Behind The Scenes: Kessler Crane Key West Shoot from Cristina Valdivieso + Jon Connor on Vimeo.

It’s taken me a while to finish this piece, a lot longer than usual, mainly down to my crazy schedule here in the states. I am currently in Lewiston, Idaho shooting a documentary on the 7D, 5Dmkii and 1Dmkiv. It’s going to be really good I hope, I can’t say much more until it is edited then I will do a blog on it. Been great fun shooting and big thanks to Preston Kanak my intern. He has been amazing…more from him soon as he has a great project at the moment, making a 3 minute film every day of this year!

I shot this about 2 weeks or so ago down in Key West. I was down with my good friend Eric Kessler of Kessler Crane. We were testing out gear, some of it very new. Amongst the gear we tested were the excellent “Pocket Jib”, the Oracle system and the new Philip Bloom signature edition Pocket Dolly, yes you are reading that correctly. I love the Cineslider and I love the PD V2 so Eric said “why don’t I simply make a special one to your specs” and he did. It’s awesome, I have the traveller 2 foot length but there will be a 3 foot one too. It has the drag control of the Cineslider and the different gearing and crank of the Cineslider too. Love it…it will be out for sale in September hopefully. Price TBA. It’s a perfect slider for me. Am very happy with it! It works with all the motor stuff and Oracle too and does the vertical moves as demonstrated by Eric using the V2 3 foot pocket dolly at the bottom of this post. The normal V2 one is still great, this will just have more features but it will cost more for sure. It will be $995 including the outrigger feet which cost $150 normally, a special case to carry it in, gearing taking from the Cineslider as well as the crank mechanism and the drag control from the Cineslider.  This is not a replacement for the V2, simply a higher spec version made to my requirements.

Shooting Lewiston Documentary using "Philip Bloom" Pocket Dolly

The Pocket Jib is simply awesome. Very easy to set up and smooth as anything. We got a permit to film in Mallory Square for 2 evenings in Key West, no way we could have gone guerilla with this! I had some help. Eric was there as were CanonFilmmakers.com’s Jon Connor and Cristina Valdivieso filming BTS and training videos. The jib ads SO much to your shots, admittedly it is a bit overused in the below shoot but as the short was to show of the toys it made sense to use it a lot! Normally one MAYBE two shots in a piece like this would be enough. The jib costs just $1200 , amazing quality for this price!

With the jib we had the K-Pod tripod system which is a joy for this as it has wheels. You can use your own 100mm bowl tripod but make sure it can take the weight! We got the balance weights from a local sports shop…flying with them is daft and expensive!

2 nights in Mallory Square from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Monument Valley is a place I have been desperate to visit for all my adult life. Ever since I fell in love with the John Ford movie “The Searchers”, simply the greatest western ever made and majestic to look at it, Cinematographer Winton C. Hoch captured Monument Valley in the most perfect way using the legendary Vistavision film format.

The film itself is epic and if you have never seen it then get on itunes now and download it! The locations used are 0ne thing, but the story and everyone in it will simply blow you away and they have the most perfect beginning and end shot ever put to film. I think they are responsible for my love of bookends. Below is the opening shot. I didn’t want to embed the closing shot too, if you have seen the film you know it, if you haven’t buy the movie…you will not regret it!

Anyway, that is a long winded way to get to the point of this film. As many of you know I have been in the US since early June doing lots of varied work, I have come to the end of my trip and before I went home I simply had to go to the place I had always dreamt of going to, so from Idaho ,where I was shooting a doc which i will do a blog on soon, I drove for two days, 1000 miles down to Monument Valley. I did not want to fly as I heard the drive was spectacular. I actually filmed the entire journey which I need to edit soon!

I have done an in depth commentary to play once you have seen the film. You need to hit pause when I say so as 5 minutes is not enough to tell you everything that I want to tell you.

Stuff that is not in the commentary. I used 2 Gitzo traveller tripods, a gorillapod, miller Solo DS20, and the manfrotto tripod with 503 head. I also used my new Kessler Crane Signature Edition Pocket Dolly which goes on sale for $995 in September. Pre-orders will be taken soonish I believe. If you can’t afford it check out the Pocket Dolly V2, is great too but doesn’t have the new gearing, drag control, feet or bag.

ALSO, lots of timer remotes, 3 power supplies and a brilliant battery brick for the 5d/ 7d by Switronix. it’s the Powerbase 70 and gives you about 6 times longer than a standard battery, it also has a d-tap out to power other things. ESSENTIAL for timelapse. I did have 3 power supplies for the cameras but one of them is 3rd party and this caused an issue. In the hotel there were LOTS of power cuts, every time this happened the Canon ones simply restarted, the 3rd party one said “cannot communicate with battery” which made it useless. It was $50 so it’s fine for normal use, just not here. That is when the fat battery of the Nikon D3s which goes on forever, the 1dmkiv and the Switronix battery pack saved the day.

Switronix power base

For the timelapses I shot AV mode mostly which causes lots of flicker, had the F stop around F5.6 or so, interval I believe was 7 seconds as I used 64gb UDMA cards so had the space to fill them up. Quality was medium or large. Yes lots of flickering so I used the FCP plug in called “long exposure” part of CHV ELECTRONICS Time Collection which costs $40. Bargain! I use it for almost all my timelapse.

The amount of time between shots comes down to two things, space on card and how long you have. You need 24 photos for a 24p video frame so keep that in mind. Too few photos and the computer needs to work them out, too many is fine as you can speed them up! Most of the nightime exposures were relatively high ISO of around 1600 with 30 second exposures as it was SO dark. When the cloud cleared and the moon came out the ISO could be dropped right down.

I stayed for one night out of three in “The View” Hotel. You have to stay there. It’s worth the $200 for this basic hotel as the view literally is breathtaking. Most of the shots in the second half of the film were taken from my hotel balcony.

To make sure the cameras were ok in the rain i covered them over with plastic. After my 7D died in Florida (still waiting to get it back from repair a month later!) I am very cautious about this weatherproofing now!

So, yes , I used 5 cameras at once. Not in the grasp of most, but this was simply as I needed to maximise my time, with two more days and just two cameras I could easily have done it. I wish I did have more time…I will certainly go back!!

Quick recap of gear used:

Cameras used:

1 5Dmk2 for video. Shot in 30p as was new and it didn’t have the new firmware on it incredibly so conformed to 24p in post. No big deal. It’s upgraded now!

Timelapse cameras:

Another 5dmk2, 2 x 7d, 1Dmkiv, Nikon D3s

Tripods used 2x Gitzo Travellers, Miller Solo 3 stage carbon fibre with DS20 head, Manfrotto with 503 HDV head (sticky!), heavy duty gorillapod.

Lenses used:

D3s: 21mm, 50mm, 85mm Zeiss ZF

Canon: 14mm F2.8, 17mm TS, 24mm TS V2, 24mm F1.4, 35mm F1.4, 50mm F1.2, 70-200mm F4 IS, 70-200mm F2.8 IS, 1.4 extender

5 intervalometers (timer remotes), 2 official canon ones, 1 official Nikon one and 2 third party ones.

Oh, all graded as usual with Magic Bullet looks, 20% of at checkout with code bloom20. Cropped to 2.35:1 in FCP using the built in plug in “widescreen”.

Anyway enjoy the film and do listen to the commentary. If there are any of my films you would like commentary of let me know!

Monument Valley from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

For a full description of shoot and gear please visit my website and also a 12 minute commentary.

http://philipbloom.net/2010/08/02/monumentvalley/

Monument Valley commentary by PhilipBloom

The photos below show you the number of cameras I had going at one time as well as “The View” hotel and my crappy Ford Edge rental that got stuck in the sand !!

This little piece was shot as ISO 1250 using the Nikon D3s, 21mm Zeiss ZF.2 F2.8, 50mm F1.4 and 50mm F2 macro Zeiss. Lit using just one LITEPANEL MicroPro (dialed right down)  in the tiniest bathroom known to man in my hotel in Oslo.

It’s a lot darker than it’s spiritual successor, Shaving it Back, the first short I made using the Canon 7D.

How did I find it? Fine to operate. I used the 7″ Marshall monitor to see what I was doing and a ball head manfrotto tripod to get those easy mucked up angles. Shame when you hit record the frame rate of the output from the Nikon to the Marshall drops, but it’s good enough for reference and with the pixel to pixel of the Marshall I was easily able to get my focus.

The codec of the Nikon sucks. Please get rid of Motion JPEG and make it full HD. This is potentially a great video camera. It already is an amazing stills camera. For now, it’s part of my arsenal. Not for the majority of shooting, that’s my Canons. This is for those moments where low light is needed!

Original music by Harold Green.

It was graded using Magic Bullet Looks, which you can get from Redgiantsoftware.com for 20% off with the code Bloom20 at checkout.

Flickering effect in V2 was with FX FACTORY light kit for FCP

This was made in part for my Oslo workshops to show the students sequences, telling a story through different angles and moments in time.

Bad Hair Day: Nikon D3s from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Kit wise I used the camera, 1 32gb Kingston card, 1 16gb Transcend card, a manfrotto tripod, Kessler Crane Pocket Dolly Traveller, Manfrotto 701 HDV head, Canon 100m F2.8L MACRO, 50mm F1.2L, 70-200 F2.8L IS, Tokina 11-16 F2.8, Zacuto Z-Finder and some fader NDS/ Vari NDS.

Salton Sea is very dirty, salty and sandy. Not the ideal environment for a consumer camera but it worked just fine. I had a few overheat warning issues after about 2 hours solid shooting in the sun and a couple of times the buffer ran out for the card and it stopped recording. First time I have seen this.

Image wise I have no idea if it’s better or worse than the 7D. I would literally have to shoot side by side and compare. Certainly from what I got I am very happy with the image out of the camera. I missed the extra dial, the dial in white balance, the mid ISOs and the top LCD panel. I really hate pressing a button and rotating a dial to get my iris to what I want it at. But these are niggly issues. Nothing major.

I also used the Kessler Crane Pocket Dolly Traveller again. I actually did have play with the crank and it was actually quite useful, still as mentioned on the Above Skywalker blog the belt in itself helps so much in keeping it dead silent. It really performed superbly. Very happy with the moves.

Aspect ratio is 2.55:1  Wider than I have tried before. All cropped in post. Grading done with Magic Bullet Looks. Get 20% off with code Bloom20 at www.redgiantsoftware.com.

Sound wise everything is foley. I forgot to bring my Rode Video Mic…anyway it was fun digging around Soundtrack Pro and Freesound.org for the right-ish sounds.

So how was my experience? Pretty good, apart from the odd overheating no real problems. I really enjoyed shooting with but as an owner of a 7D I missed a lot of the ergonomics and shooting in a place like that I would have felt happier with the extra protection it offers. All in all though an amazing camera for $800!!

Thanks to www.saracollaton.com for the following BTS pics.

Music is by the great Ry Cooder from the movie “Paris, Texas”

Salton Sea Beach from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Shot on a Canon Rebel T2i and a Kessler Crane Pocket Dolly Traveller

Music by Ry Cooder

Shot on location at Salton Sea Beach, CA

www.philipbloom.co.uk

I shot this over a couple of hours on a rotten windy day in San Francisco. It was filmed at Sutro Baths ruins.

The opening shots of the frothy water are straight out of the camera with no colour correction, real black and white, the light flickering is all natural light.

The “alien” cave shot onwards is all graded with Magic Bullet which you can get 20% off with code bloom 20 at the redgiantsoftware checkout.

Music is by James Newton Howard from Lady in the Water.

I will have some of these shots up soon with natural sound recorded with the Holophone Portamic Pro 5.1.

I used the DP slider for the dolly shot. Review coming soon.

5DmkII conformed to 24p and also Twixtor plug in used.

Lenses. 14mm F2.8L, 50mm F1.2L, 100mm Macro F2.8L, 90mm F2.8 TS, 70-200mm F2.8 IS

Sea from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Photos all courtesy of Sara Collaton

It’s the end of my Dubai shoot. We haven’t got everything in the bag so I will have to come back at some point to finish it off.

One of the best things I did whilst here was move hotels on my own money so I could have a killer view to do lots and lots of timelapses. I moved to the new Atlantis Hotel on the Palm Jumeirah in Dubai. Initially I was on the 4th floor and here is what I put together of some of my timelapse tests last week.

I showed them to my producer and he loved them, I said it would be much better if I could be higher in the hotel, so he made a couple of calls and I got moved to the 18th floor where the views were spectacular.

I also went out and did some other timelapses, from the ground looking at the same buildings as i could see from my room. Of the world’s most expensive hotel, also some of and from the world’s tallest building.

Both my 5DmkIIs and my 7D were used as was my Lumix GF1 which was used for a large number of the shots in this piece including the star timelapses.

I was mostly in aperture priority mode. The second shot was done over 24 hours from my balcony and the camera took a shot every 15 seconds. The others varied between 1 second and 4 seconds. Mostly AV mode but the shot of the Burj al Arab and the one from the top of the Burk Khalifa I had in manual so when it got dark it looked dark.

When shooting timelapses I find I tend to throw away about a third of them as they don’t quite work. But I am getting better, learning from my mistakes. After all it’s only by making mistakes do you improve! I am using a plug by CHV for FCP called Long Exposure which evens out some of the flickering. It’s very cheap. I also graded this strongly using Magic Bullet Looks. Don’t forget you get 20% off of MBL from Redgiantsoftware.com by using the code Bloom20

Lens wise I used the 70-200m F2.8 Canon. 16-35mm F2.8 Canon. 24mm F3.5 TS Canon, Tokina 11-16mm f2.8, Panasonic 20mm f1.7, Olympus 17mm f2.8, Canon 24mm F1.4, Sigma 10mm Fish Eye

I mostly shot aperture priority mode to cope with the light change Sometimes in manual. You don’t need expensive cameras to do this. The GF1 is a cheap camera and there are even cheaper ones out there like some of the powershot series with built in timelapse. It’s great fun, very boring to shoot but ultimately the most rewarding.

GF1 in action

Shooting on the world's tallest building

The world's most expensive hotel!

I must say that I really had a lovely time here. I enjoyed Dubai much more than last time. Big thanks to all the crew. To Arun, thanks mate despite the accident! Ryan, Elie. To Ian for hiring me again and to Graeme for being the jolliest man I have ever met.

I want to dedicate this film to Sky Vasser, daughter of my friend Vanessa Vasser whom I worked with on “Nightshift” who died at a tragically young age. I only met her a handful of times but she had enormous personality that I will never forget. My thoughts are with you Vanessa.

Sky from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Filmed in Dubai over 5 days and nights.

Shot on the Canon 7D, 2x5DmkII and one Panasonic GF1

Made in memory of Sky Vassar who died recently at a tragically young age.

Thanks to Media Prima and Talkabout Media

I have just got hold of 720p versions of the 3 spots of “Voices of Change”. The commercial I shot in India for Greenpeace using the Canon 5dmkII. Lucy Campbell-Jackson has also told me it will now be shown on more channels than originally planned reach an audience of 950 million. That’s pretty cool!

Thanks to Greenpeace for letting me show these. Here is link to blog with more info.

So here they are the 90,60 and 30 second spots.

Greenpeace: Voices of change. Shot on Canon 5dmkII from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

©2009 Greenpeace
Directed by Lucy Campbell-Jackson
DP Philip Bloom
Edited by Daniel Bird
Graded by Rob Chiu
Sound design by Ben Lukas Boysen aka Hecq.

Greenpeace: Voices of Change 60sec 5dmkII from Some Like It Shot on Vimeo.

Greenpeace: Voices of change. 30seconds Canon 5dmkII from Some Like It Shot on Vimeo.

Well simply because this was filmed for a segment of my new “shooting video with the 7d” dvd that is coming out in a couple of weeks. It was about how to record sound separately using the Zoom H4n and a Sony wireless lav.

Graded with Magic Bullet Looks which you can get twenty percent off when using code BLOOM20 at checkout

It is simple the lovely Von Marie Donato reading a short text (used by Charlie Sheen in Platoon!) and me filming her from a number of different angles.

I used the 35mm f1.4, 50mm f1.2, 70-200mm f2.8 and the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 which was used for the pseudo “jib shot”

I left the zoom recorder running whilst I did all the different shots and used pluraleyes to sync it all up automatically.

First two shots were shot at 720p 60p and converted to 29.97 in Cinema Tools.

Below is the native 30p version on Vimeo and below that is the jES De-interlacer 24p transcoded version on Exposure Room. The 24p has some motion blur due to the method I used. I will change this to another version later.

Enjoy.

Girl with the flaxen hair: Canon 7d 30p (!) from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

]]> http://philipbloom.net/2009/09/25/a-little-short-shot-using-canon-7d-and-shot-in-30p/feed/ 39 http://philipbloom.net/2009/09/22/greenpeace-commercial-shot-on-canon-5dmkii/ http://philipbloom.net/2009/09/22/greenpeace-commercial-shot-on-canon-5dmkii/#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2009 04:13:58 +0000 pbloom http://philipbloom.co.uk/?p=5241 This is going out on MTV in the next few days. It’s the commercial I shot in Delhi on the Canon 5DmkII a couple of months back. Shot on monopod, Zacuto rig and Miller DS20 with a wide variety of lenses. 30p.

Check out my previous blog for more info.

http://philipbloom.co.uk/2009/07/21/greenpeace-90-second-commercial-in-delhi-india-on-the-canon-5dmkii/

http://philipbloom.co.uk/2009/07/26/tutorial-on-syncing-sound-with-the-5dmk2-and-pluraleyes-for-fcp/

http://philipbloom.co.uk/2009/07/23/the-canon-5dmkii-a-documentarians-video-camera/

Click here to see the 90 second spot. There is also a 60 second and 30 second spot.

©2009 Greenpeace

Directed by Lucy Campbell-Jackson

Thanks!

Philip