Pro Moviemaker Winter 2019

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THE COLOURIST’S SEAL OF APPROVAL

You have to have total confidence in a camera to let one of the world’s top colourists take a critical look at the footage. But that’s exactlywhat happened when award-winning colour grading artist and one of the leading developers in the area of colour science for digital film cameras, Dado Valentic, was given the job of grading the footage from Peter Hamblin’s film. Valentic is based at Warner Bros studios in LA and is known for his unique approach to the processing of digital images and his film stock emulation technology. A veteran of more than 30 films and TV series, such as Ridley Scott’s Exodus , Guy Richie’s Sherlock Holmes , plus Game of Thrones , he had to turn the film around in two days for its debut screening. He was impressed. “I’m really surprised about the quality. The material was shot in high ISO, but it’s really clean. There was absolutely no noise, which is very interesting,” he says. “Even though the material was a compressed H.265 file recorded in the camera, there were no artefacts, which was a big surprise. “I’d love to learn how Panasonic made the sensor record footage as clean as that. There is very little or no noise even in the dark scenes, and this movie had lots of dark shots and exterior night shots. It looked better and cleaner than cameras that cost ten or 20 times as much.” Valentic was impressed by the look from shooting anamorphic lenses, usually the realm of large and expensive cameras. “Anamorphic with a large format sensor gives beautiful filmic results with a great cinematic quality. We are used to seeing images like this coming out of big cinema cameras, not a small camera,” he says.

action and camera movement was required. “In the first scene, you see both

“And this, to me, speaks in volumes as to what this camera can actually do, because it’s a transparent communicator of what the lens is capturing. It has personality.” In Hope of Nothing centres around two brothers, one of whom has lost all hope, while the other is still in pursuit of their shared dream of becoming filmmakers. So, to get across the gritty side of real life in Hollywood, the film has lots of dimly lit atmospheric scenes with mixed lighting. It’s a real test for any camera, but with a wide dynamic range and incredible suppression of noise even at high ISO, the Panasonic Lumix S1H delivered. “We didn’t have any real problems with the light. If you look into two of the scenes, especially in the bowling alley, there are so many different lights, but that’s what we wanted,” says Hamblin. “We wanted it to look a bit crazy, with neon lights coming in from all angles and, although the lens flare is big, it doesn’t overwhelm the image. Everything held up really well.” With such a small form factor, the advantages of the Panasonic Lumix S1H’s lightweight and portability really shone through, as it was possible to rig up the camera quickly in scenes where a lot of

brothers in a sort of dream sequence; dressed to the nines and surrounded by adoring fans,” explains Hamblin. “There are 50 extras that we paid for just an hour and a half of their time. We needed to be quick and agile, so Steadicamwas our best option. “We only had 12 hours to prep and shoot the whole thing, because of where it was set [the RIBA Library in London]. Usually, I would spend a day or two beforehand pre- lighting and blocking scenes, but it was all go, go, go. It’s quite spectacular how we pulled it off, because it looks stunning.” It was this speed and ease of use, ultra-high quality and, of course, the 6K sensor that helped Hamblin create his vision of shooting a full feature film in CinemaScope. “We’ve pulled off things I didn’t think were possible; we wrote a script, found the locations, prepared the sets and shot all three scenes in just one week,” he says. “It’s a good job the S1H was so reliable, because it meant that we could have a little more leeway for everything else.”

More information

panasonic.com/uk

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WINTER 2019 PRO MOVIEMAKER

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