Blog

Dubai Desert Oasis

More images from Dubai. Today we shot a Desert Oasis scene complete with camels, Dancers and musicians and Horse Riders. And it all ended with a spectacular sunset. Daydreams of Dubai is a magical journey through some of the most picturesque areas of the United Arab Emirate of Dubai and is being produced by Filmation 3D in Dubai with production support from 21st Century 3D and AeroCine.

Burj Al Arab

I get the feeling that Dubai is the epitome of desert Oasis. In what would seem a terribly hard and unforgiving land, they have built gleaming edifices, Palaces to opulence, magnificent resorts and spa’s to cater to any and all luxurious pleasure. Today our little production company was at the only 7-star hotel in the world, the incomparable Burj Al Arab which has a staff of 8 for every patron staying in the hotel and a butler for each floor. The resort is so exclusive there is no check-in desk, all of the arrangements take place in the privacy of your own suite (oh, I forgot to mention, there are no “rooms”, only suites). Here are a few of the images I made today.

I am in the UAE with 21st Century 3D and AeroCine to make the film Daydreams of Dubai for Producers Lulu Mahaini and Humaid Mohamed Humaid of Filmation Film Production in Dubai.

Using the iPhone as a camera

camera iconIt’s a terrible camera. The lens is tiny, the resolution stinks, you have no creative control over shutter speed, sensitivity, aperture, and it’s ergonomically a nightmare, not to mention, sometimes it’s a really bad phone too. But it’s always there. I’ve always got it handy when I see something I would really like to photograph and don’t have my DSLR on hand. As a result, I have a lot of photos taken with my iPhone that I wished I had a better camera for. But having taken so many photos with it, I’ve discovered something about the iCamera, or maybe I’ve discovered something about myself, because I’ve started to like the images I can create with it. Continue reading “Using the iPhone as a camera”

Mabel Screening at Santa Barbara Int’l Film Fest

Last week I was at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival for the Premiere screening of a short documentary film I shot for Director/Producer Pia Clemente called Mabel. The film chronicles the life of Mabel Sawhill who, at 99 years old, and with a little help from her niece, who is deaf, still runs her own catering business, doing the shopping, cooking and serving for as many as 100 people several times a week.

Not unlike Mabel herself, the film is charming and delightful, and had audiences at SBIFF laughing and inspired. The film was edited by Geoffrey O’Brien, and features a wonderfully playful soundtrack by Aiko Fukushima.

Mabel is likely to be playing more festivals in the near future, so keep in touch and I’ll let you know where you find her.

There were a lot of other films at the festival worth talking about, but I just wanted to mention two features that are standouts, and oddly both have musical themes to them: Ragnar Bragason’s film Metalhead is a striking film from Iceland, a darkly comic drama about a grief stricken young woman who turns to Heavy Metal music after she witnesses her older brother die in a farm accident. And a beuatiful film by Felix Van Groeningen called The Broken Circle Breakdown which uses Bluegrass music to help tell the story of an unlikely couple who fall instantly and deeply in love.

Longboat Key, FL Sunset

Sunset in Longboat Key, FL
Click on me to see a larger version

Tech Scout day on Longboat Key in Florida, the afternoon was overcast and at one point it started to rain pretty hard. As the day waned the rain had moved on, but the clouds that had been left behind foretold of a bleak sunset. Most of the crew left but I stayed behind hoping something interesting might happen, and right at the tail end of sunset, the clouds started to break apart and this beautiful scene presented itself.

They named it Magic Hour for a reason.

No Ordinary Hero

I am thrilled to announce that NO ORDINARY HERO starring John Maucere with Oscar winner Marlee Matlin is having its world première at the Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis! I am the cinematographer for this feature film which was directed by Troy Kotsur who is also deaf. We  made the film under an extremely challenging budget, in a very short timeframe, and with cast and crew working through language barriers, but it all came together very smoothly and we created a very beautiful film that will première in Indianapolis Oct 19.

NOH-posterNO ORDINARY HERO: THE SUPERDEAFY MOVIE is a family drama about a deaf actor who plays a superhero on a TV show but must look beyond his own struggles to inspire a deaf boy to believe in himself. Based on the real internationally known SuperDeafy character created by John Maucere, NO ORDINARY HERO is a story about being different and finding the one thing that makes the ordinary, Super.

Crossing Language Barriers to Produce a Film

No Ordinary Hero was conceived by the film’s star John Maucere and Director Troy Kotsur who are both deaf. Executive Producers Liz Tannenbaum and Paul Maucere are deaf, as are about half of the cast. The relationship between DP and Director is normally a close one with a lot of collaboration, and going into this project, I have to admit I was a bit concerned about communicating with Troy. But as it turned out, my concern was unfounded. Continue reading “No Ordinary Hero”

Shooting “No Ordinary Hero” on the Canon 5D MkIII and Atomos Ninja 2

by Jeff Gatesman
I have shot a feature film called No Ordinary Hero with the new Canon 5D Mk III using the clean video output to an Atomos Ninja 2 and recording to ProRes 422 Hq. This was a conscious choice for several reasons, the main one being that we have a dozen or so FX shots, mostly green screen composites and we needed the fattest “negative” our low-budget film could afford.

I will get to the meat of the subject with camera setup and recorder settings in a moment but first let me start by addressing the fat “negative” statement (and unless you are going straight from your camera output to a finished product you need to be thinking of the files as a camera negative, or at least a starting point for your final look) because when Canon came out with the firmware update on April 30 that allowed for clean video out via HDMI on the 5D Mk III, I read a few posts where people visually compared the h.264 video from the camera to the 422 video recorded by the Ninja. The conclusion that there was no discernible difference visually between the files is as expected–the codecs were doing their job, compressing and decompressing the file so that in the end they look like HD video. This is not the point of recording 422 Hq over h.264. The reason for recording the raw video to 422 Hq is to get as much information as possible for the post workflow in order to be able to cut keys easily, and color time the final film without the degradation that begins with a lossy codec like h.264.

If you compare the two codecs you can easily see the difference: h.264 is an 8-bit codec using 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, and the Ninja 2 records Pro Res 422 Hq at 10 bits using 4:2:2 chroma subsampling. A simplified comparison is that the identical files as recorded from the 5D Mk III on cf card vs the Ninja 2 weigh in at 129 MB vs 863 MB respectively. That is almost 7 times as much information in the Pro Res files. In order to make the files so miniscule, the h.264 codec has to throw away valuable information during the compression process and rely on interpolation to recreate it during decompression. You can see the effects of a lossy codec by viewing the frame grabs below, taken from the actual footage from No Ordinary Hero and cropped at 100%.

h.264 frame grab from cf card
Frame from the h.264 file recorded onto cf card Canon 5D Mk III

 

Pro Res 422Hq frame grab from Ninja 2
Frame from the Pro Res 422Hq file recorded onto SSD drive Atomos Ninja 2

Notice how much sharper and higher contrast the image from Pro Res looks. Continue reading “Shooting “No Ordinary Hero” on the Canon 5D MkIII and Atomos Ninja 2″