Lowdown - ABC TV 9pm Wednesdays

[John Brawley]

Hi.

 

Tonight on ABC 1 @ 9PM. Lowdown is a comedy series I shot late last year (aside from tonights pilot), and is set in the world of celebrity tabloid journalism. Lowdown shines a spotlight on the life of a man whose job it is to feed the publics insatiable appetite for celebrity gossip...something it seems we just cant get enough of.

 

With a very recognisable list of Australian cast, Lowdown is narrated by none other than Geoffrey Rush and also stars Kim Gyngell as the Sunday Sun editor, Paul Denny as Bob the Sunday Sun photographer and Alex's (played by wilfreds Adam Zwar) best mate and Beth Buchanan as Rita, Alexs on-again-off-again girlfriend. Alexs inept GP Dr James played by Dailan Evans fuels his cyber-chondria while Julia Zemiro plays Hope van der Boom, the gutsy publicist to the stars.

 

The pilot, which airs tonight was actually shot waaaaaaay back in late 2008. Once the series was picked up we shot the rest of it at the end of 2009. It was amazing even grading the different footage from RED a year apart.

 

It's a low budget production (hey it's the ABC) and we shot single camera over about 40 production days....pretty fast.

 

Most of the show is handheld too...I had the Cooke 15-40 T2 on most of the time....not exactly lightweight !!!

 

Those of you overseas can watch it here after it goes to air tonight ( i think)

 

And there's a

which was cut from offline edits (before grading)

 

jb

[Dimitri Zaunders]

Awesome! I love the ABC's Wednesday 9pm comedies and I've been seriously missing them since I left home, I'm so glad this is available online!!

[Fred Neilsen]

Wow just saw it, it's up there with frontline as one of my favorite ABC comedies. It was nice to see an ABC comedy with excellent production value, (east of everything, though not a comedy is another current ABC series with great production value that comes to mind) I loved the shallow depth of field particularly the focus pulls in the conversation between the doctor and alex while he's getting his anus examined, I also loved the edgy look with the fast zooms, hand held and split screens. Ooo cant wait for the next episode.

 

Fred

[Keith Walters]

I loved the shallow depth of field particularly the focus pulls in the conversation between the doctor and alex while he's getting his anus examined,

 

Steady on; you're making sound somewhat gross-er than it actually is! :lol:

(All you see is Alex bending over and pulling a lot of faces :) )

To me the plot/theme seem to meander around somewhat, like a cross between "Frontline" and "Flight of the Conchords". Actually I'm not entirely sure what the episode was about. I've made an HD recording of it; I'll have to examine it more closely.

 

The images certainly looked sharper than what you get from something like an F900, but I didn't think the colour rendition or highlight handling were particualrly good. However it was an earlty model camera and firmware.

 

In a few places it did look like 35mm film origination, but in others (in particular the Sunday Sun offices with the daylit windows) it screamed "VIDEO!!" Then in other places it looked like someone had taken a hi-resolution black and white image and colorized it; the colour just didn't look convincing somehow.

 

Still, I've seen much worse, from the US and elsewhere!

[Mathew Rudenberg]

Most of the show is handheld too...I had the Cooke 15-40 T2 on most of the time....not exactly lightweight !!!

 

Good lord, I threw that beast up for one scene handheld and it made me stiff for a week. It's a beautiful lens but not worth the back pain. I'll stick with the lightweight Angi's, vignetting and all...

 

Of course I also went handheld with the 24-290 once. only once.