off and was rolling when shut off at the power switch, not a good thing to do to it.

The camera op. is not me. The young fit little *%# ran around operating that thing all day and most of one night for three days. I was knucklewalking at the end of it.

If only I could slough off age and attrituion like the hide of a snake I would be happy. Alas I have to make do with being a "character".

A play with the SI2K in W.A..

On set stills from the short film "TWO MINDS'
Producer: Andrew Napier
Director" Damien Giglietta
1st AD: Johnny Ma
DOP: George Davis

Behnd the scenes pics ex-the facebook shot by Johnny Ma.


Images 01 and 02. It might seem a chore but really only takes a moment. Always mark focus points with one of these and you won't go astray.

Image 03. Nobody does blood, guts and brains seeing the light of day like FX specialist Freena Hamilton, so if you are here in the West doing a shoot and need all sorts of FX and make-up, give her a call.

Image 04. A contradiction in terms, top gear P+S-built camera-recorder, Ex-Europe, top gear Chroszeil follow-focus, Ex-Europe, Budget Cine-city "Jumbo" mattebox, Ex-Chandrigagh India, all working as they should.


FOOTNOTE:

I just got to play with a beta of an updated DVR. For product confidence reasons, I won't go into details about the new feature set except to use the Aussie words which say something is very good - "it is the duck's guts".

The following is probably not a fair comment to make and probably quite provocative but

If the RED is not yet similarly featured and as turnkey user-friendly to feature production with light crews, it might be a case of RED being dead in bed. That is probably going a bit too far. The RED still has more pixels even if they are harder to muster down the pipe.

I must drag my old no-name editing computer and its broken legged coffeetable stand down to the next shoot and start editing the 2K rushes on set to make a point, just because I can.

Copied from the facebook for West Aussie readers.

BOOTLEG- written and directed by Johnny Ma, nominated for two WA screen awards (cinematography S.P. Becker and sound Jon Jenkin) is being screened this friday tomorrow along with

TRESPASS, directed by Damien Giglietta (shot on the SI2K) and

THE DEAD WASTES (believed to have been shot on the RED) and Love thy Zombie (hilarious zombie spoof), directed by Wade K. Savage. ( I can personally attest to "Love Thy Zombie" being entertainingly watchworthy ).

Come along and supprt upcoming local film makers!!!A night of inspiring Films, food and drinks

Location:FTI cinema at 92 Adelaide Street Freo.
Time:7:00PM Friday, February 26th

Added: FTI is on www.fti.asn.au and I think is phone 93351055.

The end-product of this no-budget Tropfest entry can be seen here :-


YouTube - First Person Shooter (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGRoKPyAUQg&feature=related)

For first time director, Ed Love, this was a learning adventure with a steep coal face. The story had heart.


The final production vision looks very flat. The original camera files looked much better. One day, I might talk Ed into doing another HD edit from the original files, properly colour-graded. Due to the deadline looming and some things needing changing, Ed had to do another final edit in SD from the VTS files of the DVD-Video disk he had been given as the end-product to send in.

Given more time, I would like to have made a helmet mount for the mini head and used it as a POV camera for the videogame-in-dream sequence. However available time and resources did not permit.

Hand-holding the heavy SI2K recorder unit/camera out in front like a handycam and trying to do an over-the-shoulder follow was a little bit difficult for an old codger. At that time I did not have a side-finder otherwise I would most certainly have used it.

The final sequence in the park on the rock was a desperate rush against fading light. The high overhead POV was forced by the location, - all houses and streets behind when the setting was meant to be bushland. This was achieved not by a ladder or elevator, there wasn't any to be had with no budget, so desperate measures came into play.

The camera head was gaffered onto the foot-end of a redhead light stand. The lamp spigot just happened to be a neat fit into the tripod-handle hole of an old Miller head which was tilted almost to its limit to get the pole about 80 degrees towards vertical. The three legs on the stand made it rather difficult when doing the reverse in-the-tree shot.

Needless to say, the whole ten-minute cobble-up was uncontrollable, which is why the father-son hug thing near the end was so rough.

The teenager's bedroom was tight to work in. We were not to move stuff outside. As the sun went down the light did change and somebody turned on the ceiling fan when things got hot - with my light still gaffered to it.

Lighting was poverty chic. CFLs in two old portrait-studio photoflood parabolic reflectors, two garage worklights, some blue gels to calm them down a bit.

I had given the director the pre-emptive advice about the ethos of not starving his volunteer crew. However when he sprung for our vittels and we bogged right in, after a minute or so, we observed he and his lead actor sat off a short distance away starving themselves and we felt a bit churlish. - It was a genuine no-budget shoot. It was a sweet story which deserved a lot better treatment than we were able to give it.

I came in on it after the young actor who helped with "Fox Featherweight", "Seeking Closure" and "I Belong To The Shadows" suggested the director approach me when his original cameraman bailed.

I felt obligated to my actor who volunteered on the other shoots as this one would help his showreel. What I did not know was that he had resigned from the project because of work and school committments otherwise I would not have taken this on. His replacement came on board with just 24 hours to learn the part and after having moved from interstate with his family.

Please be gentle. I have never made claims to being a competent cameraman and know even less about lighting.

Here in the west, today - a different adventure.


We took two SI2K camera/recorder units up to a high school which offers a media option for its students. The purpose was to demo the cameras and to practice hooking up sound via a MixPre and setting levels.

November/December over two days, I will be directing a short for showreels of two actors who have assisted pro-bono on several projects.

One of the students will assist as boomswinger/sound mixer, the other will undertake a third supporting acting role. Others may be there as observers, one teacher will be crewing either as camera assistant or camera operator, the other as assistant and tutor/chaperone.

It is sobering to consider that by the time the most committed of these young people attaches professionally to a project, our cameras, maybe even the ARRI Alexa will be obsolete relics, the speed at which technology is advancing.

David Newman, CTO at Cineform, whose codec is at the core of the SI2K system, in the days of his youth schooled at W.A.I.T., which became Curtin University, here in Western Australia. It is good to be able to name drop locals who have gone on to make good at the forefront of their particular specialty.

Will post furthur on this topic as it evolves.

Went out to Christmastree Well south of Perth today with owner of a campervan who wanted to give it a drive to see if anything was going to fall off. Took the camera in case anything interesting stuck its head up.

I expected to see a racehorse goanna but was too slow powering up the camera to pick off the one we did see immediately, so had to make do with frogs in the dam assassinating mosquito larvae and some Carnaby's black cockatoos.

Here's the happy snaps from the moving vision.

Lens. Angenieux "Compact" zoom 17 -75.

Got home and found I had a bush tick near my left eye in one of the roadmap wrinkles like an old bobtail goanna.


1. 2.
3. 4.

1. Black cockatoo pair.
2. Black cockatoo "sitting nit" ( on watch) while partner has a bit of a chew in the leaves to left out of frame.
3. Open dugout pond.
4. Open dugout pond.

Yeah, I know - I am a slack cameraman. I should have moved until the cockie was in the skypatch but the trip was on a time limit and to prove the car.

The Carnabys cockatoos mate for life. Due to habitat loss and land clearing, they are likely doomed because in addition to habitat loss, illegal birders and smugglers chop open the nest trees and the birds, likely to not find a suitable new one - ( hollowed and rotted out in just the right way with an overhang ) - just won't breed and just grow old together.

The dugout dam may be for fire-fighting water source. The government well is about 30 metres distant.

We had our first shoot day for "Bail On Me".

Here's some grabs. Images are not graded yet. Gavan, our DOP is going for a depressing flouro colour look of juvey detention centre or lockup.

1.2.
3.4.
5.6.

Brendon in pre-court interview.
Brendon enraged in holding cell.
Clare the caseworker.
Clare the caseworker doorshadow reveal.
Paul the unkindly warder.
Unrelated - Holodomor Memorial Service. ( Shot on EX1 as roving cam. Main cam SI2K.)

Lenses used?

Lenslist :-


CP Ultra T* 9mm, 12.5mm, 16mm, 25mm.
Angenieux 17mm - 75mm zoom.
Kinoptik 5.7mm in confined workspace.


Sound via Rode NTG-1. Mix-Pre.

I meant, lens in correlation to the thumb # above, such as...

1: xxx (like CP Ultra 12.2mm)
2: yyy

etc...

Alex.

Now you've got me. As writer and director ( although missing in action a fair bit of the time due to security issues within the location ) I went big on faith with my crew so the details are not burned in. So there are vague recollections.

1. 12.5mm CP Ultra T*.
2. 16mm CP Ultra T*
3. 16mm CP Ultra T*
4. 17mm - 70mm Angenieux zoom at 22mm. - for stylised montage.
5. 16mm CP Ultra T*

6. Holodomor memorium is extra-curricular on Sony EX 1. Lighting conditions, early twilight. Lens at about Z30 wide-open.

Thanks Bob.

Why not shoot everything with your Angenieux zoom, though. From a brief look, it appears the sharpness equals CP primes?

The decision to shoot with the primes ? I am not certain. I think the DOP, Gavan O'Sullivan's decision was driven both by the lack of available suitable light and the camera having just enough to go with. In their sweet spot, I think they are a bit sharper than the Angenieux. The frames above except for 4 and 5 were not shot by him, so should not be held representative of his work.

We had two 650watt fresnel and a 2K fresnel available but no scrims. The SI2K had enough from the ceiling flouros and a 240watt incandescent equivalent CFL in an 18inch parabolic reflector at 0db to get the oppressive look he wanted with the Ultras wide-open. He bounced this off the wall for a faint soft fill. He was after a flat, soul-less institutional look. The walls are actually high shine satin gray.

The Angenieux was used in the case worker's shots to enable faster working for a sequence of stylised images. He was shooting silhouettes against windows covered with scrim style drawn roller blinds so the lesser light passing of the Angenieux was not an issue.

These will intercut in an opening montage with the juvey detainee and prison officer walking through various corridors, CU foot shot (socks as shoes confiscated for safety), CU crooked fingers in top of jeans ( belt confiscated for safety) to intercut with vision of the visiting case worker after her arrival in her interview room getting her papers ready.

I don't know Gavan's plan for the actual drama vision. I think he may be crushing the blacks a bit and just tidying up the grade. He was light metering and colour temp metering ( high science for me ) with his film gear for most of it, so it is all consistent, except for the stuff we did after he had to depart on other tasks.

I think as far as he is concerned the SI2K is as close to a film camera as video has gotten in his hands-on experience so far and he is treating it as a film camera.

For the montage, I think he will be both crushing the blacks harder and desaturating.

Yes, I think Si-2K is terrific, still holding its own against all the newest cams out there.

Lighting: have you used LED lights with SI2K?

There are fantastic small on-camera Z96 lights now available from China for about $70 each. Their light looks better than the 126LED lights I'm currently using. I'm awaiting delivery of 4 of them. My idea (aside from using them individually as keys/fills), is to make a 4-light block, which probably will rival Litepanels 12x12 at just 25% the cost. Not sure about CRI on those, but just eyeballing, the light quality seems fine.

For fresnels, it appears Sola12 's by Litepanels (http://bit.ly/gDBaSU) are the first viable LED choice - although I personally have no first-hand experience with them, and price is insane.

Alex.


I have not tried LEDs yet. Still using traditional lighting. I have a biggest boxful of CFLs and batten holders to make up about 3 x 1200watts incandescent equivalent worth. I just haven't got round to holesawing all those holes and tracking down the broad aluminium doorframe extrusion to make up the rims of the boxes.

Here's a link to the Tropfest entry local film maker Andrew Pheasant directed last year.

YouTube - games (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUDou-pHUM8)

Finally got around to ordering and fitting the P+S parts for the camera base for using quick release mounts ( Panasonic SHAN TM-700 ) on an old Miller LPT tripod. Wishing now I had done it it much sooner instead of procrastinating.

No more swearing and cursing with head bent under trying to get that wretched thumbscrew to match up and wobbling the camera to take the load off the thread from jamming tight, whilst trying not to drop it.

Original message deleted. Attempt to upload a readable file. Short story - a handwritten note with important focal length settings had been scanned to .jpg by crewmember but the file would not open and the original paper page was lost. I uploaded it to dvinfo.net and was informed that the file was a .psd incorrectly tagged as a .jpg file.

This enabled me to convert the file to a bmp in Premiere Pro. This probably represents an abuse of dvinfo.net but hopefully Chris will afford me this one indulgence as it got me out of a bit of a jam in shooting background plates with correct lens focal length settings.

Bob, you can always shoot a troublesome file over to me as I'm also a graphic designer with all the associated software.

Andrew

Andrew.

Thank you for your kind offer. Regards from here in the West.

No worries.

Best regards from over here in the east where we flood every now and then. :-)

Andrew

Floods. Up on the hill I don't have to fret about getting my feet wet, only roasted or hit by small tornados. The hill across the valley has a peculiar shape and in the right weather conditions it inteacts with something, A rotor comes off on the southern end and by the time it hits the high ground here, it becomes a mini tornado.

They always seem to follow near to the same path and the bush where they go is all trashy with trees leaning over onto others, so it has probably been going on since time way back. In the same weather conditions, the kerosene stink from the airliners passing overhead descending into Perth reaches the ground about 3 minutes after they go over.

It was mostly bushland up here when I was a kid living down in the bottom of the valley. You would hear the yet unborn tornados go over. There was no strong wind noise as such, just a sort of changing hollow tone to the environmental sounds you hear on a windy day. Then about five minutes later you would hear things cracking and being broken up on the inland hilltop. Now I live up high in the zone along with a lot of others.


However, we had ourselves a little earth-tremor under my patch about 3km to north-west from the place last week. The birds all went deadly quiet for about an hour or so. Didn't notice anything at the time but checked up today and found the earth did move ever so slightly at the right time and date.


A bit off-topic perhaps.

Interesting with the animals. Over here I noticed that in the month or two over Christmas, the piles of dirt from ants digging were popping up over lawns (2 or 3 inches high) like I'd never noticed before. The ants were up to something.

Then we got the floods in January: not quite almost as high as the January 1974 floods but worse for the city.

Weird, eh?

Andrew