Robin Schmidt has provided us a very extensive write up of how he shot the trailer for his film in the 14-Island Film Challenge. It is crammed with information on gear he used throughout the shoot. Here’s the write up.

SHOOTING THE TRAILER – BAHAMAS 14 ISLAND FILM CHALLENGE

As a finalist in the 14 Islands Film Challenge the brief was a slightly tricky one – shoot a film of your choice, on the island you’re sent to, that helps us put bums on seats and beds on heads. Having just bought my 7D it seemed the perfect opportunity to put a marker down and shoot some really stunning material and capture the colour and beauty of Long Island. A week before the shoot the challenge organisers suddenly called and told me I couldn’t use the camera for the film and they had to use the XHA1 instead. Aaaaaggggghhhhh. I took it anyway. The trailer is made up almost entirely of shots from the 7D which won’t make it into the film, but being on the island gave me a fairly unique opportunity to try the camera out in some unusual situations, like on a speedboat, or in a four seater prop plane! My key kit was my Redrock Micro Eyespy Deluxe (with additional handles, because it’s useless the way they sell it to you), Steadicam Merlin, Zacuto Z-Finder, Libec LS38 tripod, EWA Marine splashbag Zoom H4N audio recorder, Sennheiser lav mic, and Rode NTG2 shotgun mic (incidentally, dropped in the sea, dried off and works perfectly!). Lenses: Tokina 11-16, Canon 24-70L, 18-135IS, Sigma 30 1.4, Canon 50 1.8. I was doing all sorts of different kinds of filming, sometimes with the full Redrock build, sometimes just running around with the Z-Finder tucked on the back, handheld, it was really just a question of reacting to the situation as it evolved and guessing what might work. I was a one man band out there, directing and shooting, and I’d say that was the most challenging part of working with this kit. Ideally you have an assistant and that makes life a lot easier, and makes shooting a lot quicker.

BASIC SHOOTING

You may or may not have noticed but it’s very sunny in the Bahamas. On normal video cameras you’ve got an ND built in, just flick a switch and you’re ready to go. Not so with the 7D. I knew this was going to be a problem for me before I went and I had a couple of different choices before I went as to how I solved it. I could have bought a bunch of different NDs for different situations with different thread sizes but without an assistant I knew that would be unworkable. I couldn’t take a matte box with me as I just didn’t have enough luggage capacity, plus I didn’t have the £650 I’d need to buy one with the filters. So I plumped for the best compromise I could think of, a Fader ND 77. My 24-70 and the Tokina are both 77 so I figured that would work for most situations. Sadly, it did limit me a bit when I wanted to use the Sigma 30mm, my favourite lens for doc work. The Fader ND is great but you have to be really on it when using it. You basically dial it to the setting you want and go from there, but it’s really easy to knock it and it has no end stops to tell you when you’re at the maximum or minimum setting. As a result I got a lot of shots with insanely inky blacks that I’d managed to over ND, especially with the Tokina, which is so wide, you really see the edge of the filter and get weird weird vignetting effects. The other problem shooting out there is that people are pretty dark skinned, and trying to expose for a nice looking sky, and for dark skin tones was nearly impossible without someone manning a reflector. I think that’s the one item I’d have swapped any of my other kit for. The other essential piece of kit was the Zacuto Z-Finder. Now, I really really really don’t like Zacuto at all. I find their ‘look here’s a hot girl holding a camera’ approach to marketing stinks of smugness as they coin it in off products they claim are the business and charge through the roof for them. You’ll find hundreds of testimonials claiming the Z-Finder is the answer to focussing on a DSLR – all I’ll say is I don’t really believe any of those people can actually have used one. I don’t doubt the product is well made, and does what it says it does, it’s just the lcd on the 7D isn’t up to being magnified x3 and so you’re none the wiser as to what’s in focus than you are just using the screen. In fact, I actually think you’re worse off, particularly on wide shots. Not a clue. If you live in London I’ll gladly show you exactly what I mean (and yes I do have the dipoter set correctly). The reason it was so essential was for shading the LCD. That’s it. You could use the Hoodman Loupe to do the same job, so why pay £300 for the Z-Finder. Because you’re an idiot like me and believed the hype. In 18 months when they bring out a 5d Mk3 with a vastly improved LCD then it’ll work. The other piece of kit I’d have been lost without was my trusty Libec LS38. Now Libec’s not a big name, but when I was researching this tripod got rave reviews and yet nobody was buying them. I’ve used many Manfrotto tripods at the cheaper end of the spectrum and hated them all, but the Libec is an absolute joy. You don’t even think about your moves when using it, it just goes where you want it to, lovely start and stop, lovely, simple tripod. Get one. I generally mounted the whole redrock rig on the tripod but it’s far from ideal as your centre of gravity’s completely in the wrong place. There’s a tripod plate for DSLRs for about £99 from Redrock, so that will probably have to be bought… gets expensive this lark!

SPECIAL SHOOTING

Shooting from an aeroplane was probably the toughest to get right. Rolling shutter issues are such a major pain in the ass that putting the camera out of the window at 120mph was always risky. I shot almost exclusively on the Tokina 11-16 as the wide lens helps hide the shutter movements but it was still hard to get any long shots that worked. I did try the 18-135 kit lens because it has IS, but it was completely useless. In an ideal world I’d have had a monopod to brace the camera with and keep it a little bit steadier, but basically it was me with my head out of the window, holding a camera and that’s it. We shot for an hour and a half and I probably got fifteen seconds of useable footage. Not a great return and that monopod would have been mighty useful. Shooting on a boat was great, again using the Tokina it just gives you such a great sense of speed as the shot barrels round the edges. I initially shot with my Kata rain jacket but those things are just impossible to operate video around so I gave up and just trusted my 7D’s weatheproofing. I actually left the camera doing a timelapse one night shooting the stars and woke up at 4am to find it was completely covered in dew, panicked, dried it off, and it just went ‘Is that all you’ve got?’. Amazing camera for just dealing with stuff it really is. Shooting underwater was a challenge all of its own. My EWA Marine splashbag is basically just a sealed bag that you put the camera in and then push it underwater. It’s about as functional and easy to use as an iron condom. I was terrified of putting the camera in the water, but that was absolutely fine. I kept knocking the exposure, couldn’t tell if the camera was even recording, the front of the bag kept passing in front of the lens, and in general it was a nightmare. You need extra weights to keep the bag from just ballooning to the surface and best of all, it’s like a greenhouse inside the bag so the camera overheats in about 5 minutes. It’s also near on impossible to see the shot you’re getting underwater. I’m glad I had it but really, if you’re going to shoot underwater, you need a proper housing. Finally the Steadicam Merlin… it looks like a total joke. However, it does actually work. Of course, using it as a pro tool takes a lot of practice and one of the toughest parts of it is the lack of an articulating LCD screen which does mean you’re guessing a little bit half the time and walking backwards is treachorous. I highly recommend one though as that rolling shutter is a bitch on handheld shots, particularly with a big heavy lens like the 24-70L. Lens of the trip has to be the Tokina 11-16, it was the lens I turned to constantly to get me out of trouble, and always made things look great. I shot a lot of closeups on it, using the idiotic shallow dof on a duper wide lens actually had me giggling from time to time. Try doing that on an XHA1.

I wish I’d been able to shoot my whole film on the 7D because it is a wonderful camera. It’s challenging as hell using it as a video camera, but there’s one particular reason why I love it so much. Digital technology is fantastic and it’s meant I could have a career in this business when I might not otherwise, but there’s nothing romantic about zeros and ones, about chips and sensors. Filmmaking is a passion for me because there’s something mercurial about it, something magical, and when you get it right it puts a big smile on your face. 35mm and 16mm film have that magical quality and there’s nothing better than sitting in a da vinci suite and seeing your rushes come to life in the grade. Digital doesn’t seem to have that romance. With the DSLRs I’ve rediscovered that magic through the lenses I put on the front of the camera and suddenly I’m in love with filmmaking again. Something about being able to put the camera in front of an event that’s perfectly ordinary and suddenly make it feel special and magical… that’s what I love about these cameras and it’s why I’ve embraced them. The 7D is a stepping stone, and it’ll be forgotten about soon enough, but the glass you stick on the front is where the romance lies. Embrace that and you won’t regret it.

Robin Schmidt

By the way, Robin has the coolest home page for a website I have seen in a while. Think Grindhouse. www.elskid.com .

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