I dont post clips (from others) often (maybe I should?), but I think this one deserve some visibility for many reasons. First because free running (aka parkour) is cool, second, because it was shot with an HDSLR (Canon 7D) and, finally, because it was made by a visitor of the blog (who turned into a friend) who could use some exposure: Chad Bonanno.
When Chad contacted me a few months ago about how to balance a Glidecam 4000 with an HDSLR, I thought he was a wedding shooter then forgot about it until I saw the video he has been working on. Lets just say that I was wrong!
About Dan
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I’ve lived here my whole life. I started up gymnastics when I was about 13. When I graduated I left gymnastics and started freerunning. Since then I have turned my passion into a career and a full time job. I am also currently pursuing my career in stunts an plan on making this a life long journey.
I had the idea to shoot a high production video for quite some time but I never had the behind-the-camera skills to do so. So for a long time it just stayed an idea. When I met Chad banana I realized that my idea could become real some day. So we sat down talked it out and got to work. We spent 5 weeks of filming trying to pump out as much as we could each day. This became tough once my body started to get tired of filming each week. But despite injuries and aches and bruises we pushed through to the end. After all the action was done the video was then given to Paul Darnell to cut and edit. Once that was done, the torch was then passed to Chad bonanno. He worked his magic on the video and gave her a little nip/tuck. Finally, after a ling process the monster had come to life. So far the video has gone way beyond what we had expected and we hope it continues to do so.
About Chad
My name is Chad Bonanno, I am a Art Director and Animator based in Los Angeles, and also do a lot of action and glamour photography on the side. I have taken a particular interest in the Canon 7D series, and that is my weapon of choice. I hooked up with Team Tempest in 2009 and started doing design and animation projects with them, but when the time came to give one of Team Tempest members Dan Mast a new Demo reel, I jumped at the opportunity. Using the Canon 7D , a Canon 16-35mm and Canon 10-22mm (also a Tameron 10-24) and a GlideCam 4000, we got to work. Shooting all over LA, in locations such as downtown LA, UCLA campus , Santa Monica , and Hollywood. The shoots are pretty fast paced, since the freerunning moves are very flowy and quick, you have to have your setup locked down before shooting. On the other hand, it is a run-and-gun situation because a lot of the locations we shoot prohibit parkour due to liability issues amongst other things. Victor Lopez assisted in many of the 5 days of shooting as a coordinator , Victor being a lead member of Team Tempest, guided day with creative direction while I worked out the camera moves and angles. I used 2 other B camera shooters, Dave Kim and Mark Williams.
Here are a few behind the scene shots I selected. I piked these because they show the scale of Dan jumps and also give an idea of the camera man job!
The overall result is excellent and we should expect more from Chad in the coming months in this domain.
A few technicalities
- The shooting was done in 5 days, spread over 5 weeks.
- Keeping the action in focus was done by shooting at f4-f5.6, measuring the distance to the subject and trying to keep up with him!
- Grading was done In After Effects
- Mostly desired item for the shoot would have been a quick release plate on the GlideCam to reduce the setup time
Gear used
Just a quick follow up on my post about the new Red Rock Micro Nano Rigs announcement. I receive an email from Brian, and he is not too happy about my comments on the announcement. Well, I would not be either if I was in the RRM gang.
I wont go into the details of the email exchange (dont worry, everything was very civilized and polite!) but I think it would be fair to RRM to state a few points.
First, these rigs were build around two restrictions: cost and weight. They receive a lot of requests for lighter rigs and wanted to have an offering for the market segment. Now they do, I just wished they put the rigs weight on the product page (!). Also, they should use lighter bodies for their product page too. Regarding the cost, well.. it is cheaper than Zacuto for sure and I doubt anyone is complaining on that front!
We also talked about the lowdown handle not positioned correctly: it should be pointing in front of the rig instead of at its back. Brian told me the handle direction can be configured to fit what ever the owner wants, so that is a good thing. Still, I think they should have shown it in at least one of the picture. He did not comment on the use of the hot shoe mount, which is a bad thing if you are using heavy lenses.
Also, I told him about a bad experience I had with a Captain Stubling where the knob of an handle got loose and made the rig tip over and fell off the table on a concrete floor (the lens survied by miracle!). It seems like they recently improved the knobs, which is a good thing:
and my guess is you were also probably using an earlier version of our handgrips, which we’ve really improved over the past few months including all-machined clamps and lift-and-lock knobs
Could anyone confirm this?
While this exchange did not change my mind about the usability of the Grippit and Low Down for users of heavy HDSLRs (7D, 5D, etc…) it provided more info on the products.
By the way, if you are in the Montreal area and plan to buy one of these rigs, I would love to steal it from you for a day to test it out.
If you dont have a Z-finder or can’t even afford a LCDVF, here is a great opportunity for you to win one. Hangrip will be giving one away in a raffle at the end of the month. So far, the odds are very good, with only 44 participants at the time of writing but I have a feeling this number will go up very soon!
Just visit Hangrip!
This week big news was Canon announcement of their wonder camera. If you have not see it yet, here it is.
You know what this reminds me of? Videos from the 60s saying everyone would own a flying car in 2000…
Some of the technologies highlighted in the video already exists and I am sure they are working hard on those that do not. Still, I believe it is all vaporware coming from Canon marketing department.
Think about it: why would Canon design a camera able to do everything in a single unit? We are talking here about a company that is over protective of its product lines and would rather limit customer options than cannibalize its sales. If you dont believe it, just think about where we were 18 months ago with Canon stalling the 5D MrkII firmware to protect the video division. To make it happen Canon would have to merge the DSLR, point and shoot and video (pro and consumer) divisions under a single entity. Unless there is a big mentality shift at Canon, I can’t see it coming anytime soon.
Instead of this presentation, I would have preferred seeing one about Canon vision of what it coming in the next 3-5 years. Then again, CEO are like politicians, they only promise stuff that is going to happen when they are out of the picture.
Am I the only one wondering where is the 3D?
For various reasons, I rarely post videos from others on the blog, focusing instead on creating original content. Yet, I can’t resist the urge to show you this clip from Clemens Wirth. The guy is super creative and mix 5DMrkII footage with visual effects perfectly.
I asked Clemens to share some tips and he gladly accepted.
He shot almost everything with the Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5X Macro
For those who never saw the MP-E 65, it is a manual focusing lens with a macro ratio of 5:1. As far as I know, it is the only commercial lens with such a magnification factor. While hard to use, it can produce some incredible results as Clemens showed us.
Saw this time lapse on Vimeo via Petapixel. Shot on a 5DMrkII of course.
Awesome right? Well, not when I was there!
Here is my view of Eyjafjallajökull when I was in Iceland…
Btw, my framing correspond to the same house we see on Sean clip at around 00:42, the bulldozer and other field machinery were leaving when I was shooting.
I think the obvious difference between the two clips show something very important for anyone who wants to produce awesome stuff: commitment is key. If you are not willing to can’t invest your time and energy into something, success can only be achieve with luck. In my case, lady luck was waiting for me the next morning…
This article is a reaction to a post on PhotoCine News about the validity of shooting flat with HDSLR. The article is interesting and worth a read.
To summarize: contrary to popular believes, you should not shoot flat, instead you should use a picture style that matches as closely as possible the target look. While I agree with this statement and the reasons backing it (output format of the 5D is a lossy compression), I think this is an incredibly bad advice to give to 95% of the population because the reasoning behind it does not apply to them.
First, we rarely know how the footage is going to end up and we are rarely able to influence the environment we shoot in. This means you could be shooting in custom picture style that pushes toward orange and later on realize that it does not work with what you had in mind. Correcting the footage could then be much more complicated and involve quality lost.
Using Shane as a reference proves me point: Shane shoots movie where everything is already decided before going on set and he has total control over the lighting, cloths people are going to wear and locations. Having such a high level of control allows him to be confident that his footage will end up in the sweet spot of the exposure curve, work well with his “Shane look” and there will be no extreme values. Because he has such a high level of control, he knows what to expect from the camera so he can trust the clips as being as close as his desired results as they can in camera.
On the other hand, someone like me and you, who is shooting guerilla style, has much less control over the light. Shooting flat allows us to protect our clips from high variations of exposure from one scene to the next or even within the same sequence if the subject is partly lit (dont forget that reducing the contrast protects us against the limited dynamic range of the camera). Since we dont have control over much, we need an insurance that we can recover as much of the image as we can and that is what a flat picture style gives us. We might lose some quality by doing so, but that is the price of this ‘insurance’.
Moral of the story is: shooting flat give you more flexibility in post production for your grading and exposure at the cost of additional time while shooting with a custom picture style gives you a better starting image and less work in post production at the expense of time spent in preparation and lack of flexibility in post.
Pick the philosophy that fits your needs.
I am currently testing a workflow that would insure the best possible image quality. It is ridiculously time consuming but I will use it for my footage from my Iceland trip and report on it afterward.
BTW, I am still in Iceland and the country is incredibly photogenic. Here is a small clip from what I shot yesterday, in the rain. And in the wind. And in the cold…
At the end of 2009, I asked you, the readers, what you wanted to see in 2010 on the blog. I know it is hard to tell but I have been working intensely on every single point you asked for and results will unfold in the next few months. It just seems like having a full time job is a major obstacle to getting things done!
Anyways, one of the topic people asked me to talk more about was photography. Video is all cool and flashy but most of us are were, at the core, photographers.
This time, I am not going to talk about gear or plugin but simply a website dedicated to sharing images. It is called 500px. It is very easy to compare it to flickr and the like since they have a lot of features in common but I think it is a step above the rest for one thing: how easy it is to browse gorgeous images.
The principle is simple: users browse and vote for images they like to make them popular. The more popular an image is, the higher its score. There are no albums, groups or the like created and managed by users. This somehow protect the site from comment spam as is so commonly seen on Flickr.
Dont get me wrong. I like Flickr, I just find the user experience as a viewer and as a photographer more pleasant on 500px. While I rarely randomly browse pics on Flick, I spend a lot of time in the popular and architecture section. Both sites were designed with different goals. Flickr is a community where everything goes while 500px is designed to showcase work of art. The best example? The size of the images they are more than twice as big on 500px!
The site is still in its growing phase and there arent millions of user yet so it is the perfect time to register (free, use the invite code: youwelcome) and grab your namespace. I cant remember the last time I could register on a site using only alain(!).
Time now for a shameless plug, if you are curious to see my work, you can see it here. As you will soon discover, having people rate your pictures can be scary and fun at the same time.
Disclaimer: I discovered 500px when Ian, its co-founder, placed an order for Fader ND filters. So yes, there is a tiny financial relationship between us but I will let you be the judge of its impact on the content of my post.
Update: added the invite code
Canon is now hosting a full page in its digital learning center about the FCP E1 Plugin that we previously talked about.
Canon also used the opportunity to send a quick jab to Nikon when talking about H.264: This is an ideal file type for video capture in an SLR camera, delivering relatively compact file sizes with image quality noticably superior to alternate video compressions (such as Motion JPEG).
From what I have been able to gather from the various screenshots, there is not much new. On the contrary, some of the wished for features (lens & exposure metadata) are not present.
As I predicted, the sentence ’start editing right form the CF card‘ wasnt really true. The plugin converts the clips to ProRes (you can pick any variations) before you can do anything with them. Canon talks about a 3x speed gain over the standard Compressor transcoding. That is nice but that is about the same thing you can get by using MPEGstream clip. Actually, I wonder if that is what they are using under the hood!
For who is this for?
Log and transfer is a workflow tool. It is near useless for 95% of the 5D users, but, for those who are going to use it, it is incredibly useful at helping them to organize their files and automating their backup strategy. Oh, there is also that Timecode thing that would be so useful if there was an easy way to synchronize the date/time on multiple camera at once.
While there is no harm in installing the plugin once it is available (March), unless you are shooting against a script, the organizing features of the plugin will be overkill.
BTW, thanks to David Guset for the link to the Canon page.
News from BeachTek
First, got this email from BeachTek:
To everyone waiting for the new DXA-5Da XLR adapter for DSLR cameras, they have now shipped ahead of schedule to both B&H and Adorama. The first shipment is in very limited quantities but we are expecting the next, much larger batch to arrive before the end of March. The new DXA-SLR with built-in preamplifiers and phantom power is still on schedule to be shipped by March 30th.
next, the MultiMount5D will be available at the end of March for 89$.
Vimeo goes 1080p and HTML5!
You can read about it here. I dont know which one is the most important: 1080p or HTML5… So far, these upgrades wont affect many people/video since most people are not using a HTML5 browser and the clips are rarely uploaded at 1080p resolution.
At least, now you know and you should change your Compressor presets to use the new resolution.
5D Firmware update
A lot of people have been talking about the upcoming firmware update. Planet5D is now talking about a March launch. Guess what? That is what I have been talking about since 2009! The release of the firmware was bound to the Olympics. Canon wants videographers to shoot the events with the 1DMrkkIV and not the 5D (they want people to see pro using the pro bodies). Once the Olympics are over, they will push the new firmware.
Zeiss new HDSLR lenses
I could say a lot of things of why this is big news, but Vincent did it very well already in his post.
Aperture3
I have been using A3 for over a week now. Expect a detailed review by the end of the weekend.
Edit: forgot to add this link to a quick overview of the video feature of A3 by the folks at Still Motion.
New content
I have been working on a few personal projects recently expect to see some of my work soon. Both in stills and motions.
