Over the past week or so, I’ve been lucky enough to shoot some footage with two of Blackmagic’s pre-release cameras, the URSA Mini and Micro Cinema Camera. Some of you have seen it My URSA Mini test recording video, Today I’m posting a little short film I made over the weekend for fun with a tiny movie camera.
While the Micro Cinema Camera would obviously be amazing for drones, gimbals and action shots, I thought I would shoot a narrative style film with it to test it in more unexpected environments.
I gave myself a day and a half to come up with ideas, shoot, edit and color grade. With no budget or crew, I decided to keep the idea very simple, shooting only with natural light, without any dialogue, and limiting the location as much as possible. Everything went smoothly in the end, the camera has a small footprint and is able to capture a lot of footage even when shooting guerrilla style.
The picture below is my entire “rig”, which mainly consists of camera, magic arm and monitor. I mounted it on a stick for most of our shoots, but also mounted it on a small rail system for a few handheld shoots.
The film itself was shot using a variety of lenses including: Tokina 11-16mm, Rokinon 24mm, Rokinon 50mm, Nikkor 50mm, Zeiss 85mm. Shooting RAW 3:1 allows me to easily match footage from different lenses in Da Vinci without having to contend with highly compressed codecs. It’s worth noting that the short was also edited in Resolve 12, with final touches and some film grain added using FilmConvert.
Check out the short clip below.
micro
The concept was clearly meant to reflect the “micro” theme as much as possible – from the micro SD card to the fact that the main character is metaphorically under a microscope. In the end, it became a fun little weekend project and a great excuse to test out the tiny movie camera in a real-world environment—rather than just shooting color charts and dynamic range tests.
I must say, I really like the image quality of this camera and enjoy using the S16 format. I achieve shallow depth of field easily with the Super 16, and when working as a one-man team sometimes it would be nice to have a little more wiggle room when pulling focus. I will be using Super 16mm film on another shoot coming up, so this is a good reminder that you don’t need full frame (or even Super 35mm) to achieve a film look.
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cast/crew
directed by Norm Kroll
Starring Ray Sestrup
music by Andrew Sestrup – http://www.andrewseistrup.com
Producer: Norm Kroll and Jane Kroll
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