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

The Subway Short is the new Resolution Chart

Folks following me on Twitter and watching the comments here have noticed that I’m a bit obsessed with an offhanded comment made on the Rebel Café. In response to some technically sound but rather dry sample footage from the Ikonoskop A-cam dII, Gage replied:

I need to see a subway short.

After I cleaned the coffee off my keyboard, I contemplated the profundity of that statement. See, it wasn’t long ago that when a new camera showed up, we wanted to see test shots of Macbeth swatches and resolution charts. Or at least we thought we did. But lately, some crazy filmmakers have brought art to a technology fight, and they are kicking ass. There’s the D90 Subway test, and one shot with the RED One as well. And there’s Reverie, AKA The Bourne Zoolander (you know I love you Vincent). These aren’t really short films, they’re emotional trigger experiments. They’re camera tests designed to tickle our cinema bone rather than satisfy our slide-rules. They promise a cinematic feel rather than razor sharp 4K filmouts. We watch them on our computer screens and on our TVs. You know, where we watch everything. 

For every piece of footage that seemingly proves that the Nikon D90 D-Movies are unusable, there’s at least one that shows how great the footage can look if you work within the camera’s limitations. Ditto the 5D MkII. Folks seem less interested in how a camera fares on a test bench than how it handles being serupticioulsy weidled in a no-photography zone. After Gage’s comment, the Ikonoskop guys actually posted a tiny clip that’s kinda like a subway short!

I told Gage I’d make t-shirts, and I did (all credit goes here). Proceeds go toward buying Gage a beer.

A month ago I wrote that “buttons and features and resolution charts just had their ass handed to them by sex apeal,” and now that movement has a mantra. So when a camera company comes at you with specs and megapixels and data rates, you know what to tell them.

I need to see a subway short.

Pictures and Clarity

No milk in the fridge this morning, forcing me to make an Americano rather than my usual cappuccino. In that spirit, here’s an undiluted rant on cameras, DV Rebel priorities, and what we might hope to hear from RED next week.

What are you looking for in a camera? A big sensor? 2K? 4K? Raw? Uncompressed output?

What you should be looking for is a machine that transmits your creative energy into the images it makes.

The least friction between you and your images.

The fastest route to the emotional truth.

I shoot a lot of stills with a 50mm at f/1.4. The shallow depth of field helps me portray what I consider to be the emotional truth of a situation. But this practice is only feasible thanks to a hundred little details about the camera’s ergonomics and electronics. If any of those failed, I’d shallow-DOF myself right into a collection of unusable photos. My Canon 5D is more than just a box with a big sensor and fast glass. It’s a machine designed to create opportunities and then, when they arrive, to make sure I don’t miss them.

Many videographers find their first experience with a 35mm lens adapter to be quite a cold splash of water. The images from these rigs can look amazing—but it just became a whole lot more work to make them even acceptable. Your system got a whole lot less agile, your solution more brittle. The ways to mess up a shot grew in proportion to the potential for greatness.

• As soon as you have manual focus, you need a follow-focus, which means you need a rail system.
• As soon as you have a fast lens, you need a variety of ND filters, which means a matte box.
• As soon as you taste the glory of fast primes, you need more of them. You’ll never have enough. Time to go Pelican Case shopping.
• As soon as you have shallow depth of field, you need a big, sharp monitor and mad focusing skills (possibly provided by a second person). You will blow takes due to bad focus.
• As soon as you have a small camera, you need support gear for something as simple as prolonged handheld work.
• As soon as you have manual control, you need quick, intuitive access to that control.

Video cameras have long had solutions for all these things. Good autofocus and fingertip manual focus with LCD focus assist. Built-in ND filter wheels and well-placed toggle switches for common functions. Zebra overlays, histograms, waveform monitors, professional audio inputs and monitoring. And built-in lenses that zoom like crazy and focus from a millimeter to infinity.

The video camera manufactures aren’t winning any ergonomic battles these days. After the gloriously balanced DVX100, Panasonic gave us the unwieldy HVX200. Not to be outdone, Sony provided the wrist-wrenching EX1. Nevertheless, the video cameras of today are mature, evolved machines not just for making images, but for ensuring that you make exactly the image you want, with a minimum of fuss.

And yet not a single video camera under RED One’s price has a sensor bigger than your fingernail.

Along come these video-shooting DSLRs, with enourmous sensors, the wrong form-factor for video, and none of the features that turn an DVX100 into a battle-ready companion. They make awesome images, but they do so at the expense of the operator. When you only see the images, these cameras seem like they must be the best thing going. But the images are the result of a process, and that process is painful. It’s up to you to decide if sexy DOF is worth giving up control. As you make that decision, here are some things to bear in mind.

• It’s better for a film to have good audio than shallow depth of field.
• It’s better to have control over your camera than to shoot in HD.
• It’s better to have good lighting than raw 4K.
• It’s better to put time into color correction than visual effects.
• It’s not HD if it’s not in focus.
• There’s no such thing as a rough cut with no sound.
• Your story is told using the images you create, not the ones you intended to create.
• You’re not done editing until you’ve watched your film with an audience of people who don’t care about your feelings.
• Your film is still too long.
• Your next film will be better. How’s it coming?

(That last one is more for me than for you.)

The D90 and the 5D MarkII can make compelling moving images. But they are not yet cameras that will support your creative development as a filmmaker, growing with you as your skills develop. Did Vincent Laforet want Reverie to feel like a masterfully-lit soap opera? Did Matthew Bennettt want Subway to feel like the wobbly video from a jailbroken iPhone? We are at times seduced by aspects of these demo reels that are perennially absent in our video viewfinders, but we are not seeing the work of a cinematographer in full control of their craft. We’re seeing accidents—some happy, some not. Images borne of a battle with an uncooperative piece of kit. Mario Andretti doing his best with front-wheel drive and an automatic transmission.

This Thursday, when RED reveals their new cameras, I’ll be looking at features and specs along with everyone else. But I’ll also be evaluating whether these cameras seem to be filmmaking companions that allow me to craft an image intuitively and effortlessly. The camera should disappear, leaving only me and the images that, for better or worse, I created.