We shot on Epic with a set of ultra primes and a Duclos 11-16mm for the jib stuff. Everything was shot with the camera rated at ISO400 and with a 2mm blue streak filter.

The introductory section of the video where Kyrie is walked through the ‘lobby’ of the club was backlit with two PAR64s with CP61 narrowish lamps stacked vertically for some extreme streak filter action. There was a bunch of 2K and 1K tungsten fresnels gelled a medium blue hidden around the space to side and backlight the cast as we tracked backwards (handheld) with them. A large china lantern (a Lantern-Lock with a 1K lamp inside a large Ikea paper lantern) was dimmed down and walked along with us by one of the electricians, just outside the right edge of frame, for a nice soft key light giving circular reflections in eyes.

Lighting plot for Kyrie London Rooftops promo – intro

Lighting plot for Kyrie London – Rooftops

For the main space I had two 6-light minibrutes acting as 3/4 backlights on either side of the large projection screen. Both had 4×4 flags on each side to reduce spill on the projected graphics. The two rows of 650W lamps in each unit gave a nice double streak from our trusty filter in the mattebox :

Added to that were some more PAR64s, low angle from behind the cage – I tweaked the height and angle of these shot-to-shot to either bring out the wetted-down cage floor or flare the camera even more for the jib shots. We also had PARs above each team of DJs.

Kyrie’s keylight was a Briese 180 Focus reflector fitted with the 5K tungsten head. This is an exceptionally lovely light although I do wish it was a tiny bit brighter as it does fall off quickly.

I also used the china lantern a fair bit throughout as an additional bit of fill or beauty light on closeups/crowd shots etc.

A Joker-Bug 800 with a Source 4 narrow lens on a scaff tower was operated throughout to give Kyrie a followspot style backlight; although really it wasn’t punchy enough and I wished I’d had a proper xenon theatrical followspot.

Finally I had a handful of 1K cyc lights (just simple floods really) that were gelled blue and dotted around where needed to light the walls or uplight the DJs.

There was no hazer available from the rental co so we gave very short bursts of a smoke machine every few minutes and made sure the smoke was very dispersed. I really hate over-hazed sets and it’s incredibly easy to go too far. A little goes a long way just put some depth into the space without turning into a Queen concert.

Everything was on dimmer racks for convenience and powered by Pixipixel’s fantastic new 60K generator.

I think we even finished 20 minutes early

KYRIE LONDON – “ROOFTOPS”

Director – Phil Hawkins
Producer – Oly Dempster
DP – Ed Moore
Focus puller – Ben Oliver
Loader/DIT – Lucas Lytra
Jib – Sam Alkad
Gaffer – Simon Olney
Spark - Dominik Pałgan

Each day, the internet amasses thousands of hours of original video content. Thanks to cheap technology it’s never been easier to shoot something and have it accessible by the whole world.

The catch of course is that finding genuinely outstanding material becomes increasingly difficult. The short film COWARD is one such piece. It takes an extraordinary combination of talent and sheer will to create something like this. Whilst both the director David Roddham and cinematographer Stephen Murphy have clearly got the first in abundance what really inspires me about this project is the second, and that’s the reason I find myself constantly telling people about this project since it went into production.

The short film as a format can so often be an awkward mess; a deadly combo of typically inexperienced filmmakers coupled with a very non-commercial type of filmmaking. The instinct seems to be to write about what you know, so we end up with a lot of shorts where  20 somethings talk in coffee shops.

With COWARD David Roddham and his producers have flat-out refused to do anything other than operate on an epic, broad-strokes scale. From the astounding art direction to the practical FX; the phenomenal cast to Stephen Murphy’s painterly 35mm anamorphic photography this whole project from end to end speaks volumes of the creative confidence and ambition of its production team.

This is proper cinema; visual storytelling. The film breathes; in turns frantic, expansive and thoughtful when it needs to be. There’s no extraneous dialogue or showy shots for the hell of it. Whilst pretty much every short film is in part a calling-card for its makers, there’s an honesty to COWARD that permeates right through to the last credit – it’s a film first.

Stephen Murphy’s camera seems to suck in the action; the perfect witness. The compositions are beautiful, taking full advantage of the wider frame. It feels like a David Lean epic – totally absorbing, powerful and bold. The photography requires work on the part of the viewer; it draws you in rather than frantically waving in a direction with showy camerawork. And yet there are moments of pure cinema: a soldier staggering out of a shelled crater into an desolate, smoke-filled battlefield, edged by burning wreckage, is as powerful a war film image as I’ve ever seen.

This is clearly not a cheap production but I hope we can all take inspiration from the fact that this team of mere mortals have figured that all out, got the money together and made something of this scale. I have no doubt this is going to have a huge impact with all the right people and I wish the whole team the very best of luck for what lies ahead.

COWARD on Vimeo

The making-of

Couldn’t resist adding a few captions… with apologies to Stephen

Full results can be found here.

To whet your appetite, here’s a quick video test of everything we tried:

We only just wrapped yesterday so this is just a few notes from the shoot, no footage to see just yet.

I’ve had very good experiences with the Sony F65 over the past few months so we went with a two camera F65 package from Filmscape. A camera had a 16-42mm and B camera had the Optimo 24-290. The F65 is hardly a small camera but if you have the crew to handle it I believe the results are unparalleled at present, and I’m a big fan of the mechanical shutter. I rated the camera at 640 and shot in the slightly reduced bitrate F65Raw format to save a little on offloading time.

Jason adjusts the cinetape on the F65 “A” camera

“B” camera with Optimo 24-290

Both the director and I wanted a lot of camera movement so we kept A camera on a Louma2 crane and B camera on a dolly. The Louma2 is an extraordinary bit of engineering with a telescopic range of 8-32′. All axes are encoded so the software can do some really nifty tricks. With smartpan and smarttilt engaged, the head automatically pans or tilts to keep the camera pointing the same way whilst the crane arm is moving. And in planing the telescoping axis automatically adjusts as the arm is swung around to keep the camera travelling over the same horizontal or vertical plane. In this mode the camera can travel along a straight line with no arcing. The head is the predecessor to the KeyHead and as such is a joy to operate.

The Louma2 with its arm almost entirely retracted

The Louma2 in flight

It really is one of those tools that can effortlessly handle anything you throw at it.

You can see all the Louma2′s capabilities on show in their showreel:

On the lighting front I wanted to try and mix in theatrical automated lighting with film style equipment. The director wanted to use all the space available in the location including a balcony area so there was a lot to cover.

Lighting plot

I had two basic states – one for the “fashion shoot” sections of the video that was brighter and more conventionally-lit, and a state for the performance sections that played with the automated lighting to good effect.

The location had no easy access to rig above the space so I used an 8K helium lighting balloon from Airstar as a soft overhead key. This was supplemented from the front by a 10K into an 8×8 bounce for fill (for some shots I used the 10K direct just over the camera dimmed right down for a traditional beauty light).

8K tungsten balloon light

Front fill from a bounced 10K behind B camera

We couldn’t rig anything to the existing photography cove in the location so my gaffer and his team had to construct a goalpost rig from square truss across a 7m span for backlights consisting of 2K fresnels and Source4 spots. We also had 2 x 2K zap lights on the truss with a matching pair underneath to light the cove itself for a blown-out “photoshoot” look.

Shot showing the backlight truss (note the balloon light was in the process of being packed away!)

The balcony area was backlight by five 2K fresnels gelled half CTB rigged to the roof beams. I didn’t really put any front fill in for this section as it was more a mood setting piece to open the video.

My lighting programmer Simon Horn suggested we go for Robe Robin 600E spots for our moving light source – this is a highly versatile fixture based on a 575W MSR lamp which punches more like a 700W. They have a variable CTO filter so could be integrated into the “fashion” state without standing out as a daylight source, and beyond that there’s a tremendous range of parameters to play with including pan, tilt, zoom, focus, color mixing, iris, gobos and more.

We had two Robins on the truss, three on the floor underneath (with a central one for low backlight beam effects centered on our singer), three in the balcony with two below that.

Combined with Simon’s excellent programming we got some fantastic animated beam effects for the performance stuff. We kept the room hazed up to maximise the beam visibility (this inevitably lowers contrast a great deal which I’ll dial back in during the grade).

With a ton of footage in lovely F65Raw from the camera I’m very much looking forward to the grade! Will update this post as the process continues.

Huge thanks to the crew for what was inevitably a big and complex set up in not much time!

Here’s a few more pics:

Unless you have a huge budget for serious HMI firepower, shooting day exteriors means you have one lighting unit only – the sun. ¬†And whilst you can’t control where and when it’s going to appear, you can calculate both of those and use that information to your advantage. ¬†A sun position calculator draws on a heady yet ultimately simple bunch of celestial mechanics to figure out the path of the sun through the sky at any given point on the Earth, for any given time.

Using that knowledge, you can perform all sorts of tricks, from the simple to the incredibly helpful:

• Work out sunrise and sunset times for anywhere on the planet on any date
• Work out exactly what compass bearing the sunrise will appear at, for those glorious long lens African savannah shots
• Work out how long the shadow of any given object will be at any time of day
• If your shooting location is surrounded by tall objects like buildings or trees, work out – months or years in advance of the shoot if necessary – the precise time when the sun will clear the top of a building that’s 55 degrees above the horizon from where your subject’s going to be standing

It’s a tool any DoP, gaffer or professional stills photographer needs to have in their arsenal. And thanks to the iPhone, we have a perfect mobile computing platform for the job, and thankfully the guys at Chemical Wedding have stepped up.

Helios Sun Position Calculator at ¬£17.99 joins pCam (the film calculations package, review coming soon) at ¬£23.99 in the category of “unsually expensive iPhone applications”, and that is going to be the first thing that hits any prospective customer seeing as Apple, in their wisdom, don’t allow demo versions of software in the App Store.

If you can get over the sticker shock – and I’m speaking here to an audience of film industry professionals – let’s not forget that we wouldn’t think twice paying the same amount ordering a few extra brackets or clamps or something in a lighting rental package if we thought they were going to help out on a shoot. ¬†And that would be per day – ¬£17.99 gets you Helios forever.

The market leader before Helios is probably sunPATH, at $99 (¬£61), a venerable desktop Mac or PC tool that does the calculation side of things, spitting out PDF charts, combined with a Suunto compass/inclinometer for actually being able to point at the spot where the sun’s going to appear.

With the exception of the compass (and more on that issue later), Helios loaded onto a iPhone replaces both these tools with ease.

The main screen of the application lets you select a date and location easily, and I liked that there’s a single button to press under each selection to preset the date or time to ‘today/now.’ ¬†For location, you can either get Helios to use your iPhone’s GPS to find your location, which works very quickly presumably because the location accuracy required is the level that the iPhone gets pretty much¬†instantaneously¬†off cell tower triangulation, rather than having to locate the GPS satellites. ¬†And if you don’t happen to be at wherever you’re calculating for, there’s a database of major cities around the world, or you can enter lat/long co-ordinates.

Once that’s done, the main screen, shown above, gives a compass display showing the sun’s bearing at the time, date and location you’ve chosen. ¬†The whole compass ring can be rotated with your finger (this is actually really cool, because if you set the time, date and location to where you’re at, and rotate the ring so the sun icon is pointing towards the sun in real life, you’ve just made yourself a little impromptu compass!), or you can drag the sun icon itself to different compass bearings and the time shown will update to show you what time it would be when the sun is at the bearing you’ve chosen.

Of course, bearing is only one part of the puzzle. ¬†On the far left of screen, Helios gives you the inclination of the sun in degrees above the horizon, and perpendicular to this is a black bar showing shadow length as a result (really just the other side of a right angle triangle, of course). ¬†The end of the shadow bar gives you the ‘shadow ratio’, so if it’s saying 1.2 you know an object 1 meter high would cast a shadow 1.2m long at the time you’ve set Helios to.

The second display mode of Helios is SkyView, showing the track of the sun across the sky with the centre of the diagram being directly above your head and the red circle around the outside being the horizon. ¬†In testing I found this a really useful way of gauging how ‘toppy’ or ‘sidey’ the sun was going to be during say the mid-morning, when looking at different shoot dates a month apart.

The final display, calling on the iPhone’s built in accelerometer, is the¬†inclinometer. ¬†After a short calibration procedure which I found slightly confusingly described, the display gives you a black¬†artificial¬†horizon. ¬†You can then ‘sight’ along the long edge of your iPhone at an object above the horizon and read off the angle to it from the screen. ¬†The developers haven’t missed a trick by pulling in the data from the other displays into this screen, so based on the location and date you’ve set, the inclinometer shows the two times and compass bearings during the day that the sun will be found at that angle. ¬†This is very useful for working out when the sun will clear tall obstructions around your location, whether so you can shoot in bright sunlight, or so you can avoid it. ¬†It’s probably not the world’ most accurate tool – you don’t want to go surveying with this thing – but the accuracy is well within the requirements of the job in hand.

Working with Helios just as I walked around town today, thinking about the sort of questions I’d have if on a location scout or shoot, I found myself reaching for my iPhone and finding an accurate answer when before I’d have just guesstimated the sun position for a certain time of day. ¬†The attractive design and well thought-out menu structure only make it less of a barrier to get the thing out of your pocket in the first place.

There’s a lot of rumours flying around that the next hardware update to the iPhone, likely to be announced in the next few weeks, will contain a magnetic compass to help improve the GPS and enable turn-by-turn directions, as well as being accessible by third party apps. ¬†I’m sure the second Chemical Wedding get their teeth into the compass APIs they will have that integrated into the app, which would take it up to a full five star rating for me. ¬†At the moment, you still need to carry around a trusty Silva compass. ¬†But with the compass integrated into the iPhone, you can easily imagine a mode where you just point the phone anywhere on its own and it reads out what time of day the sun would be closest to where you’re pointing… or even, if you wanted the sun at a very precise point for some reason, what date you should come back on to achieve that.

One suggestion I came up with that could improve it would be integrating a simple weather report for the location and date given and superimposing some sort of graphics onto the compass wheel on the main screen, so as you drag the sun around the compass you can see times of day where it might be behind cloud, rain etc.

Other than that – this app will more than pay for itself the first time you use it for a day’s exterior work. ¬†I look forward to more film software from Chemical Wedding.

[rating:4]