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Jane Doe day 1: The Spooky Apartment
Ed Moore
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A weekend of pre-production, RED, and crowded tubes...
Ed Moore
What a pleasant weekend!
We wrapped the Armoured Land Rover shoot late on Thursday evening (pictures and video to come, they’re editing frantically as we speak to get it all done before the Christmas break) and producer Rachel and I hightailed it back up to the Midlands, arriving at 3am, so we could sleep in our respective own beds before pitching a concept to Somerfield the next morning in Bristol at 11.30am. Ouch. Having returned from Bristol the rest of the day was spent de-packing the equipment van from the shoot and returning the excellent PDW-700 XDCAM HD camera kindly loaned to us for the shoot by Creative Video (more on that in a later post).
Mrs Ed and I headed to her folks in Luton Friday evening which was to be our base of operations for a weekend of London-based fun.
For me, Saturday brought two pre-production meetings for a couple of shorts I’m DPing early next year:
Jane Doe (D: Myles Robey, P: Robin Davies), in which a terrible accident has severe psychological consequences for the responsible party, and The Ash Can (D: Jamie Hewitt, P:Sabrina Dridje), a horror (or is it?) piece set on a WWII era marooned submarine. We’re planning to shoot both on RED, and I spent the day meeting with both production teams to plan our next steps. Myles, Robin and Sabrina are all involved in one way or another in Perrier’s Bounty, currently shooting in London, so I dropped by the set for lunch and to hang around and see the RED being used on a ¬£5 million feature. Nice to see that all the ‘oh my god it’s unreliable and unprofessional’ malarkey has died off now – other than the camera having a different logo on the side, and the complete lack of film stock and processing costs from the budget, I could have been on the set any 35mm mid-budget picture in the world.Saturday night was a party with a load of Mrs Ed and I’s friends from university, and Sunday inevitably involved a lengthy recovery process involving a lie-in, lunch with Mrs Ed’s family and some extra napping beyond that…
The Tube was insane around London the whole weekend, probably due to the cold. However, it was nothing compared to Japan. I think they made need to acknowledge the place is officially overcrowded…
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Why the RED modular system is good news for Steadicam operators
Ed Moore
If you’re reading this, it probably hasn’t escaped your attention that RED recently announced a new, extremely modular approach to digital cinema cameras.¬† Having had lunch with Garrett Brown (forgive a guy for being proud) which inevitably involved a lot of chat on how the steadicam system has evolved over the years, Jason Wingrove‘s twitter jumped out at me.
If RED can come up with (and I’m sure they will) a sensible range of cabling to attach their various modules together, Jason’s suggestion would produce a really interesting rig.¬† Traditionally if you want ‘feature film quality’ you’re looking at a big and heavy camera, with a Steadicam rig to match.¬† RED can be configured in any number of ways to meet and arguably exceed today’s concept of ‘feature film quality’, but with just the tiny sensor module and a lens at the top and everything else down below as the counterbalance, you have a lightweight system, requiring only a lightweight rig.¬† Hurrah!
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Very briefly: RED rock the world
Ed Moore
I will blog about this properly later, but RED really lived up to their hype today.  Congratulation to all their team!
