The Still Distant Light - Improv Mood Piece - F65 w/ Cooke Mini S4s

jenningsp

jenningsp

Well-known member
The Still Distant Light - Improv Mood Piece - F65 w/ Cooke Mini S4s

An improv mood piece we put together in a day and shot in a couple of hours because we had a free camera :)
#cameratestsarethenewshortfilm



https://vimeo.com/123529171



We got a free sony F65 and some Cook Mini S4s to test for a weekend and thought why not try and make something!! So we put the call out on Facebook for a couple of actors, some crew and started writing that night with my good friend Ali. Within a few hours we had a couple of actors and a basic outline.

The next day we all met for lunch and discussed tone and mood so we were all on the same page. We had a basic structure, a few key lines and set off for a location I stole off a friend - Thanks Teeks! The four hours we'd given ourselves to shoot quickly became two as rain clouds stole all out light.. You can kinda tell by the last shot which I had to heavily neatvideo :/

Nat and Nic were amazing and brought so much to the piece. Ali guided their conversation while I danced around them with the camera trying to improvise as much as they were. It really did feel like raw filmmaking as we felt our way through the afternoon. Fluid, reactionary and adaptive. Everyone was in the moment and it was very cool.
Let us know what you think of our little film :)
 
As for quality I really felt it being too noisy in almost all the shots. Did you shoot in S-log2? what codec?
 
Oh man that compression is a killer.. There's a slight grain to all of it, but the Prores looks great! Except for maybe four shots I've pushed a little too much coz they were quite under... I'm pretty sure it's all the low tones and slight grain that's killed the compression.

I've replaced the file with a denoised export to help vimeo a little more ;) that camera is super clean and we shot the lowest compression 1080p in slog. I think it was a 12bit MXF, but I converted it all to Prores 4444 before cutting.
 
Great images, Patrick - would kill to get my hands on an F65/Cooke combo for an arvo!
 
This looks great Patrick.

It has that typical F65 look that makes you think of really well shot and higher quality F55 footage, which out of the box F65 material has. Difference is it's in all shots as opposed to only shots where you "lucked out" with the F55. This consistency is part of the extra that you pay for the F65, apart from the higher specification which lends the image more depth. But is when you start playing with it in post that the gap between the F55 and F65 starts truly showing. Did you shoot this in HD?

About the mentioned noise, I don't find it noisy at all. If this was film it would be considered ridiculously clean and as film is still the standard of sorts I think your shots are perfectly fine. Noise is only bad if it looks like fixed video static, which the F65, as well as the Alexa and specially the F35 really do not.
 
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