Through the month of April into May I shot a feature called "A Way Around." The last feature I shot was a documentary, so I was pretty excited at the opportunity to once again return to the world of long form narrative. "A way Around" is a road trip movie that chronicles two characters as they travel from LA to Salt Lake City, Utah. The Cannon 5D, being the workhorse of the low budget indie wold, was the directors camera of choice and there was very little wiggle room in the budget for me to suggest otherwise. I have had mixed feeling about DSLRs from the beginning of their rise around 2009 but I figured this was a good project for me to finally take the plunge and see what the 5D was capable (and not capable) of doing. My friend and fellow D.P Matt Roe had shot a feature previously on the 5D and was a solid resource as I prepped for this one. I had shot small pieces on DSLRs in the past and was familiar with the 5D but it was still a bit nerve racking to dive right into shooting a feature on one. I knew the limited dynamic range would be one of the biggest issues I would be dealing with so choosing the right picture profile was really important. The good thing about jumping into the world of DSLRs late is that there are a TON of articles/screen tests/comparisons online that millions of other film makers have posted in regards to DSLR film techniques. Matt had suggested using "Marvels" profile as that was what he used on his 5D feature. I looked at technicolor's profiles as well as "Flaat"and a few others but settled with "Marvels" as it seemed to be a good happy medium. Matt had warned me and I had also read to stay away from overly flat profiles because banding can occur when stretching the waveform while coloring, resulting in loss of information. "Marvels" lifted the black values slightly without creating an overly flat image. I also used "highlight tone priority" on wide day exterior shots and select shots that I could not control all of the highlights properly. This setting helped retain more information in the highlights without significantly altering the mid tones. It worked well, but I used it sparingly in case it was degrading the image quality at some level.
I knew the other big issue with shooting 5D would be focus. Due to budget constraints, I had very little say as to lens choices and I knew it would be a disaster to pull focus on still lenses no matter what, but it would be even more of a disaster if we didn't choose stops wisely. Again, I spoke with Matt and did some research online and decided that whenever possible, I wouldn't open up the aperture wider than a 4.0. I also hate the nauseatingly shallow depth of field that has become the trademark of so many indie DSLR shoots. I feel like depth of field is an artistic choice that can help tell the story or draw your attention to different aspects of a frame in varying ways. It seems like so many people out there just think the shallower the better and that seems like such a closed minded way of thinking about it. What's the point of having amazing locations if everything in that location is soft? You can't really create a great composition if the only element in focus is the talent (or 2 inches of the talent at times). AC Mark Rosen was up for the challenge of 1sting on this show, and he did an amazing job. The B camera almost always wore the 24-105 zoom which we used mainly at the 50 and 85mm focal lengths to match A camera for dueling OTS's. We shot all the day exteriors around a 4.0-5.6 but it proved to be quite a challenge to light night interiors and even day interiors to a 4.0 with the limited lighting/grip package we had. There were times where we were forced to shoot at a 2.8 due to the complexity of a shot or just the sheer amount of area that would be seen in a wide. I did however notice that with shot compositions that did not include a lot of depth (like two people sitting in bed 6" away from a wall) it made a huge difference to open up to a 2.8 rather than to stay at a 4.0. Many people had said it was okay to push ISO on the 5D but I had seen some footage shot at ISO 800 and it didn't look so great. I never raised the ISO over 640 on this show.
We used our 1 ton lighting/grip package on "A Way Around". On the lighting side, it basically included a bunch of Fresnels up to 2k, a few parcans, Lekos and some assorted Kinos. We really pulled off a pretty good looking film with an insanely small amount of lighting/grip gear. Jeff Marlowe came on board as gaffer on the show and he did a great job. We were really understaffed and "undergeared" and to pull off some of the shots that we did was pretty awesome. One of the biggest challenges of this feature was that director Aaron Fradkin wanted to double cover every scene due to the improvisational nature of the script. This made it extremely difficult to light as we had to light both sides of a conversation at the same time, meaning that almost no fixtures could be placed on the ground unless they were far enough away from the talent so that neither camera would pick them up. When we had the space, we keyed with a 2k Fresnel through 6x6 light grid so that the key could spread and reach both subjects at the same time. The problem was, it could not be wrapped properly on both subjects at the same time and it was difficult to place a fill light because it would be seen by one camera or the other. We almost always flew a back light way out high on a menace arm as to not be seen by either camera. The back light situation was a bit tough as well because it may look great on one subject from one direction, but it would spill unpleasantly onto the other subject in the opposite direction. We solved this by making the back lights a bit more toppy than I usually make them, in order to avoid spill on opposing subjects. In some cases we were forced to live with not so perfect lighting on both subjects but it was more important to Aaron to have double coverage for editing than to have lighting perfect so it was a sacrifice Jeff and I had to make. I was most proud of a night interior bar set up in which we had to light 5 people that were being double covered from opposing angles (An early version of the setup is ABOVE LEFT). When finished, we ended up keying with a 44 kino on a menace arm swung way out high over the bar and filled with another low 44 kino under the bar. We also had (2) tweenies on baby off set arms on dimmers for backlights that played as flickering bar TV's. We punched a parcan into the ceiling in the background to raise the ambiance behind the subjects and then we had another tweenie raking across a bunch of glass bottles in the foreground. We did a lot of color temp mixing on each of the fixtures and it looked awesome. I still don't know how we were able to frame out the fixtures for double coverage but somehow we did and it looked pretty good.
Overall I was happy with the result and I think "A Way Around" has a lot of potential. I'm curious to see how it's shaping up in the edit. We really pulled off something amazing. The locations were gorgeous and it was a small but awesome crew who I plan on working with more and more in the future. I learned a lot in the 18+ days of shooting and I would say my first true dive into DSLR shooting was a success. I came to the conclusion that the 5D is a great low budget option, it just takes a lot of hard work to bring everything within the constraints of it's limited dynamic range. If you have the right tools and the right amount of time to do this, you can make a 5D image look pretty similar to an image from one of the big guns.
Through the month of April into May I shot a feature called "A Way Around." The last feature I shot was a documentary, so I was pretty excited at the opportunity to once again return to the world of long form narrative. "A way Around" is a road trip movie that chronicles two characters as they travel from LA to Salt Lake City, Utah. The Cannon 5D, being the workhorse of the low budget indie wold, was the directors camera of choice and there was very little wiggle room in the budget for me to suggest otherwise. I have had mixed feeling about DSLRs from the beginning of their rise around 2009 but I figured this was a good project for me to finally take the plunge and see what the 5D was capable (and not capable) of doing. My friend and fellow D.P Matt Roe had shot a feature previously on the 5D and was a solid resource as I prepped for this one. I had shot small pieces on DSLRs in the past and was familiar with the 5D but it was still a bit nerve racking to dive right into shooting a feature on one. I knew the limited dynamic range would be one of the biggest issues I would be dealing with so choosing the right picture profile was really important. The good thing about jumping into the world of DSLRs late is that there are a TON of articles/screen tests/comparisons online that millions of other film makers have posted in regards to DSLR film techniques. Matt had suggested using "Marvels" profile as that was what he used on his 5D feature. I looked at technicolor's profiles as well as "Flaat"and a few others but settled with "Marvels" as it seemed to be a good happy medium. Matt had warned me and I had also read to stay away from overly flat profiles because banding can occur when stretching the waveform while coloring, resulting in loss of information. "Marvels" lifted the black values slightly without creating an overly flat image. I also used "highlight tone priority" on wide day exterior shots and select shots that I could not control all of the highlights properly. This setting helped retain more information in the highlights without significantly altering the mid tones. It worked well, but I used it sparingly in case it was degrading the image quality at some level.
