Maximilian Motel

Hey Phil, I don't know what the Shipping to the UK is, but it shouldn't be too bad. Check out MBF, a German shop. I buy most of my grip there. C-Stands / Goboarms / Goboheads aren't super cheap but affordable. The thing that really stings are Cardellinis... If you order with some other people, it should doable to buy a new Goboarm as a replacement. There's also prolightdirect.co.uk (I found them a while ago for Mathellinis as an alternative to the 120 Cardellinis here), but their 40" Goboarms are about 50 quid.

You can get greenscreen fabric fairly cheaply which will make your life during production and especially during post-production easier. Light those so that they are around 50%, depending on if you shoot log etc. Also, (clean) rimlights will help the keying - if they work with the light in the background. If you see spill in the talent's hair eg., try using violet gel on those rimlights as it helps to get rid of it. @Stuart Allman I was looking into them a while ago and they seem to be ideal to light an already green / blue background, but won't probably be enough for a white one.

You could certainly use faster shutter speeds (like the 45° angle in Saving Private Ryan), but if motion tracking is your concern, I feel like modern software should be fine with motion blur as well. It'd probably be harder to add "correct" motion blur in post than to shoot and track with it straight out of camera. (Example with Mocha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGDlW1QeY3c).

Since you said that you were not being paid to shoot this, I assume very-low-budget approaches for the fire might be helpful, too. Shane Hurlbut posted about "cheap DIY fire" a while ago. If you haven't seen it: http://www.thehurlblog.com/film-lighting-building-medusa-the-perfect-diy-fire-light/.

Thanks Ed, that's super helpful!

I did some tests yesterday with a D810 and a Tecpro Daylight LED (use those, they are much brighter as the ones whose white balance you can change). While I like the quality of light it gives off and is also able to work off of V-Mount batteries, it only gave me 1/50s at f1.4 and ISO 4000 (don't do that on a D810, ever...). I didn't use any gels as moonlight is pretty much the same color as daylight (just sunlight bounced off a neutral grey surface = the moon).

I don't know the shippin fees, but I often use mbfshop.de (a German shop, let me know if you need help translating). Or directly from Manfrotto, they sell the avenger grip stuff in Germany (though I suspect probably all of Europe).

A LUT basically converts the colors & contrast of footage. While SLOG->Rec.709 or something like that can be used very early to get the footage to look "right", LUTs can also be used to apply a grade. You might, for example, generate a look in a program, such as Davinci Resolve (or now also Photoshop), then export that as a LUT which you then apply in Premiere / Final Cut.

I have shot some concerts with RGB LEDs and I absolutely hate them. If it's clean RGB then only one of the color channel is filled with information, so you lose about 66% of the info you'd usually get and it ends up looking very un-detailed and "cheap", in my opinion. I'd rather go with a normal, gelled light source that doesn't output just one RGB channel.

I hope Modern Studio got back to you yet. I have bought from them every time I visited LA and absolutely love getting more and more grip equipment which comes in handy if it's time to problem solve. Unfortunately, because of luggage prizes when flying, I haven't been able to buy any pipe clamps but I did build pretty much the same setup (though smaller) in "junior". As said by Aidan: Try the Big Ben sollution, and then add a short speedrail, some cardellinis and a lots of sandbags, to weigh the stand down. If you need four lamps, in 90° angles, talk to Modern Studio, they are always super helpful and actually build stuff on the fly, if you go to their store!

Hey Lee, do you have any mood photos of light setups that you / the director liked? It's probably easier to start out with where you want to end up and then it'll be easier to figure out what you need. Also, will you be shooting in a studio? Or at least somewhere where you know you'll have the power to run a lot of Tungsten Lamps? The base-ISO of the 7s was 3200, right? If so, you could be fine with the 2ks, but usually it is safer to go for (at least) a size over. Always easier to take light away than the other way around. Edit: The Shot Designer" app might also make life a bit easier, if you want to have an image of your light setup idea so you can post it here.

@Satsuki That would probably be the more real thing to do. :)

Do you know which version of the 105mm it is? The f1.8 is absolutely brilliant and probably one of the best portrait lenses from that time. I did shoot with a 24 1.4 on a GH4 once (ultra low budget music video), and it worked fine for what I needed, but the chromatic abberation can be a bit much, especially, I imagine, for everything above 1080p. Another problem could be the color rendition. I didn't do any professional tests concerning that, but it felt to me like the colors are slightly shifted towards a brownish hue, so maybe not the best option if you want to go for a clear-2016-look. But at least compared to other photo lenses, they are build like tanks and have their own pull-out-lens-hoods.

Concerning the camera movement: What about shooting at a higher resolution and then use fake movements in After Effects to make the shot feel organic. I think Mad Max did that for a lot of the shoots as they used Russian Arms which were too steady for their taste. This might at least make the Polarizer thing easier to pull off.

What are your plans regarding the placement of the M18? Have you looked at the Sunseeker app? I probably wouldn't trust it for precise placements of the light, but might give you a nice starting place.