Venomocity

Last year I had the great fun of working with the Phoenix-based agency Riester on a series of three anti-smoking spots for the Arizona Bureau of Tobacco Education and Prevention. The finished spots were held up briefly, but finally airing in Arizona. Here are all three—click through to view them in fancy YouTube HD (link is below and to the right of the movie)!

You may notice that some of the footage appears to be hand-cranked. In fact, the entire spot was shot on the Panavision Genesis, a camera that quite prominently lacks a hand crank. So my DP (the brilliant Carlos Veron) and I shot the hand-crank sections at an even 50 fps (the Genesis's max), and then editor Gregory Nussbaum (of Pictures in a Row) and I ran the shots through the very same hand-crank After Effects project that I included in The DV Rebel's Guide.

Of course, some of the hand-cranked shots contain visual effects (supervised by Ryan Tudhope). As I told the crew at the kickoff meeting, it's not a Stu job unless we're doing something annoying with time. Ryan's animators actually worked at 50 fps on the original plate, and then rendered only the frames called for by the hand-crank retiming curve. This allowed them to be as surprised and annoyed by the hand-crank effect as the live action crew!

By shooting at 50 fps, we got smoother 24p results from the hand-crank effect, as it had more frames to pull from. You can do the same if your camera has a 60p or 60i mode (50 for PAL), as most do. All of this is explained in The Guide.

Carlos also shot wide-open much of the time. The combination of Super35 sensor, overcranking, and wide dynamic range (since we'd be shooting outdoors in direct sun) meant that the Genesis was really the only digital camera I felt we could use for this campaign. We almost didn't get one, which would have meant resorting to, gasp, film!

Orphanage colorist Aaron Rhodes graded the spots in Film Master, creating LUTs that the VFX artists used to preview their work with propper color. We used much the same workflow as we did on The Spirit.

These spots have everything I love, performance, cinematography, and a worthwhile message. I'm proud of them and delighted that I can finally share them with you. You can also watch them in their native habitat on the very cool web site developed to anchor the campaign: venomocity.com.

I Shoot Stunt People

Folks following me on Twitter know that while I didn’t preorder a Canon 5D Mark II (actually in stock now on Amazon, both kit and body only), I got to borrow one for a couple of weeks. My generous benefactor was none other than Vincent Laforet, whom I met when he gave a presentation at Industrial Light & Magic a few weeks back. The camera is back in his hands now as he prepares for his surf film.

Rather than rush off to the nearest subway station (well, maybe in addition to running off to the nearest subway station), I decided to contact a local group of filmmakers and performers called The Stunt People. We collaborated on a one-day shoot that involved stunts, fight choreography, and a lot of fun despite the nasty weather.

The images in this post are stills from the shoot, featuring a hasty, “one-light” color correction using Magic Bullet Colorista.

The camera itself offered few surprises. The control is maddening, and the form-factor is annoying for handheld work. I tricked it out with a stripped-down configuration of the Redrock Micro DSLR kit, and the follow-focus was a lifesaver—don’t leave home without it. I did not encumber myself with an LCD monitor, instead relying on the camera’s built-in LCD. The live view zoom function is fine for checking focus before a roll, but not during, and the fixed position orientation of the screen is punishing for creative camera angles.

But the images are pretty—as long as not much moves. There is noticeable rolling shutter artifacting. The low-light capability is stunning (all the images you see here were shot with available light), although working in low light means that the damned 30 fps frame rate is compounded by a creamy 1/30 shutter. The result, as I’ve described before, is that the stutter and incompleteness of film’s cadence is missing, resulting in an motion characteristic that is all verisimilitude and no cinema.

With 24p and manual exposure control this camera would be of use. Without those adjustments, it’s a tantalizing but ultimately frustrating curiosity to the DV Rebel. The best thing about it is what it portends for the very near future.

When the short is cut, colored and mixed I’ll post it here, probably sometime in January. In the meantime check out some of the clips on the Stunt People site—they have some mad skills!

LA has a subway?

Gage made a subway short using, get this, a video camera (a Panasonic HMC150 to be precise). Apparently people still use those.

Subway Short from Devon Sloan on Vimeo.

As anyone who's read The DV Rebel's Guide knows, I made my subway short ten years ago:

The Green Project from ProLost on Vimeo.

But there must be some mistake because both of these were shot with 1/3" sensors, which everyone knows are worthless.

The Bourne Inspiration

In response to the subway short trend, Eric Escobar blogged about a scene in The Bourne Supremacy that he finds rebelliously inspirational. That struck a chord with me, as I too have a Bourne scene that inspires me. It’s the Waterloo Station scene in The Bourne Ultimatum.

In this scene, Bourne outwits CIA operatives while guiding a reporter to safety. It was shot in London’s busiest train station without disrupting thousands of commuters and travelers. That’s right, it’s the ultimate subway short!

What’s amazing about this scene is that it follows the DV Rebel rulebook to the letter. They used a minimal crew and natural light. When out among the general public, the only props we see are cell phones and a syringe. It’s only when the action moves to a stairwell that the guns come out. A sniper gets involved, and his footage too is shot separately from the actual station (a wee bit of greenscreen work connects the two). All of this is intercut with people in a room full of monitors. There’s nothing in this scene you couldn’t do yourself, without permits.

For The DV Rebel’s Guide my editors went to great effort to secure the rights to use the kitchen scene in La Femme Nikita as an example of an approachable DV Rebel action scene. But as the Bourne films show us, such scenes are abundant. For every Bond chase with flipping cars and helicopter shots, there’s a gritty, tense mano a mano battle that requires nothing more than hard work and great choreography.

I think this guy’s got a power window on his face.

And color correction. The Bourne sequels are great examples of the hidden gift to the DV Rebel that lurks in many a DVD—the supplemental materials feature deleted and alternate scenes prior to their DI color correction (see Color Makes the Movie). It’s easy to see how the vérité footage, often shot without immaculate control over lighting, becomes more cinematic and pointed thanks to the DI. Color correction adds style, but it also helps tell the story by subtly altering the lighting. Again, this is 100% Rebel-compatible—with readily available tools such as Magic Bullet Looks, Colorista, Apple Color and Adobe After Effects (plus the DV Rebel Tools), you can often color-correct your way to high production value—and you’ll be in good company doing so.

A pre-DI shot from the deleted scenes

That same shot is in the film, color corrected