“I made a feature film, Summer Rain, which was the first tax-break film made in the UK after the scheme was introduced in the late 90s,” says Jonathan. “Now I’m proud to be directing what I believe is the first feature film in the Europe to be shot on the Sony EX camera.”
Producer John Adam co-wrote the script for S.N.U.B! with his father Peter. They hit upon the idea for the movie when they visited Kelvedon Hatch in Essex, a genuine Cold War nuclear bunker on three floors, 100ft underground, with hundreds of 1950s computers dotted around the place. “It’s a set that would cost millions to build on a sound stage,” says Jonathan. “So although our budget was small, our production values are enormous.”
Shooting with the EX
“Using the EX1 came about because it had just been released and John had read that it had amazing low light capabilities. The window of opportunity to shoot in the bunker was ridiculously small – two weeks to shoot the whole film – so we couldn’t spend a lot of time lighting.
“The first time you go to this location, you genuinely walk around going, ‘wow’. You enter through this cottage in this little wooded area, go down three or four steps and turn a corner and there’s this 150m (500ft) corridor. At the end of the corridor you turn a corner and there’s a set of steel blast doors. Then a couple more turns and you hit a stairwell which, just to confuse your orientation, goes up about three floors. So you go in at ground level to find yourself in a facility that goes up three floors. It’s mad!”
S.N.U.B! is a very different proposition for Jonathan than Summer Rain, which was shot with Panavision 35mm gear, had an eight-week shooting schedule and a large crew. “Compared with that, S.N.U.B! is a big challenge,” he says. “But how can you resist a film where you get to see the Prime Minister’s wife axe a radiated convict? But then they throw in the challenges, first by saying you are going to shoot on HD using two new cameras – and second, by showing you the budget. Just when I was thinking it was impossible, they told me I only had 13 days to shoot it in! I was very fortunate to have Jordan Cushing as DP. He seized the opportunity to work within those limitations.”
“I found out about the film on the internet,” says Jordan, who was DP and first camera operator. “I arranged a meeting with Jonathan and John, and they seemed to warm to the idea of me shooting the film. We met for the first time seven days before principal photography started. Then we went through a lightning quick prep period and I met Phil, my other camera operator, for the first time.”
“It was actually on the first morning of the shoot,” adds Philip Gaze. “We were at the nuclear bunker, which was a fantastic location. It’s the kind of place you wouldn’t normally get to see. I’d been speaking to someone two weeks earlier about their purchase of two Sony EX cameras, which is the first time I’d heard about it. Then when we got the go-ahead for the film, I asked what we were shooting on and they said the EX, so I spent five days doing intensive research.”
Compact flash cards
Rather than tape, the Sony EX records to SxS compact flash cards, which conveniently slot straight into the CF port on a Macbook Pro. There are slots for two cards, and a 16GB card will record for around an hour. “My first impressions were that, for the level of camera, it was pretty impressive,” says Phil. “It performed really well. It’s the first time I’ve shot tapeless, and not having the reassuring clunk when you press Record was a bit unnerving to begin with, but apart from that it’s pretty straightforward. When you’re shooting, it makes no difference what it’s recording on to. What’s very nice is that you can review and not worry about recording over anything once you’ve got your take; it’s all there, all categorized, and you can go and look at each shot individually when and where you want.”
“Yeah, that was extremely useful,” agrees Jordan, “especially shooting with two cameras all the time, because in an ordinary two-camera set-up, my preference would be to be at the monitor, not operating, because then I could switch back and forth.”
“When were shooting, we had four cards – two 8GB and two 16GB, one of each per camera,” says Phil. “Most of the time we just had one card in the camera, and when it was getting close to being full, we’d swap it out. On our bigger days, we’d do one card change per day. They were taking a card off us at lunchtime, regardless of whether it was full, and downloading in the afternoon and actually reviewing the rushes during he shoot. That was the cool thing about it. You could follow the shots through the shoot, and if you needed to pick up something, you could do it on the following day.”
“Same with batteries,” adds Jordan. “They were lasting really well. We were probably getting through one and a half batteries a day. But of course, they’re brand new batteries.”
Lowlight performance
“One of the reasons John said he wanted to use the EX was because it apparently had incredible lowlight sensitivity,” explains Jordan. “When I was doing my research online, that seemed to be borne out, but it wasn’t until I actually got my hands on the camera in the test period that I was blown away by how it compares with other HD prosumer cameras. It’s back to the sensitivity of the most sensitive DV cameras. You had that step back once you switched up to HD, when you really needed a lot of light. Because of the nature of the movie – the speed we had to work at and these massive sets – we really had to use available light in some of them. It was incredible to have that kind of sensitivity at our disposal. We couldn’t have done it with any other prosumer HD camera to date.
“Because we were shooting a scene in that long tunnel, which there was no opportunity to light, this was one of the first things I tested – could we even get an image? In fact, the stills photographer came along on the first day of shooting and he asked how much gain we were using, because he couldn’t get a full exposure. He was finding it dark, but we found the sensitivity of the EX amazing. So much so that we were using -3dB a lot of the time.
“S.N.U.B! is a horror movie,” he continues, “and in terms of the lighting, it was conceived that the film would get progressively darker to create a more sinister atmosphere in the bunker, which starts out as a very institutional fluorescent lit place, but with the third act being emergency lights only. So one of the things I was concerned about was noise in the blacks. But this hasn’t been a problem at all. There was great detail in the shadow and decent blacks – not film blacks, but still, really impressive.
“So you have the sensitivity, clean blacks and a lot of detail in the highlights – you can record up to 109 IRE, which they seem to use now instead of scopes. It doesn’t give 110 per cent, unfortunately, but it does give 109 per cent.”
“We gave 110 per cent,” adds Phil.
Handling
“We shot handheld for quite a lot of the film,” explains Jordan. “S.N.U.B! has three different kinds of look or feel, and as things start to go to pieces in the bunker, the camera work becomes a lot more ragged. The first act is quite fluid. Then the second act is very static and stale, as they’re in the bunker, more or less waiting. Then things start to go wrong and that’s when the camera comes off the tripod and it gets more and more frenetic as you move towards the climax of the film. So there was quite a bit of handholding in the later stages of the film, but early on there were also occasions when it just wasn’t practical to move the camera any other way than handheld.
“It’s not really a very handheld-friendly camera. There’s no weight at all in the handgrip, and where you hold it is 3-4in from the center of gravity, so it really pulls to the left. And it’s a fairly heavy duty camera. But it helped that part of the changing style of the film was that the camera height progressively changes throughout, so by the time we’re into the whole crazy handheld stuff, I was able to hold it by the top handle, which is a lot easier than holding it by the side grip.”
“I quite liked it actually,” says Phil. “I found I could twist the grip and wedge my thumb in between the hand piece and the camera, with my fingers underneath the camera, and that was quite comfortable.” “Why didn’t you show me that!?” says Jordan, “your hand is massive, though.” Jordan tries Phil’s grip and nods approvingly. “Oh, that’s not bad at all. Interesting.
“I was propping it up with my left hand,” he adds, “which doesn’t allow you to operate any of the controls, which is why it was useful to have an assistant. And that’s another thing. It was very new here in the UK, so there were few accessories available to us. We had one matte box, but we were hoping to have two because I used some filtration. That presented some problems too, when it came to the use of grads with the matte box, as there isn’t a whole lot of room to adjust the height of your grads once you get the matte box in there, because the microphone is in the way.
“We didn’t have follow focus either. We had some on order, but we couldn’t get the rings you screw on to the outside to gear the focus with. This was a bit problematic, as we were working mostly wide open to try to get some selective focus, to take a bit of the video edge off. So it was hard work on our assistants, but once we get into handheld there are also issues when someone is pulling off the barrel – sometimes that can introduce unwanted movement, but fortunately, as the third act was quite frenetic anyway, it just contributed to that energy, the excitement.
Image sensors
The Sony EX camera uses three 1/2in 1920x1080 CMOS imaging chips. “As far as the size of the image sensor, it’s hard to say what effect that had on the depth of field. Obviously, mathematically, it has 1/2in chips instead of 1/3in chips, so it should give shallower depth of field, and we shot wide open for virtually the whole film. Basically, when I needed to lose a little bit of exposure, my preference was to switch to -3 on the gain as opposed to stopping down the lens, in order to reduce the depth of field. That being said, because we shot most of our masters at the wide end of the lens, we still often had the whole world in focus. But when it came time to trying to get selective focus on subjects further away, it was possible to do that on the long end of the lens. With 1/3in chip cameras it often isn’t even possible. And even on some of our medium shots, the focus is quite critical. We were watching some of the rushes today, and you can really see when it is sharp, and it really is very sharp. So that again was part of the appeal of using this camera over others.
“The controls are one of the major benefits of this camera,” explains Phil. “There’s a real focusing ring, and not just an endless turn, so you have some guidance there, and that helped a lot.”
“I liked the aperture ring as well,” adds Jordan, “compared with the usual options of either a little wheel or a toggle button. You can really quite accurately punch in portions of stops, rather than just dialling in some kind of arbitrary movement and having no idea what’s actually happening with the lens. We also made good use of the macro on a few shots. The minimum focus when not in macro is surprisingly far, so that was a bit of an obstacle when we were trying to do some longer lens stuff to getting objects large in the frame. We had some issues where we were on the border as to whether we should be in macro or not. I think it’s somewhere around 4ft that you have to make that decision.
“Some of the sets we were in were massive,” he continues, “but there were also sets that were incredibly small. I think our smallest set was probably the escape hatch. Characters go up this 110m ladder to escape to the surface, and two characters have a dialog scene in a room at the bottom of the escape hatch. It’s probably about three foot square. We decided to shoot it from down the ladder because there was no way to get the camera in there and get the characters in focus. That said, it’s pretty good in terms of getting a wide angle. We shot a lot of the film at the wide end of the lens, to take advantage of the great big rooms and give the them a sense of scale. We had quite a big cast, so we could do master shots from fairy close and still get the set and all the characters in the frame.”
Monitoring
“As far as monitoring goes, I primarily operated from the LCD,” says Jordan, “because it’s just not practical to run down halls being chased by actors with axes and having your eye to the eyepiece – and some of our cast members were surprisingly enthusiastic as far as running went; they didn’t realize that sometimes you don’t need to run full tilt right at the cameraman. I found the viewfinder didn’t give me the same confidence in terms of sharpness as the LCD, which is the opposite of what you usually find. I had my viewfinder in black and white and Phil had his in color, as it’s switchable.
“What was also useful was the ability to dial in a specific color temperature, as opposed to other prosumer-level cameras, where you just have to take a white balance at the same time and use your eyeball to see whether or not they’re actually matching. Seeing the footage cut together, our two cameras matched exceedingly well. There’s quite a lot of control in the menus too, in terms of being able to adjust the image. I did a lot of tweaks with the detail setting, just to undo some of the work of the technicians who put in all the sharpening features and take away some of that electronic edge that you find. So we had a preset for both cameras, which was primarily the detail settings, but was also a heavy adjustment to the gamma. You have a lot of control over the recorded image, which is pretty amazing for a camera at this price point.
“It really has everything,” he adds. “There’s a bunch of very good presets, in terms of the gamma; there’s virtually every type of detail setting – black pedestal, knee points. I believe it’s the identical set of menu options you get on the other XDCAMs. I couldn’t think of one setting I’d have liked to have played around with that I couldn’t. I would have liked a week of prep just to try out all the settings, because there’s so much leeway.” “There’s also a Steadishot mode, which worked quite well” says Phil, “except I found that a couple of times I had to switch it off because the monitor was lagging. At one point I was doing a handheld tight shot while moving, and the picture only caught up with me when I stopped.”
“It’s not as good as the Canon XL2’s system,” adds Jordan, “which I think is the best image stabilization on any camera in this category, but it’s close. It’s certainly better than the rest of the prosumer cameras I’ve used, which is probably all of them. Except of course, you’re fighting the physical balance of the camera, so it had better be good, because, as I say, the camera isn’t so friendly to handholding.
Changing light
“For one of our big set pieces, we had the logistical teams of soldiers arriving at the bunker, bringing in supplies, so we conceived a Steadicam shot that would take us through all the action, going into the cottage that is the entrance to the bunker, and then bring us all the way down into this huge corridor that leads you deep into the Earth. So we got Steadicam operator James Blackburn. He brought along a Flyer rig, which is a lightweight support, and the EX seemed to work great on that. So we conceived shooting this scene all in one take.
“The one thing that we did have to rig for that shot was an iris pull, as we were going from daylight to this dark tunnel, and it simply wasn’t practical to light that space. So James rigged up something. Fortunately, it does have a geared iris ring, so we used a little Preston wireless rig to do the pull, which worked out very well. However, by the time we got through the day to the best take, which I think was the fifth take because of the complexity – with probably 40 people in the shot and a lot of choreography, with vehicles pulling in – the sun was setting, so the iris pull, which had been seven stops when we did our walk through, was just one stop at the end. So we could probably have gone without the motors! But it was nice to have the option of takes one through four, but in take five you could just see the horizon and there was this nice orange glow.
“The subsequent scene, also shot with Steadicam, is the sky darkening, because this big atomic cloud has exploded. So the sky was supposed to darken – but it actually had darkened, because it was basically night. It’s a new camera, and there were inevitably one or two glitches. “For the last three days of the shoot, my camera was coming up with spurious menu changes,” says Phil, “one involving the manual and auto iris. You’d have it visibly on manual iris, but it would switch to auto. You’d keep fiddling and eventually it would sort itself out. The other issue with my camera was color temperature. The number would change, but the temperature wouldn’t. It would look the same in the viewfinder, but the numbers would be different.”
There was also a huge difficulty on Jordan’s camera importing any footage into the edit that had daytime timecode. “It would also have been nice to be able to sync the timecodes,” says Phil, “but they’re very much separate.
“One other thing we did notice is that there were some issues with the rolling shutter. When you do quick pans of strong verticals, you notice that they tend to wobble a little bit, but being aware of this, we did our best to avoid big pans across strong verticals. Also, we were just looking at some rushes of machine gun fire, and there were some strange artefacts where you have banding of the machine gun fire. So frames where you don’t see the muzzle flash, sometimes you’ll get a portion of the screen that’s been lit up by the muzzle flash from the frame before or after. It almost looks like lens flair. We were shooting 1/50sec at 25p, so that tells me the entire frame isn’t exposed at once.
“In conclusion,” says Phil, “I’d quite like to own one of these camera and have it at home for the odd job. The price range for this level of camera makes it a really good buy.”
Jordan agrees. “I would never have thought that I’d be interested in buying a camera, frankly – the investment for the value you get, and then next month another camera comes out. However, with this camera, I am seriously considering buying one. Although we found one or two glitches, it’s early days for the camera, so I’m sure they’ll be fixed.”
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Steve ParkerSteve Parker is editor of the Reel Show. His degree course in linguistics and ergonomics was completely wasted on him. He stood for election for the position of President of the Students Union (and won) so that he could spend a year organizing parties and drinking cheap alcohol. He became a journalist while at university and has been a slacker ever since. |