Monday, August 23, 2010

It's a fact, that in this business you can never be too well prepared.

Friday, Sarah and I were on set of "Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life" an indie film currently being shot on several location in NYC.   We were there to film promotional interviews with members of the cast and in particular, the film's star, Mira Sorvino.

The location was in Harlem and the cast and crew were staged in a gymnasium at the Riverside Church, about three blocks from the working set.  The actual set was a very small and very warm apartment and considering its size, it was filled with an amazing amount of gear and talent.


From experience, we know that filming or photographing actors, musicians and politicians often involves a whole lot of "Hurry up and wait".   Today was no exception.

Call time was 3:15 pm and as usual, we arrived about 30 minutes early, so as not to have to make any excuses about being stuck in traffic.  Justine, an associate producer on the film warned us that we would be carrying our gear to several locations and that some of them will be "walk-ups" and she assigned to us a production assistant to not only help move the gear, but also to keep an extra eye on it.  Something that you need to be careful with anywhere, but especially on the streets of New York City.

Marissa, our PA, certainly earned her pay that day.

At around 4:00 pm we are instructed to bring our gear to a location a few blocks away, where we could set up for our lights for Mira's interview.  This was a small, 2nd floor walk-up apartment that Mira is using as dressing room.  Unfortunately, the shoot schedule needed to be constantly revised (That's show-biz) and we were now to shoot one of the cast members back at the church, before she leaves for the day.


One of the film's producers insisted "Leave your lights as there is plenty of natural light in the makeup area."  So we ran back to the apartment, grabbed the audio gear and headed back to the church.
 

The lighting in the makeup areas was fairly dreadful and for anything more than a basketball game, pretty much useless.  Sarah and I grabbed some Japanese shoji screens and three of the clip-on lights that had been set up in the makeup area to create a soft light source and background.  It looked good on Sarah, it looked good on the talent.  Roll camera!  On to the next challenge.

Schedule change again and we would taping the film's lead character, Jeremy (Max Beer), in the same room as Mira.  "It just needed to look a little different".  Thank God for plants and flowers.

The room set aside for the interviews was approximately 8x10 and loaded with furniture and clothing for the set stylist.  The walls, a pale, semi-gloss blue and an small air conditioner screamed from the window.  Yuck!


Obviously, heat would be a huge consideration and it was important to keep the talent comfortable, especially after a long day of filming.  I used a small Lowell Omni light with a Chimera soft box, replacing the 600w halogen with a smaller, cooler 300w bulb.  We also used several battery operated Lite-Panel LED lights for any additional kick that was needed.  Excellent light quality with nearly zero heat.  At the very last second, the AC unit would be silenced.


As this was Mira's last day on the set, the director wanted to squeeze in as much face time as possible and we were informed the day might run long.  It did and around 11:45 pm she finally sat down for the interview.

I had a monitor standing by so that she could see herself on camera.  A professional with 30 features to her credit will know how she wants to be filmed and sure enough, concerned with the way shadows effect her deep set eyes,  she asked me to move the main light an inch or two lower.  She looked at the monitor and said, "That's pretty good".   I was able to breathe again.


Camera rolled and she gave a fantastic interview.  Difficult to believe that she had been on camera for the previous 14 hours.  What a pro!

The Crazy Duck Website

Monday, August 16, 2010

The Greatest Show on Earth for 10 Minutes

I'm a night person.  Check out any of my posts and you'll usually find that they were created late in the evening.  Although I've not spent more than a week at a stretch in California, I seem to have embraced their time zone.  It's not that I have a beef against early risers, it's just that my biorhythm is set for night.

Well, I've been trying to buck that trend for the last week or two.  I've been working on getting myself up and out of the comfort of my bed to film the sunrise over Manhattan.  

Like running or bike riding, once I'm out there, it pretty feels good and if the conditions are right the images  can be quite spectacular.   Ok, but I have to get out there at 5:00 am to appreciate it.  Ugh!


Strangely enough, the best conditions are not always a perfectly clear day.  In fact a clear blue sky can be a bit boring, photographically.  Instead, add some puffy clouds or or brilliant red sky of an approaching weather system and things might begin to happen, but often, only for a very short period of time.

A few days ago, I arrived at a location that I had previously scouted and in the few minutes it took for me to mount and power up the camera, I had already missed the most brilliant part of the display.   Although I researched the schedule of the sun and moon, I had not taken into consideration that finding parking could be a slight issue.  Even at 5:30 in the morning

From experience, I have found that I need to begin setting up in the dark, just prior to a period designated as "Civilian Twilight", which is usually around a half hour to 40 minutes before the sun actually peaks above the horizon.

One of the key elements to capturing a decent sunrise or sunset with your video camera or still camera for that matter, is having control over the brightest areas of your image.  Now in a skyline, that's usually (but not always) the sky.

In my situation, filming the sun rising up from behind Manhattan, the sky is always the brightest part.  To balance this I use something called a graduated filter, or grad filter for short.   As the name implies, the filter, which is a piece of glass in front of the camera lens, gradually gets darker, allowing less light to get through to the camera's sensor.   If you put the dark part over the sky, then it will darken just that.

Sometimes, if the sun is reflecting on the Hudson River, I need to use a second filter, upside down, with the dark area at the bottom of the image.  This way, I can reduce the amount of light coming from both the sky and the water in the foreground, leaving the city in the clear part in between.


This technique can often solve a myriad of problems and not only on the skyline.  I have used graduated filters to knock down the reflections on buildings, sidewalks and any other part of an image that needs to be evened out or even intentionally darkened.

Once you get into the edit room, it's often too late to fix the problem.  There are "digital grads" available as plug-ins for most edit systems, but if the bright section of the image is too bright, their is rarely much you can do to recover the detail that you have lost.

The strength of a graduated filters is conveniently measured in the same way as Neutral Density filters.

.3 = one stop less light
.6 = two stops less light
.9 = three stops less light
1.2 = four stops less light

A good set of filters is quite an investment.  I've purchased my filters from  a company called Formatt and I've found their quality control to be quite good and their prices a bit more reasonable than some other companies.  But, even at a reasonable price, they're not cheap, so gather them slowly.


Aside form all the technical stuff, just standing out there along the river with a skyline the looks like OZ looming in the distance is a beautiful experience.  The noise of traffic and construction will not begin for  another hour and it is just a magical time, especially now in the late summer.  It will be a bit more challenging at 15 degrees in the winter, but for now it's perfect.

A few runners, a fisherman and myself appear to be the only folks witnessing a giant ocean liner, pursued by two small tug boats,  slowly cruising into port.   The sight is breathtaking!


By seven o'clock, the sun is high above the buildings and the show is pretty much over until the following day.  Time for a cup of tea as I sit down to review the images.

Not every morning is golden, but everyone is different and with a little bit of luck there'll be a cloud or two and something great to shoot.  I can pretty much guarantee that the images will be one of a kind.
Crazy Duck Website

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Back in the New York Groove

July has been such an incredibly busy month. (Thank God!)  So busy, in fact, that I've had difficulty finding the time to sit down and write about it.   Well, it's 2:00 am and I'm once again, experiencing the joys of jet-lag, caused by my second trip to the Hawaiian Islands in less than a month.   The flight was grueling but the locations of Maui and Kauai were both stunning, so, I don't really expect a pity party over my pain.

I'm taking advantage of this quiet time to gather more footage for our New York City HD collection rapidly growing and soon to be revealed by Getty Images.   This has been quite a learning process for us.   Getty's standards are higher than other stock agencies and necessarily so.


The EX XDCAM cameras that I use are terrific for most applications, but I've learned that it is very important to pay close attention to the internal profile settings of the camera as well as the exposure.  Images that look fine on a computer screen or even a 50" LCD may not look as good when they are blown up for use on large projection screens.

Proper exposure in a video camera is critical.  When the camera's sensor is not getting sufficient light, that area of the picture won't just be dark, it might get very noisy.  Noise in a video signal looks a bit like the kind of grain you might have gotten from high speed films like Kodak's Tri-X.

You do remember film, right?

If the camera's gamma setting is set to low or the detail is set to high, you might be plagued with subtle, digital noise in those dark areas of the image.   And if the exposure is too hot you run the risk of losing detail, as well.


Ordinarily, these issues may not affect your video at all, but if your images are to be used in a broadcast commercial, a television program or on 20-40 foot projection screens, that digital noise might stand out against the pristine images created with more expensive cameras.

Other factors may come into play, as well.  Sarah and I found issues with the way our Avid editing systems were processing the XDCAM files.  We found that in some instances, Avid's color corrector was adding a small amount of banding and other digital noise into our pictures.  Banding occurs when the blending between shades or colors appears more like bands of color rather than smooth, subtle transitions.  The digital noise appeared like excessive grain. The same as if you had the gain on your camera cranked to a high setting like 9 or 12db.  (Gain gives your image an electronic exposure increase)


When Sarah tested the same images using Final Cut Pro and Adobe's Premier editing programs, this particular problem did not occur.  So, for us it was a matter of finding which program worked best for the individual images.

Again, this matters a lot less if the final destination for your images is Vimeo or YouTube.

I tend to push the Sony EX3 far beyond its normal operating limits, often working under the extreme lighting conditions of a sunrise, sunset or moonrise while using auxiliary Nikon and Canon lenses, as well as neutral density and graduated filters.  In most cases the camera has worked just fine, but I've learned that I can achieve even greater results with a bit of research and experimentation.


One of the great things about the internet is that you can benefit from others experimentation as well, just don't take anyone's suggestions as law.  Sample the information out there and discover what works best for you and the way you like to film.  Perhaps digital noise is what makes your work come alive.

Of course, testing and experimentation takes on a big roll in any creative endeavor and although it can be quite frustrating at first, the results are that much more rewarding when you've taken a less traveled path.

With that in mind, I'm looking forward to several days of filming (and experimentation) in Manhattan this week.  With my jet-lag placing me about six hours behind the rest of the east coast, I figure it will be a perfect time to work on my night shots.

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