Monday, March 26, 2012

Who is what?

So Backblaze is kinda cool but you have to keep your drives plugged in or it'll drop you after 30 days. And it would really suck to have a whole movie backed up, you remove the drive, and then you have a crash after 31 days.

Y'know.  I've been thinking about how we're going to shoot this movie. Since my first movie I've been shy about using other camera people because every cameraman I knew flaked out on me. But since then I've met and worked with great camera people.
There's a couple issues working with multiple cameras. For instance, they all pretty well have to be set to the same f-stop. So if you're using a very long lens on once camera and it's clamped all the way down to f5.6, then you probably need to shut your wide-angle-lens camera down to 5.6 too or you'll end up yelling at inanimate objects in post production. Sometimes animate ones.
The other issue is what if you use different cameras? With different lenses? Oh my. Oh dear oh my oh my.
Well, here's an interesting thing about this particular movie: the Groundhog Day-like plot will take us back to the same location a number of times. Wouldn't it be interesting if the look were slightly different each time? For instance it's the same scene, but we go to camera X rather than camera Y for all the shots. Different camera operator. But shot at the same time.
I think that might work really well.
Me? I'll be shooting on the Panasonic GH1 with Canon S.S.C. manual lenses. I bet we're going to have to set the cameras at different ISO's in order to deal with the above issue of different f-stops because you know I'm gonna want to be wide open at f1.8 or so. But if my camera is at 100 ISO and the 5.6 camera is at, er, math-in-head, 1600(?)ISO, they should about match. We'll fiddle with it.
Now, who is in this movie?

Michael Shattner does not exist on the Internet. Therefore he does not exist. As far as you know.
Rebecca Kush.

Sarah-Doe Osborne
Sarah Doe Osborne is Artemis.
Rebecca Kush is Haskins. She also does not have a web page. What is up with that?
Andrew Langton.

Andrew Langton is Rhodes.
Kate Britton.
Kate Britton is Trent.
James Becton.
Nobody yet knows who is Cornell. That will be worked out in the next couple days. James Edward Becton will be Cornell.


Kangas said...

You don't need all lenses at the same F-stop, they just need to APPEAR that they were shot at the same F-stop. Depending on how you compose each shot, a 5.6 on a telephoto can appear to be the same exposure as a 2.8 on a wide.

Just depends what you're aiming the telephoto at. And also, if the F-stops are close, it's an easy post fix using levels or curves.

All completely acceptable given how freakin' awesome editing multiple-camera shoots can be...

Andrew Bellware said...

That's not generally my experience. I mean, if you're shooting faces it'll seem stopped down when cutting from the wide to the closeup. Not that you can't change the exposure in post when shooting HD. A stop-and-a-half should be relatively gradable even in Final Cut.
But with the new-fangled camera the kids are using these days we can match ISO's -- which is SO much harder to do on film. So we can make up for slower lenses.

Kangas said...

Well, if you're shooting a scene and the telephoto is 5.6, then you shoot a 5.6 on a wide(and the rest of the scene is lit even), the scene will probably look brighter on the wide if you cut between the two(as the wide is pulling in light from a much wider view).

And the other reason it wouldn't make sense is--how many F-stop changes do you make when you shoot one lens? Lots. And they all cut together, so why wouldn't the others?

Granted, I've only shot a couple of multi-camera shoots, but we've never tried to match f-stops...we just make sure the overall look matches as we shoot, whatever f-stop is needed.

Andrew Bellware said...

I tend to try to shoot the whole movie at one f-stop. So, er, maybe I just do it a derpy way.
Technically, I suppose, we should be talking about T-stops if we're talking different lenses. But on most modern glass the T-stop and the F-stops are usually pretty close to one another.
In my experience I've not had the "pull out and things get brighter" thing. Maybe that's because we barely use any lights. ;-)