Canon C300
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Shooting with 18 Cameras: The Making of The Short Game
With a background in comedy shorts, you’d be forgiven if you thought Josh Greenbaum’s first feature, a documentary that follows the 7 and 8-year old competitors in the World Championships of Junior Golf, would be a dark look at another group of driven parents. But that’s not what Greenbaum was interested in doing. Instead, he focuses on the children, these pre-teens who can, at turns, appear tremendously adult, or just like any other 7-year old. The Short Game follows eight competitors through last year’s championships, though production actually started a year before at the previous championships. That was where they […]
by Michael Murie on Oct 25, 2013 -
Be Natural: Interview with documentary filmmakers Pamela Green and Jarik van Sluijs
Filmmakers Pamela Green and Jarik van Sluijs have worked on documentaries in various roles including as co-producer of the Emmy-nominated documentary Bhutto. Their company, PIC Agency, has produced titles for movies including 42 and The Kingdom, and they have also produced content for award shows, commercials and other productions. “People come to us to add to the story when you can’t turn the camera back on,” says Green. They have specialized in creating new content by combining graphics, stock footage, new footage and editorial. These techniques should be especially useful for their first documentary, Be Natural, about the first female […]
by Michael Murie on Aug 26, 2013 -
The Cinematography of A Field in England
English director Ben Wheatley’s [Kill List, Sightseers] latest project, A Field in England was shot in black and white and follows a group of deserters in the English Civil War. But this isn’t your standard historical period piece, being variously described by reviewers as a “monochrome-psychedelic breakdown” and a “17th-century head trip.” Shot in 12 days on a micro-budget, it was also, rather unusually, released on the same day to cinemas, on DVD and Blu-ray, and it also aired on Film4 (a free digital television channel). For those interested in the movie’s production, the filmmakers have created a very informative […]
by Michael Murie on Jul 7, 2013 -
Bryce Dallas Howard on Project Imaginat10n
Back in 2011, Canon approached director Ron Howard about creating a short film inspired by a framework of eight photographs, which were culled from over 100,000 submissions through an online contest. Howard declined on account of his busy schedule, but offered to mentor a filmmaker through the process. His pupil in Project Imagin8ion was none other than his daughter, actress Bryce Dallas Howard. Through the exercise, Bryce crafted the 29-minute when you find me, a short film written by Dane Carbeneau about two sisters grappling with the death of their mother through space and time. A photograph of a dilapidated […]
by Sarah Salovaara on May 13, 2013 -
Canon C100 or C300: Which One to Get?
For many, the release of the Canon C100 has prompted one question: Which one do I get? Or, in other words, is the C300 really worth $9,500 more than the C100? These cameras have the same sensor and very similar bodies, and Canon even includes C-Log on both, but there are a lot of differences. Perhaps the most notable: C300 records internally 4:2:2 MPEG-2, while the C100 records 4:2:0 AVCHD 60p recording (at 720p) is available on the C300 but not the C100 C300 has HD-SDI & Genlock, C100 just has HDMI C100 is smaller There are other differences: The […]
by Michael Murie on Feb 6, 2013 -
Using a Home Projector for Rear Projection
Rear projection, a technique that involves projecting a background image onto a screen behind your actors, is a technique that was popular in the 40s and 50s, particularly for shooting vehicle interiors. It wasn’t perfect; the image can seem washed out compared to the foreground actors making it easy to spot the technique, and rear projection requires a fairly large studio space. Rear projection has been mostly replaced, first by front projection, and by blue- and green-screen techniques. Even low-budget NLEs now include very good green-screen filters that produce excellent results; though it’s your technique when shooting the footage that […]
by Michael Murie on Feb 4, 2013 -
Fringe Issue in Older Canon C300’s Solved?
Since its release, the Canon C300 has received a lot of praise for its image quality and low-light sensitivity. But some users have reported problems with color fringing: incorrectly colored pixels that appear on in-focus vertical or horizontal borders adjacent to a blown out – or nearly blown out – background. This most commonly appears on man-made objects like railings and window edges, though it can also be seen in specular highlights on ocean waves. The Canon C300 is not unique in suffering problems like this. By all accounts the Sony NEX-FS100 exhibits far stronger fringing. Any single-sensor camera is […]
by Michael Murie on Jan 24, 2013 -
Getting the Shot: Scenes from the Making of the Music Video, “Ready or Not”
In a previous article (An Afternoon Music Video Shoot with the Canon C300) I documented a day shooting scenes for a new music video for the band Air Traffic Controller. The completed video, as well as a making-of piece have now been posted. Director/DP/Editor Rick Macomber explained that he decided to do this video after seeing Dave Munro from ATC perform the song acoustically. Said Rick “I was listening to the lyrics and I knew how close the song was to Dave’s personal life and it touched me. So when he came to me and asked which song I would […]
by Michael Murie on Jan 21, 2013 -
Pulse: Shooting with the Canon C100, Part II
In Part Two of this interview with Patrick Moreau of StillMotion, Moreau discusses the settings used while filming the short film Pulse with the Canon C100, as well as the lenses and audio hardware they used. He also discusses intercutting footage from the Canon C100 with other cameras. See also: Pulse: Shooting with the Canon C100 Part One Filmmaker: For this project you were recording to AVCHD? Moreau: Yes. We used AVCHD in this situation because we wanted it to be as natural as possible, which is possible with this small footprint. We did an AT&T campaign for the Olympics […]
by Michael Murie on Jan 10, 2013 -
Pulse: Shooting with the Canon C100, Part One
When manufacturers are preparing a new camera for release, they often loan pre-production units to filmmakers in the hope that they’ll make a video the company can use to promote the camera. Such is the case with the Canon C100. Canon loaned the filmmakers of StillMotion two C100 bodies and financed the making of a short video, Pulse. As StillMotion described in their blog post on the making of the video, the idea for the video came from a potential client: We’d recently been approached to make a Kickstarter film for a team who had created a pretty remarkable innovation […]
by Michael Murie on Jan 8, 2013
