FS7: Recreating 1943 on the FS7 with zero crew

[Martin.G]

I had the pleasure of making a video about an old father this fall. My client wanted to tell his fathers story to preserve it for future generations. To show them how hard life was back in the day, when we did not have ipads, internet, or even phones at all. They did not even have water in the house until a couple of decades ago.

With the project came some interesting experiences. For instance, working completely solo but still making a feature film look of the footage. For the budget, and with the excellent costume and props management of my client, i think we did really good.

The good parts starts just before the 4:00 mark. The film is in norwegian, but the man talks about the things we show in the recreated footage, so it should be passable also for you foreigners to follow the story without subtitles. Besides, this is primarily a photographers forum, am i right? So enjoy the pictures, and do please criticize. Thats how we all evolve as filmmakers.

Shot on the Sony FS7 V2.10

Interview - Sigma 35 1.4 Art
Fishing - Canon 70-200 4L IS
Glidecam - Zeiss E 24-70 4 OSS
Most other - Sigma 24-105 4 Art OSS

Metabones Speedbooster Ultra

Glidecam HD 4000
Kessler Crane 8 foot crane with Revolution Head
Kessler Crane Pocket Dolly

Graded in Davinci Resolve using LC709A LUT with Panasonic Gamut as base.

The interview was shot in 4K and most of the compositions are dialed in for 1080p delivery. I think it holds up really well for documentary/broadcast use, but would not use this technique for a proper feature film targeted for cinematic release.

 

[Grug]

Wonderful stuff Martin. I'd love to see a subtitled or dubbed version in English so that I could follow the actual history he's recounting. For a one-man-band affair, I think you got a remarkable result.

 

[Martin.G]

Wonderful stuff Martin. I'd love to see a subtitled or dubbed version in English so that I could follow the actual history he's recounting. For a one-man-band affair, I think you got a remarkable result.

Thanks! Maybe i will sub it if i have available downtime. Its actually quite interesting stories he is telling.

There was only two days of planning behind this, and four shourt norwegian autumn/winter days of shooting. It really was run and gun. Im still amazed at what the FS7 can deliver when presented with nice costumes, cool props, and daylight.

Allthough i learned the hard way about exposing correctly for the slow motion in FS7. If you see the parts where the boy chops the tree at 06:18 and when he chops the wood at 06:41, these images was shot in 150fps and underexposed. The image degradation from this really shows.

 

[Grug]

Even dubbing it would be fine (and would take a fraction of the time to do compared to subtitles).

The full-frame HFR stuff isn't great with these sensors, does the v3 firmware let you use crop mode for HFR work now? I'd recommend doing that whenever you can. I default to 2k crop mode for all of my HFR (over 60fps) work on the F5 these days precisely because it avoids all of the nasty artifacts.