ATOMOS | ADVERTI SEMENT FEATURE
“The output and 4K look belies that it was shot on the FS7. It does show what Atomos has achieved”
REACHING OUT TO ATOMOS On the technical side, Stephens is quite savvy with the cameras and the back end, and so reached out to Atomos, particularly for the use of ProRes Raw for the movie. “Dan from the company got back to me and we met up in London and talked about squeezing the very most from the Sony FS7 camera that you possibly could,” he explains. “The only way we could do that with the budgets we had was to get two or three cameras and just squeeze the life out of them to get the footage into ProRes Raw HQ quality. “What we got with the Canon prime lenses, alongside the mist filtering we were using, was quite remarkable. The output and the 4K look belies that it was shot on the FS7, which is now a five-year-old camera. It does show what Atomos has achieved. At the moment, we’re still working with proxies and deciding which direction we’ll go in post. We’re very much looking forward to treating that ProRes Raw HQ in the colour grade, because what you can do with it is quite ridiculous.” DOP Nathan Claridge and camera operator, Jack Edwards, did take a while to get their heads around working with Atomos monitors as they allow you to view more of the highlight range. “There are certain things you have to pay attention to when you’re shooting with an Atomos Shogun 7 or Inferno and it’s
action; if there’s one thing with Damien, you know he’ll nail the action scenes. He was heavily involved with the Kingsman movies, so when I read the action, it was highly believable that what I was reading in the script would come to life.” THE SHOOT The production had to look at ways to manage a tight budget and took their initial inspiration from a similarly themed Netflix production called Sex Education . “That production used a local area in South Wales, but it was made to look like it could be America – it looks incredible,” says Stephens. “We took a lot of confidence in that and were able to secure some incredible locations in and around the Derby area. Instead of bringing everything down to the London area, we took everyone up to the Derby area. In the end, we shot 29 scenes – interior and exterior – in more than 30 locations in that area. There were a lot of locations and we were blessed with the weather. “We had what I’d call an extremely tightly knit cast and crew,” says Stephens. “The only way we could see it working due to availability was to take the UK side of the dialogue and block it as if it were a series of small films on weekends or a block of three or four days; the biggest one we did was eight days. Rather fantastically now, we have pulled off the UK shooting.
IMAGES As the name suggests, a lot of the action sequences involved fight scenes, including stuntmen on fire and cameras spinning around
important to also know what you can bring back from that. It’s been a rollercoaster ride to get it to this point, but we’ve been able to gain more than we expected to from these cameras shooting in Raw,” says Stephens. Edwards was able to build the camera rigs with the Atomos recorders on-board. The design of the FS7 does allow for a
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