Shorts documentaries using the 7D
 

A few months ago, a friend of mine, Nicolas Lévesque, was asked, as director, to produce a series of 20 shorts documentary films focused around the past and present of Racine Street, our main street here in Chicoutimi.

He hires me to shoot and edit about half of them (I don’t know if it was for my skills or for my 7D actually…).

The production calendar was really tight. We had to produce the entire serie in about a month so we usually had between 1 to 3 hours to shoot, and a half day to edit each film. Fortunately, the concept developed by the director turned around portraits of specific people. This helped us to work fast.

I want to share some with you since I consider these films to be a great example of what the HDSLRs opens to us in terms of creative ways to tell a story. These films would have been a lot different or almost impossible to do whiting the timeframe without this kind of cameras. They are full of assumed flaws, like shaky camera moves, out of focus shots, rolling shutter, crew members in the frame. My director believed, and I 100% agree, that theses imperfections added to the reality feel and helped us to convey our little piece of story.

They are in French, but some of them have been subtitled, so enjoy!

Dave:

This is my favorite. Was shot in a nightclub. Shot using to lenses, the sigma 17-70 2.8 and a fifty years old Nikkor 50mm 1.4. I used a SteadyStick to somewhat stabilise the shots since it was all handheld. I used a VL10li on camera light. The low light capability of the camera helped a lot.

Contrôle:

I didn't shot this one. I wasn't available at the time of the shoot so my director took my 7d and shot it himself. I did the editing. Was shot using the sigma 17mm for the interview. The rest was shot using a Nikon 80-200 f2.8

18,15$ au compteur

A good exemple of what a little camera can do for you. There's no way I could have acheived this angle from inside a car with another type of camera. I would had to use some kind of rig outside (and the taxi bill would have been a lot more than 18,15$), or I would have ended with a narrower field of view but we wanted to emphasis on the street buildings so we needed that angle.

L'école de la chaussure

A bit of slowmotion and glidetrack to show the handcrafting.

So that's it, please feel free to comment on these films or ask any question. You can whatch the whole serie here: Accueil . The web site is in french in english, but unfortunatelly, the movies are not subtitled. We didn't had enough time.

Thank you for watching.