Breakaway - Super16 Short

Matt Workman · April 3, 2007

Production: Breakaway

Director: Jarod Su

DP: Matt Workman

I am about 5 days deep into a super16 short film in Rochester, NY. We are shooting Kodak 250D and 500T on a SR3. We are using a Zeiss 11-110 T2.2 mainly. We have Cookes and Zeiss primes but for several reasons I'm sticking with the zoom.

We have two 1.2k HMI's, one 575w HMI, lots of sub 2k tungsten, and kinos. I originally thought this would cover us but even on 500T doing wide night shots is difficult. I don't think we can afford a 500amp genie or any 12k but I can see where those might be helpful.

I'm concerned that we were shooting at t2.2 on the lense but a lot of the time I could only eak out t1.4 for the skin tones. Wei suggested pushing 1/2 stop in processing in those situations. Also I would have normally geld my HMI's 1/2 CTO but that would have really killed the exposure. So now a lot my night stuff is going to be full blue.

We were lucky to have Wei Pun as our steadicam operator. She is a professional DP/Operator who is represented in HK and the USA. She did a great job training up our AC to use her wireless follow focus.

Set photos from the first week are online:

http://www.mattworkman.com/2007/breakaway-week1/

Dailies from a few steadicam takes are online:

http://www.mattworkman.com/breakaway/daily...eadicam-gym.mov

*these are obviously from the tap, not the lab.

I'll definitely post some footage and stills when we get our film back from the lab. We are planning to do a Spirit2k to HDCAM at PWNY.

Cheers,

Matt

Chayse Irvin ASC, CSC · April 3, 2007

Looks cool Matt. Whats the story about?

Rob.m.Neilson · April 3, 2007

I love PWNY! Mona Jackson is an amazing woman and always gives great deals if your on a budget!

They transferred all of my footage to digi beta and ghosted it to mini dv for a price less than listed for just the beta transfer!

Joe Lotuaco · April 3, 2007

Looks like a fun shoot. Makes me excited to get back on set asap.

If I may ask, how long is your shoot schedule and how long is the final piece intended to be? I'm just curious to see what a realistic schedule is for a short shot on film.

Satsuki Murashige · April 4, 2007

Hi Matt,

The production stills look good, the website is great as well. If you don't mind my asking, what were your reasons for sticking with the zoom -- too difficult to pull focus on the Zeiss primes wide open (I'm assuming they were Superspeeds)?

Some of those locations look daunting to light on a limited budget, like that really long hallway and the gym. What bounce material were you using in that (21"x24"?) frame in the still with the five boys sitting in a circle around the coach? Looks like it's doing a lot, very efficient.

I also would like to know a bit about the story, how long the film is supposed to be, and what the schedule was like. I'm guessing it must be something like a 20 minute film, to have already been shooting five days.

I wouldn't worry about not gelling the HMI's -- it should be rather easy to time out in telecine. Even for a workprint, it's doable. After all, there are a lot of DP's who shoot tungsten stock in daylight without an 85 filter just because they think it degrades the image, and they have the footage timed back to neutral for the print with no problem.

Anyway, good luck with the rest of your shoot!

Matt Workman · April 4, 2007

The story is about a poor student who comes to a preppy high school and gets taken advantage of by a fraternity type organization and how he deals with the moral delemas that come about by trying to fit in too hard.

The schedule is a little wacky, but its a Grad Film so the equipment is all free. Except for the steadicam, that was a regular day rate sitatuion, thats why those were 10 hour days. We are shooting another full 3 day shoot and then another 2 days of pickups. Its not your normal schedule, or is it?

Unfortunately I'm ditching two of the last days for a bigger music video I have in California, I feel bad but I told the director about the possibility of this happening.

Rob Hmm. I've been talking with Michael Fallon. Maybe I should talk to Mona. Is she the telecine op / colorist / rep?

Chase Your new website rocks. Its super hip hop, almost too much hip hop, heh.

Satsuki Thanks. The Zeiss lens is the nicest lens they have. The Cookes and Ziess are older series, I WISH they were super speeds. I would kill for T1.3, screw the focus puller! JK. Wei gave me the dirtiest look ever when I told her that the primes wouldn't work with the wireless focus she had. The primes are rehoused and overall crappy in my opinion. The Zeiss has nice witness marks and T2.2 is where I like to shoot anyway.

Yeah the big EXT were kinda nuts, that was a 1 hour lighting. The hallway is a funny story. The school is completely on motion detectors so as soon as you walk into a hallway all of the lights turn on. Our AD finally lost it and took two sparks and took out like 50 ceiling flourescents. I think in one of the photos you can see a huge pile of them in the class room.

For the hallway we used the 1200w PAR through the window on we used a 1k with red gel to imitate the light coming from the exit sign. The walls were about T2.0 but their faces were T1.4-1.8 even when we flotated a china lantern with the steadicam. Did I mention that this was a long steadicam take?!

The gym stuff was all HMI. There were some big sky lights and some warmish 4700k lights on also. The HMI just has the arri softbox/Chimera. We only had a 6x6 with griff and we never had time to take it out.

Hopefully the rest of the shoot is as interesting, I'm having fun.

Cheers guys,

Matt

PS: This place needs to get a cheers emoticon like at DVXuser Ninjas will do for now. :ph34r: :ph34r:

Edited April 4, 2007 by Matt Workman

Satsuki Murashige · April 4, 2007

Go ninja, go ninja, go! :ph34r:

Seriously, I know the reg.16 version of that Zeiss zoom only focuses down to 3'6" (not including the macro). But I noticed in the steadicam footage you posted had what looked like some close-focus work in it -- does the Super16 version focus closer or were you using some other trick there?

Screw the focus puller? It's DP's like you that give the rest a bad name! :) I pulled focus for one DP who loved to shoot at T1.4, and these would naturally be handheld shots with lots of near to far movement, with a janky follow focus to boot. I mean, she'd put in NDs to shoot at that stop. It was a short, so I never got see the rushes to see how I actually did.

Love the motion detector story -- could we say the AD went ninja on those bad boys?

Matt Workman · April 22, 2007

I just cut a DP reel from the footage we got back so far. We still have about 3-4 more days of shooting but I was really excited about getting something online. The color corrects are temporary but mainly I just desaturated the whole thing.

There are a lot of places I see for improvement, feel free to point them out, but this was my first time shooting on super16mm. I would have liked Zeiss Super Speeds and I wish I didn't have to operate so I could have tweaked the lighting more. But I'm happy with it for the most part.

Breaking Away - DP Reel

http://www.mattworkman.com/dp-v2/work-break.html

We processed at PWNY : Spirit -> DVCAM. The colorist did a really great job. Mainly correcting out the blue out of the night EXT stuff.

Cheers,

Matt :ph34r: