DEFINITION February 2018

SHOOT STORY ESCAPE

handheld and you can have them on all day which is usually a ten- hour shift. The 18-80mm became a godsend as it was so light, you could pick that up for a bit if you wanted a break. With the Sony you know you are going to get a good image, with the Canon C300 Mark II you’re getting a great image straight out of the camera, great punchy colours. We used that for all those stylized shots in the daytime, the slider and gimbal kind of shots. That’s the great thing about that camera, the size. You can quickly get it ready for any shots and it’s got a huge dynamic range. Shots like inside an aircraft looking out illustrated I was getting a lot from it. So those shots in a bright desert or on a glacier are fine to attempt. Also for night shoots we would use the C300 mainly just for its low-light ability.” Handholding a fully-rigged Sony F55 all day is tough but James and Dan get used to it and they go into almost automation mode to get through. “With the camera on the shoulder you’re able to react to situations much quicker. At the end of the day you’re exhausted of course and at the end of the week you’re destroyed. But with me and Dan, we can just give each other a nod and BECAUSE THEY’RE SO INTENT ON THEIR TASK THEY SOON IGNORE YOU

behind a wreckage or something. With companies like this operating there’s no need for me to invest in a drone.” The drone use in Escape entwined with the narrative and not used just for the normal wide shot. With such a confined crash area it made sense to re-emphasise that. But what really comes across as you watch this riveting series is the skill of the camera operators. They picked the Sony F55 as it’s a shoulder mount camera and this is where James and Dan excel. Once on the shoulder their huge experience kicks in and their feel for the right shot is mixed with supreme handling and not a little athleticism. “You certainly get into a bit of a flow, in many ways it wouldn’t be possible to do if it wasn’t handheld. You’d get yourself in a situation sometimes where because you don’t know what’s going to happen, you’ve just got to react. Two people could walk in to camp and start yelling at each other, you don’t know this is going to happen and I’m on my own filming it and the only way I could’ve done it is handheld, so I can swing between two people having this confrontation. You’ve got to react and know when to zoom. It’s definitely the only way. The other advantage we had was that they were all on microphones and Zaxcomm recorders so we could hear what they were saying. So if someone was 100 metres away thinking they were not in shot, we could then find a little position so they didn’t know they were being filmed but we know they’re saying some good stuff. That was quite a common thing to do.”

know who to follow, what to react to. You worry the contestants are going to be conscious of the camera but because they’re so intent on their task and under a time frame they soon ignore you, you become a ghost.” HANDHOLDING AND DRONES Part of the change of technique was to use the drone not just for GVs but as part of conversations; so shoot the action as normal and then send the drone up to get the same action from height. It’s more interesting than just two people chatting. “The drone company we used was called Dr One,” says James. “They were brilliant and always on call. They hid out of sight and we would ask for a drone and it would appear from

BELOW One of the simulated crash sites in the series was this plane crash on a glacier.

DEFINITION FEBRUARY 2018

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