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Basement Shoot Live 500T


Anthony Schilling

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This gal asked me to do an S8 shoot of her singing and playing guitar for a guitar contest. It was me, 2 cameras, 3 rolls of 500T, 2 200W bulbs, and a guy recording sound. I replaced the existing lights with the 200W bulbs, tripod mounted the Nizo 481 with wide angle attachment, and did hand held with a Canon 814XLS. Scanned the negs on the Retro8. Audio sync was rough with the Nizo, but we intended it to be somewhat rough and raw. We had to re-sing and shoot the last 20sec because I ran out of film too soon. Check it out and give some feedback. also the more views, the better chance she has to win!

http://songwriter.amplifiertv.com/channel/Gabby+Holt

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Wow Anthony, this looks amazing. What was your f-stop? The reason I ask is it appears you gained sharpness without gaining grain by using the 500 instead of the 50 or 200.

 

If I were to offer any input it would be that her skin came out a tad pale and probably would have more color if you pulled down the white levels. I assume the white levels are around 100 percent. If you pull them down to 60 to 70% her skin will probably gain color. If that causes the blacks to go blacker, just lift the set-up a tiny bit (baseline black level).

 

If you do another one of these, it would be fun to create a short story before the filming starts. Girl knocks on your door and wants you to do a video in your basement. You look at her like she's crazy. She shows you a flyer, the street address is correct but its for another state. You point this out to her and she starts crying and you say you'll help her anyways. Then you both go downstairs and you pull out a dusty box and start going through it. (cut to girl getting worried). After some grunting and noises you pull out two of your super-8 cameras and blow the dust off of them. Cut to one more shot of the camera set up (probably have to be shot in video, ha ha), then start your video.

 

After the video is over we see the cameras being put back into their dusty box.

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Regarding the image, you overexposed the image and that's good. That woman has very pale skin, you should dial down the highlights. The latitude is there, go back and work the image some more and it can look even better. I think you should replace some of the out of focus closeups of the guitar sound hole/hand strumming with flash frames to use as a cut point. Overall, I like it.

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One more thing, not about the Super-8. Whenever you can place your subject further away from the background, the more it can separate them from the background focally. Separation is usually a good thing. I don't know the area you had to work with, but if you had room to back up and also have your talent move forward an equal amount, the background gets thrown slightly out of focus and puts more emphasis on the singer. However, you may been at too high of an f-stop and maybe did not have the room to move back.

 

Plus, backing up extends the height and width of what is in the background which can pose additional framing issues.

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Thanks- It was a pretty small space, the mounted shot is a wide angle. I left my light kit in the car and just swapped the bulbs there to higher watts. I wanted to include the mid century backdrop and aim for a feel that matched. I think the Nizo was at about f2.8 at 1/58th sec, and the 814 was a f4/5.6 split with the XL shutter. We only had a 2hr window to knock it out. I'm pretty pleased with what we got given it was pretty much a one take quicky with bare bones resources.

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