Early this year I was approached by Al Jazeera to work as a DoP on a documentary shoot about a scandal surrounding a so-called children’s home in which multiple cases of extreme abuse took place more than three decades ago. The subject matter was very disturbing and shocking and I deeply admired the contributors for coming forward and telling their painful stories.
I felt honoured to be a part of this project and wanted to show the greatest respect I could to the people opening up to us. This lead me in an interesting direction in terms of the camera choice for the film.
Usually on projects I use my own Red camera or will look to rent an equivalent machine that can deliver higher-end imagery. However, I think in the past I may have over-emphasised this requirement for the best imaging in detriment to the overall piece. At least that is what quickly became apparent on the first day of this particular project.
As you can see on the left, we shot the first day on my Red. This was during the height of the Korean summer in a tiny room with no aircon. The image looked decent but the camera fans were so loud. As the conversation went on, the room got hotter and hotter and the camera fans began to encroach on the audio quality.
Additionally, the run time of the Red batteries and mags, while not bad, are not ideal for long, emotionally intense discussions. Asking people to pause between questions when things are this personal for the subjects is really difficult and you feel like a complete bastard doing it.
That night I spoke with the producers and we decided a rethink was in order. I knew we needed the ability to shoot for extended periods and that, considering many of the locations were going to be very small, very hot spaces, we were going to need a camera that was basically silent.
Prior to my Red I had owned (and loved) the Canon C100 mark 1 and had shot many projects with the C300 mark 1 and 2 and started to reminisce about all the cool features of those cameras.
The C300 was the best of this line that could be rented within our budget and so we opted for that for the remainder of the shoot.
It turned out to be a very good decision - the camera is basically silent at ungodly temperatures and seems to never run out of batteries or card space. The interesting thing for me was how much returning to a 1080p camera changed the way I shot stuff.
Suddenly I had to be super careful about my highlights in a way that I hadn’t for years as the image would blow out any hot spots so much quicker than more modern cameras. I started framing things differently in order to compensate and I noticed how my images were starting to look like stuff I shot 5 years ago when I still had my trusty C100. I had sometimes looked back at that work and thought “I’d never shoot it like that now.” but this process gave me a little bit more sympathy for past me and helped me understand the choices I made.
Away from the impact on directing or cinematography style that lower budgets or location restraints can have, one of my favourite things about smaller projects is the workarounds you can come up with in order to get what you need. I was operating sound as well as shooting for this film and recruited a wide variety of household objects and gaffer tape to capture decent boom sound. Some examples below.
Ensuring booms are cat proof is key.
A vacuum cleaner turns out to be just the right height to boom mic an old man sitting on the floor.
I learned a lot on this project both about cinematography and about life. Speaking with the contributors was a very humbling experience and I am deeply grateful to all of them for giving us their time and the warm welcomes they extended to our team.