RED ONE indy comedy starts production in Beijing

C

chinacanuck

Member
Hi everyone,

We're gearing up to shoot an indy comedy feature on a RED one camera, starting October 15 in Beijing, China.

We're currently putting the crew together and locking down locations, but we'll be keeping regular posts up about our experiences with the RED, and we'd welcome other people's tips and comments as well.

For starters we're encountering feedback that the RED needs ice packs on it to keep it from shutting down--not sure whether this will still apply as we move into fall weather, but interested to hear whether anyone else has had this experience?

Sound wise we'll be shooting directly into camera, through a mixer and hopefully with a separate drive as backup. We are weighing the benefits of synced sound versus having sound go to a hard drive, but RED's audio kinks seem to have been sorted out with the newer models.

We'll post updates here, but feel free to also hop onto our temporary web home, where we'll have pictures and clips and links to press: http://www.indiegogo.com/Red-Light-Revolution
 
9 days till we lens, and we're having trouble locking down lights. It seems lights in this country, along with what is termed a "Lighting Master", are incredibly pricey.

A good friend who does a lot of indie projects has recommended that we simply go to a hardware store and buy a bunch of T4s, long tubes that apparently work great on actors' faces and even close ups. They sell for $2 a pop, which is mighty tempting right now when being presented with bills that will run into the thousands. And that doesn't include the electricity to keep those things running.

I thought that the advantages of RED, and all the digital cameras, was an ability to deal with low light? If this is a myth, please feel free to debunk it for me.
 
Have you cast in China or are you bringing actors to China?

Is this going to be in Mandarin, or English? Or a mixture?

I'm interested in following your progress...unfortunately not the greatest Tech head in the world.

Good luck with it.

-Martin
 
the RED is not a particularly fast camera.
I have found that getting lighting equipment outside of l.a. and nyc to be a pain and oftentimes extremely more expensive in the states. Tokyo was also a pain in the ass to find affordable fixtures.
 
Martay said:
Have you cast in China or are you bringing actors to China?

Is this going to be in Mandarin, or English? Or a mixture?

I'm interested in following your progress...unfortunately not the greatest Tech head in the world.

Good luck with it.

-Martin
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Hi Marty,

All our actors are based in China, but it's turning out to be a real international cast--we've got a Japanese actor from the Chinese hit "City of Life and Death" playing one of our supporting characters, we've got a French and Australian actor, and the rest are all from China. It's going to mostly Mandarin, with some English thrown in by the French and Aussie people.

I'm not a great tech head either--hence the questions about lights!
 
Matty_g said:
the RED is not a particularly fast camera.
I have found that getting lighting equipment outside of l.a. and nyc to be a pain and oftentimes extremely more expensive in the states. Tokyo was also a pain in the ass to find affordable fixtures.
Click to expand...
By fast do you mean having it shut down? Or you mean lights for it take forever to set up? Would be interested to hear about your shoots in Japan
 
By fast he means the RED camera does not stand out as being especially light sensitive.
It's often rated 200ASA to 320ASA depending on lighting conditions, in tungsten lighting (which is quite common for night shooting) the sensitivity is around the 200ASA end and dynamic range is reduced.
You should talk to your DP about all that. Also your DP or 1st AC should prep the RED camera thoroughly to make sure it's on a stable build.
If you are in a location where lighting equipment rentals are very expensive, it's best to buy and build as much as you can, then rent those units you cannot afford to buy/build.

Good Luck.

P.S. LA is a great place to rent a huge variety of lighting and grip gear, and at the same time a horrible place to get good, cheap permits and locations. Other parts of the country are the reverse. It's never easy.
 
Looking forward to your short. Its been ages since i've been back in Beijing, and a year since i've been to Shanghai. Which actor from City and Life and Death (really great film). I'll be following this production with much interest. I've worked on productions in China and its relatively inexpensive (renting out ex1's is a fraction of the cost than the US, but formats such as digibeta are harder to come by compared to dvcpro there).
 
35mm...wow, to have that kind of money! Right now we're even doing printing of scripts at friend's offices to save on photocopying costs, so it's a digital route for us I'm afraid...

Very interested to hear these comments about lighting. Does Red not work as well as say the Sony F900 in low light? And does anyone know what types of mixers can go directly into the Red? I've been trying to lock this down so that I can get a handle on what I can borrow and what I have to steal.

Today I spent bargaining down lighting crews...so far my best result has been about 6000US for gear and 3 lighting people. In China usually equipment is expensive and labour is cheap, but with lighting and sound I'm finding the opposite--people just won't work for cheap.

Which brings us to interesting discussions I've been having with the director lately while trying to source this stuff--there is not the same kind of independent film culture here that there is in the west; the idea of a bunch of friends coming together and all working for peanuts to make a cool little film. Here it's either the mega period movies by big name directors, with 1000s of extras and an army of horses and soldiers in full battle gear, or it's nothing. Sound and lighting just refuse to cut their rates, even if the production manager and script girl are all working virtually for free. So then you get into a situation where you're on a set where the grip is being paid 3 times the wage of the line producer.

7 days and counting to lock sound and lights.
 
speculator said:
Looking forward to your short. Its been ages since i've been back in Beijing, and a year since i've been to Shanghai. Which actor from City and Life and Death (really great film). I'll be following this production with much interest. I've worked on productions in China and its relatively inexpensive (renting out ex1's is a fraction of the cost than the US, but formats such as digibeta are harder to come by compared to dvcpro there).
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Actors from "City of Life and Death" are Sam Voutas and Masanobu Otsuka. We also have actors from "Gasp", "Mao's Last Dancer", and the new Will Smith film "Kung Fu Kid".

Renting X1s here is indeed very cheap--as are meals, which most film crews budget at $1 a meal.

Which China productions have you worked on?
 
Hah, cheap meals...tell me about em. Very weary when I do dip my chopsticks in em. That's great, and judging by their performances, I bet their going to be splendid to work with. I've worked on a reality show sponsored by Pepsi (not sure if I can divulge which one, but it never aired cause of certain problems) my own shorts (but did pop in CCTV/ ICS and helped a friend with some edits.
 
We are into our 3rd day of shooting, and starting to burn the midnight oil. Yesterday we discovered the RED camera wasn't shooting sound to camera properly--out of a whole day's shoot, maybe only 15 minutes of sound made it through. Thank God we had the DAT as a backup! At least our awesome RED rental company was on the ball 24 hours, with one call at 8pm they ferried out a spanking new camera within the hour and we got rolling again.

A big budget blow out in Beijing is accommodation: Beijing is such a sprawling, massive city that getting from location to location eats up valuable time. Transitioning between locations is an absolute killer in this town, as at least 7 hours of the day are peak hours. This means that productions here usually put their crews up in hotels for the duration of the shoot, in order to guarantee that everyone is on time. This is a huge expenditure on accommodation that Western indy shoots don't have--in the west, everyone on a local shoot drives or commutes to set. Impossible in Beijing. Especially as Beijing has another unique quirk: almost all gaffers and grips are migrant workers from outside Beijing, so they don't live in town. If you hire a grip here, then you automatically have to fork out accommodation costs over the shoot.

We're currently shooting in a quaint little courtyard in Beijing's famous Nanluoguxiang, and so far the weather has been on our side--no rain outs, no biting cold (yet). The race is on to get this all shot before the dreaded Beijing winter hits.

I now also highly recommend the RED for one other unforeseen reason: people will work for you much more readily if they know you're shooting on a RED or high end camera. From a producer's point of view, what you spend on the camera you make up for in hiring costs--from DOP to PA, all seem willing to work for uber cheap if they know it's on a RED. All this ends up adding a lot of production value to the film that you would have to pay for when shooting on a cheaper camera.
 
Day 8 saw us in D22 filming our S&M party scene, where the lead character is taken to a nightclub to meet an adult shop investor. One of the hardest scenes in the movie is finally behind us!

We had a decent turnout of friends willing to don their best leather, but had to resort to the tried and true Beijing tradition of rocking up to the Film Studios with a van, and herding up a bunch of waiting extras.

In Beijing, hundreds of people wait outside the studio gates, waiting for the chance to be in a movie. They get paid anywhere between $5 to $10 for an entire day, sometimes being bussed out to neighboring cities like Tianjin or Baodin. This was my first time sourcing extras at the studio, and it was quite an experience. Our van was overrun with people trying to force their way on, so that the entire scene looked a little like some sort of zombie movie. We packed the van to the rafters, fighting off those gung ho extras who were determined to squeeze themselves into any last remaining crevice, and drove off to our location. Most of these kids are from out of town, new to the city and sometimes waiting for entire days outside the studio for their big break. I can't imagine what they must have thought of being bundled up into a van, whisked away to a bar and being told to strip to their pants and don leather gimp masks and whips for the day.

We had people tied to pianos and being "flogged", masked dancers in leather vests gyrating on stage, a bunny man, and several girls in skimpy nurses' outfits and corsets. No doubt an experience our random extras will remember.

Things started to go hairy at the end of the day, with an angry Korean band showing up demanding that we turn the bar over to them for their planned jam session, which we had not been informed of. There looked like a good chance of a brawl, but we managed to squeeze in the last shot, bribe the bar manager with a bit of cash, and head off before tempers could explode. A miracle of a day, all considered.
 
Well the film is finally in the can and we have a rough assembly edit together--so now onto new challenges: color correction. Anyone with any experience in RED color correction?

I'm trying to gauge a couple of possibilities: doing RED on one's own with something like RED Alert (how easy is this?), or trying to find an affordable post house in Beijing to do color correction. The other way that I've heard is heading to Thailand for great post packages there that include DI, but not sure whether the travel costs etc still come out cheaper than just heading to a local post house here in China. Anyone have any thoughts/experience with this? Thanks!
 
ikander said:
Looks really nice! Footage looks gorgeous, and I like the concept of the plot.

Congrats. :-)
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Thanks! Glad you thought it looked good! We'll be trying to submit to festivals later this year.

BTW, hopped on your website--really like the design for Lucky9 Studios; designed yourself? Very interested in how other filmmakers handle their website needs, as we're trying to get one up and running for Red Light Revolution.
 
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