Wednesday 28 September 2016

How we shoot Doris Visits on the move



Shooting Doris Visits - the Kit


It is amazing the amount of people who ask what the camera is when we are out, and the photographers who turn their heads because they don't recognise what I am holding. I am amazed that people recognise or don't in my case cameras. The reason is that it is not a stills camera and cannot take stills... just looks like one.

We shoot a number of things from movies to web content, but we have just sold our larger movie cameras the 5k Epic Dragon cameras. That is because we are so pleased with the small toy.

It was bought for our first venture into the web content, a web drama series shot in a small area.  ‘Doris Shades Of Bad’ the drama series. We wanted to keep the quality at 2k, which is the quality of most current televisions bought and sold. That is certainly as good as most TV shows if not much better than daily soaps and lower level TV which are often shot at 720 lines and they are interlaced. If  I have lost you there I apologize, but most shows are now HD which the retailers are currently calling 2k.
The camera had to be small and I did not need fancy add-ons like slow motion. I just needed a camera that is used widely on the professional market and the cameramen that came in would be able to use. So, I asked them and Black Magic came out tops. I have seen recent blogs where the BMPCC goes up against some newer cameras and it wins hands down. BMPCC stands for Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera.
The kitchen that Shades Of Bad was all going to be shot in is small by filming standards and none of the walls fly away or have traps. I mean none of the walls are force and can be removed. What you see is the space we had. The BMPCC was ideal and there were few other choices. Stills guys compromise, but we never needed it to take stills, we just needed a dedicated movie camera. By choosing the BMPCC our ambitions to shoot proper film were still there. The BMPCC can shoot 2k raw but that means huge files and is over kill and would certainly be well beyond our Apple based edit suit, so we shoot at 1080 uncompressed. As film makers we had to leave the kitchen and while shooting episodes of Shades abroad we just wondered why we were not shooting a travel series.


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