The Ultimate Challenge – Available Light Camera Test
Writer/director Kate Dennis and DOP John Brawley shot six shorts with six available light locations on six different cameras. Ross Mitchell, post-production manager at Deluxe helped them in this adventure. This is their story.
John BRAWLEY: Kate and I were working together on the first series of Offspring. We had some night exteriors to shoot in the backstreets of Fitzroy, and we were both amazed at how bright the street lighting looked when shooting the RED MX camera using fast prime lenses. Kate has a film in development and she was concerned about how to shoot on the streets of Paris using only existing or available light. In the context of a wider discussion I’d been having with her about the differences between both film and digital acquisition, I thought it would be really interesting to test them all.
KATE DENNIS: Being ex-camera department, I had inherited some scepticism regarding the digital formats, but here was a camera that could capture those night exteriors without a great deal of additional lighting so it made me realise I had to open my eyes to digital. I’d seen a few tests online, but what I hadn’t been able to see was something that compared film and DCP projection over a variety of cameras. For me, the test was beyond test charts, dynamic range and resolution comparisons; it became about an emotional connection to the format. John and I were ultimately both more interested in de-intellectualising the test process, revealing which format each of us had an instinctive preference for.
JB: We wanted to have the storytelling requirements inform our choices about how to shoot on the day. It would have been meaningless to go out and shoot landscapes of the city at night, so we realised we had to have actors in it.We decided to organise an available light shootout, using 35mm as a reference and the two leading digital cinema cameras that were available to us, the Red MX and the ARRI Alexa. I was also interested in looking at super 16 as well, so we threw that into the mix.
Those short films obviously saw more of the light-of-day than most ever do! Anyway, I welcome the rise of the digital video medium and I hope Australia embraces digital cinema because it is the one thing that might finally liberate local directors from the problem of finding funding.
I’ve certainly seen digital origination has created huge changes to production, but I really don’t think it’s as simplistic as making production more affordable.
The reality is, that the camera platform and the cost of origination is a small percentage of any production’s overall budget. there are also massive trade-off’s in post production as well.
If you go even go back to dogme, it’s not like we haven’t had the choice of cheaper formats for a long time. The costs of crew hasn’t changed. Logistics are slightly simpler maybe. Post production might be easier, and it’s even posisble to do it at home.
The real question is, has it made the content we’re making any better ?
No..our films aren’t better. mainly because screenwriting has been mapped out as a formulaic process, which it can never be, but to some The Heroes Journey and all that nonsense give a predictability to a lonely artistic process that requires stamina, intelligence, cunning, insight and a sense of the evolving narrative of story. I keep reading predictable stories one after they other..like they’ve been wheeled out of the McKee factory.
Well, maybe directors in Australia need to take a leaf from the book of the late Stanley Kubrick. While it probably drove actors a bit nuts that he was constantly rewriting scenes on set at the last minute, he used screenplays as a starting point only and took an exploratory, developmental approach and did not let the script be a rigid prescription for the finished film when better ideas presented themselves along the way. Surely with a low cost video camera the director himself is able to operate, there’s no reason not to take the time to explore? The Alfred Hitchcock approach where everything is scripted and story-boarded and mapped out before the camera rolls, to such a degree that he felt he didn’t even need to look through the camera because it was all a forgone conclusion, is an approach which assumes the writer already has found the best ideas. This is rarely the case. Watch a film like You Only Live Twice and see a lousy sequence of a rocket launching from the 1960s. When that film came out, Kubrick was making 2001. It looked amazing, but he wisely skipped any attempt at a rocket launch. He put the needs of the finished film ahead of the dictates of script. He stayed away from scenes that wouldn’t play convincingly and so should we all. Screenwrites should be part of a process, but the rest of it needs to be the director as a creative player of equal imagination, wit and skill.