200a in action

hemophilia

hemophilia

Well-known member
We won an HVX200a from Panasonic (thank you Jan you're the greatest). We used it one day to shoot this short as part of the 48 hour film project in Washington, DC. And now we're going to sell the camera to upgrade to an HPX500. :)

Nothing monumental to report about the camera really. It behaved just like a 200 which I've used on numerous occasions before. I didn't do a side-by-side comparison or anything though, so I can't speak to the subtleties.

The short film is pretty vulgar and depressing. Not exactly a laugh-riot... but I'd be interested to hear what y'all think. It's tough keeping a short that's basically a play (a bunch of people in one location having a conversation) visually interesting without getting in the way and distracting from the point (which is of course the conversation). So for this we just tried to keep the dolly creeping around and giving a bit of movement to otherwise static shot-flow.

I'm rambling. I'd rather you all rambled.

http://www.crisislab.com/index.php?action=view&id=9&module=weblogmodule&src=@random47f3a71ecccfe
(flash video)

-Kevin

P.S. If anyone is in the market for a new HVX200a that just got opened long enough to fully test it out, let me know. :)
 
Wow man, that was just a really good scene! Amazing progression and beautiful acting! Great shots with great audio!

Love it!

what's ur price on the 200a?
 
I really enjoyed that! Audio was great and I loved the subtle movement in your shots. A great way to invigorate a table scene.
What was your lighting setup?
Cheers
 
The dolly play was nice and did keep things moving. The ending shot with the urn falling down was just plain beautiful. Thought at first that you animated the ashes, and maybe you did, but either way that was something really nice.

Overall though this seemed very "pregnant" in terms of the dialogue, themes, and acting... almost boardering on melodrama. I would have thought it was taken from a Play.. maybe an updated Tennessee Williams pent up angst-riddled play. There were all the deliberate and overdone gestures with hair and facial movments that just come off as stilted and put on. I know it's a 48 hour piece and that's a challenge and you pulled off so much of this, but when watching it for itself.. then it kind of comes off as something very film school and very detached and one note. Like they come into the scene and play their cards right away.. don't change.. nothing rises or changes and the mood is one way and heavy handed.


Cheers for showing this and way to go in winning an HVX. Being an long time suffering actor turned filmmaker, I'm just aware of the things that play well for theater and what plays well for the tv screens...
 
Thank you for posting the footage. It's nice to finally see some images from the 200a.

Didn't you shoot the incompetent detective short? I thought that was great, you going to any more of those?

As for the short itself, it was pretty good. Although, after the guy smashed the bottle, I kept thinking, "so....who's going to clean that up? It's settling dammit!" ;-)
 
enjoyed that a lot. Very good story, especially for a 48 hour film challenge, just two scenes so you could focus on that complex dialogue. two cheers.
 
nice. thanx to share.
as you had experience with the HVX200, how did u feel the HVX200a? was it night & day with noise? did you notice a difference?
 
Thanks for all the comments, compliments and critiques everyone; much appreciated.

Lighting setup-wise, we had a 4-bank fluorescent (like a cheap knock-off of a diva400) as our key most of the time. And a Kino Diva200 dimmed down to fill in the away-from-window side. We had 1/2 CTO on the windows, which unfortunately we put on the easy way just kinda taped to the outside of the windows. So they flap around in the breeze and are distracting, but it was the best we could do at the time. Then we had a couple Pepper 100 fresnels that we used as accents/hair-lights here and there. The best bit is that we had a nice CRT production monitor on set that gave us really accurate colors, which was important since I'd never shot with this camera before and didn't particularly know what to expect and how the LCD/EVF image would translate.

The ashes shot was not-only NOT animated, but I only got one-take of it because we didn't have any more ashes. So I had them first grab some leaves and throw them off just to see how they'd fall, then do the keeper take you see there. We had to stabilize it in Motion a bit because I was sitting on a rock just over the water and did it handheld. So it goes a bit soft in HD because of the stabilization (done in Motion) but in SD it's 100% fine. That was 60fps overcranked of course, and I just got really lucky with the wind and the light.

Yes that's my detective short. You can also see what won us the HVX200a which I posted in the HPX thread (b/c we shot it on a loaner HPX500 from Panasonic-- thanks one more time Jan): http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=133297
(that one is silly and far more fun)

As for noise & sensitivity-- it wasn't a problem with this camera. But without being side-by-side with the older model I can't tell a difference. If someone had swapped my camera for a 200 during this shoot I would not have noticed. In a situation pushing the low-light more maybe that wouldn't be the case, but for this it just wasn't an issue (shot cinelike-V, graded in Color).

If this were a different forum, comparing something to Tennessee Williams would be like the biggest compliment of all time. :) But yes, this is a bit of stage play in many senses, and it can be challenging to make that work on the screen. Thanks again everyone.

-Kevin
 
Indeed and you did keep the attention and action. What dolly did you use? I also need to do some stabilization of some aerial shots through Motion. Could you describe your workflow and any helpful advice. Personally I didn't see anything that detracted from that shot. I think it's money and demo reel material for sure. So any help on how to use it and if you have to scale in or anything.. would be greatly appreciated.


You are right about the Tennessee williams thing too and congrats on what you did either way. I wish I could afford to buy that 200a off ya but I have other toys that need to be purchased first.... Cheers
 
very strong dialogue/acting. What was your shooting ratio? i.e. how many takes in each setup?

I think the blocking (placement) worked pretty well but could have been stronger with entrances and/or re-arranging of the characters on different beats. Though the staging really kept everyones part in the short about even.

Mom across from Son
Sister Across from Sister
Where did the father usually sit? Where the son was?

Yeah I spotted the CTO in the window instantly, it was catching the reflection of the kinos. Though it helped keep the outside in range and the right temp.

Also for future reference Diva lights (dimming makes it worse) shift towards magenta very quickely and leave the skin tones looking purple-ish. I think its most noticable in the mothers CU. Also adding a solid on the side where the red wall is would keep some of the spill off their faces.
 
Dolly-- It was a Matthews briefcase dolly. Really handy little things those dollies. Too bad they're so damn expensive. Some industrious individual on these boards has to make one of those for a quarter the price. I just rented, but it sure would be nice to own one.

Stabilization-- Pretty straightforward to do that with Motion. I just sent the clip to Motion from the Final Cut timeline. Applied the stabilize effect, doing it pretty minimally so as to just take the edge off the shakies and not have the image go too soft. Then I rendered the footage out of motion and dropped it back onto the Final Cut timeline. It's annoying but that's the only way you can subsequently bring it into Color (Color won't recognize embedded Motion projects). Final Cut's integration really blows sometimes. I look forward to the day that software package lives up to the word "Suite".

Shooting ratio-- I think we shot 1.5 hours. Which is about 12:1 or thereabouts? It was awkward to cover with all the differnt lines between the people. We tried to do full takes as much as possible to really let the actors flow. But had to balance that with our time constraint and the risk of having them wear out from playing it to death. It's a tough scene at times, and certainly keeping it fresh is a concern.

"Where did the father sit?" Very good question. I'm kinda bugged we didn't address that. As for the color on the mom... that was our toughest shot b/c we were at the end of the day and the sun was getting weak outside and shooting in an open room like that everything can go haywire when the light changes rapidly. So I actually hit the grade on that pretty hard to match the rest of the footage, which might be what you're seeing.

Thanks guys.

-Kevin
 
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