Nickelodeon Commercial – Red Epic and Pro I/O Module

Red Epic with Pro I/O Module

Today I shot a fun commercial for Nickelodeon with director Beirne Lowry and producer Rachel Perkins and Bodega. We shot on their sound stage in Manhattan, that didn’t lose power during Sandy, and had a really great day.

Red Epic with Pro I/O Module and Lambda Head

We shot with the Red Epic with the Pro I/O Module, which I hadn’t used until today. It adds all sorts of functionality XLR inputs, an extra Red EVF/Monitor out, etc. It makes the Epic look like a black Alexa or the new Sony F5/F55. I guess everyone is buying into that form factor. The rig came from Bob Rudis who has a nice selection of owner/op camera gear.

Cheers,

Matt

REDKEN Commercial – Canon C300 and 5D MKIII

Canon C300 and Canon 5D MKIII

Fun beauty shoot with Noah Workman and Patrick Rousseau of Iris Media Works for REDKEN. We shot with my Canon C300 and a 5DMKIII as BCAM. I used the MYT WORKS (http://mytworks.com/) slider for the first time, which worked great once we figured out how to support it. It’s pretty cool how many smaller third party companies are out there developing equipment for the film industry these days. More tools.

Cheers,

Matt

Spike TV Commercial – Red Epic with Arri Fuji Alura

Red Epic with Arri Fuji Alura 18-80mm

Recently shot a fun spot with director Ira Rosensweig @ Spike TV. Great crew and cast, we even wrapped early. It was a green screen commercial so we decided to shoot Red Epic.

I’m starting to use the Arri Fuji Alura Zooms a lot more. They are smaller and I believe less expensive than the Angenieux Optimo zooms. There are so many new CINE zooms coming out.

Canon 30-300, 30-105. Zeiss 24-70mm & 70-200mm Compact Zooms. In addition to the Arri Aluras. They are all around $20-25k which is about half the price of the Angenieux Optimos, which continue to be the defacto movie/commercial zoom lens.

Also the Fuji Cabrio 19-90mm T2.6 which I cannot believe exists, seems impossible. But it’s like $46k, so it’s a different class than the new affordable zooms. I’ve heard that there a good amount of Alura 18-80mm & 24-240mm zoom owner ops.

Fun year for lenses.

Cheers,

Matt

Bodega and Click3x Green Screen Commercials

Click3x Commercial Setup

It’s been a busy week, I shot two green screen commercials back to back for Bodega and Click3x. Both production companies have their own sound stages in their Manhattan offices which provides some fun challenges. It’s actually really helpful to be able to have our VFX supervisors and editors stop by to answer questions and to pull stills for compositing testing etc.

Red Scarlet and Master Prime 100mm Macro

With Bodega we shot with the Red Epic and with Click3x we shot with their Scarlet package, but with a Zeiss Master Prime 100mm Macro and both Arri/Fuji Alura zoom lenses. In both commercials we exploited the extra resolution of the 5k/4k sensors. You really appreciate the technology Red has created just by the size of the files it’s creating @ 3:1 and even 7:1 compression ratios.

It’s becoming more and more common to shoot create ProRes dailies from the Epic using a Pix240 or similar external recorder. It think it’s genius and makes the workflow for the Red cameras much easier. We use d Pix240 on a two camera (Epic and Sony F3) interview with Google this month too.

Cheers,

Matt