F3 on Vodafone TVC
If you are a producer or director working in commercials or drama you almost certainly would like to get the 35mm film look on screen.
Until now, the only way to afford it on a low budget was to use a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) stills camera like the Canon 5D.
They are a cheap way to get that big screen depth of field look, but come with serious shortcomings for the director of photography and post house trying to produce high quality images.
It’s a situation faced recently by cinematographer & CREWS.TV member Donny Duncan as he prepared to shoot Vodafone’s Double Rainbow commercial, a creative idea sparked by a YouTube clip of a wildly enthusiastic man, ‘Bear’ Vasquez, watching a double rainbow in Yosemite. The clip climbed to well over 24 millions views as commercial hit New Zealand television channels mid January.
“It was a mid to low budget commercial and I’d been booked to shoot on a Canon 5D camera,” says Duncan.
“But before the shoot I went to Auckland launch of Sony’s new F3 camera and I loved the demo footage that they showed.”
The demo was a short film shot by Australian Director Jason Wingrove, while the Sony F3 is a new category of camera designed to emulate the big screen look at price way below a Red camera, but a step above the Canon 5D in quality and price.
The opportunity was too good to miss.
“I was cheeky enough to ask the guys from Sony if there was any chance I could have the camera the following week for the commercial,” says Duncan.
It was a bold move because the camera wasn’t just any new camera, at the time of the shoot back in November it was one of only a handful of pre-production engineering samples around the globe.
If anything went wrong with the untried camera the idea could backfire on Duncan, but he wasn’t deterred.
“Word came back from the production company, Robber’s Dog, the agency and client that if I thought it was going to be a good thing and do the job they had enough faith to go ahead to and shoot with it,” says Duncan.
A second hurdle was to coordinate with DoP Yves Simard who had already arranged to shoot some evaluation footage for Crews.TV at the same time. Simard says he was happy to rearrange because nothing beats the pressure of a real-world test.
As a result of all this was a coup – the first commercial on the new camera.
Duncan says he was very happy with the results from the camera, although he cautions his focus was on shooting the job in the tight time frame required by the production, rather than testing all the features of the camera.
“I had no chance for high contrast dramatic lighting,” he points out.
“It was a pretty big challenge for the camera, as there were quite a lot of situations with really hot bland skies. Shooting wide shots towards the sun in a broad overcast sky was really hard.
“I almost constantly had a hard edge grad filter in the top of frame, but then I would have been doing just the same if I was shooting film.”
Duncan was also able to give Sony some feedback on tweaks he’d like to see in production models, but has no regrets about the experience.
“One reason I went for this camera was because we had a lot of VFX with doubling up of the rainbows and the waterfalls and all that,” he says.
“I figured that there are going to be fewer artefacts and rolling shutter effects than on a DSLR, which is all going to help if you are doing VFX.
“I have spoken to the VFX artist and he said it was pretty clean, there wasn’t any problematic noise at all.”
* * *
Double Rainbow TVC
* * *
DoP: Donny Duncan
Dir: Adam Stevens
Agency: Colenso BBDO
Client: Vodafone New Zealand
Technical Notes
Camera: pre-production sample Sony PMW-F3
Camera set up: Cine Gamma 1
Lenses: Zeiss Standard MKII prime lenses
Accessories: Modified Genus handheld rig, Arri follow focus
Recording: XDCAM EX 35 Mb/sec to internal SxS cards
VFX: Double streams, waterfall etc, Rainbow.
Before using look closely at: Viewfinder – location on the camera and image quality. Peaking focus tool – works great but how will you turn it off for the operator but leave it on for the focus puller. Off-board recording of 10-bit 4:2:2 – big potential but make sure you have the right cable to power the off-board recorder off the camera.
Seriously one of the awesomest commercials EVER. Great job!
To any shooter out there. In terms of VFX/editing and the final look of the picture, shoot white for white and leave the grads in the bag (unless you are fully aware of what you want the final look of the picture to be) don’t try to achieve anything in camera as far as color goes – its the age of digital, its all about manipulation of 1′s and 0′s now, not a film cutting desk. So any special look, can be achieved better in post, as long as the pictures have depth and framing* that helps tell the story, are lit in a way that helps tell the story and are balanced to White.
Once you have given me a high contrasted or otherwise manipulated picture via things like grads, things get harder to manipulate. A flat white sky is perfect, I can deal with that, with greater results than in camera techniques (now). And if I want to add any sort of graduation to the picture, I literally have millions of options on how I and the director want it to look, with higher resolution than what the camera can offer. Without effecting any CG or VFX that needs to be rendered.
* Framing – be a bit loose (wide) with this as well, so it can be manipulate if need be, with the nice high resolutions from cams like the F3, we can nudge and pull the picture with room to spare, with no detectable data loss.
Rant over