THE HDSLR CINEMA REVOLUTION

THE BEGINNING OF THE HDSLR REVOLUTION: PHOTOGRAPHER VINCENT LAFORET REDEFINES THE GAME

High-definition single lens reflex cameras (HDSLRs)—those that shoot stills and high-definition video—are designed for photographers. They’re primarily stills cameras. But thousands of DSLR shooters are using them as cinema cameras. This book shows DSLR shooters how to get the cinematic look using the video mode of DSLR cameras.¹

For years, many students and low-budget indie filmmakers had to shoot on video because film cameras and film stock were too expensive (I remember paying $50 to purchase and develop two minutes of black & white 16 mm film in the mid-1990s at NYU). Video cameras—especially with the release of Panasonic’s DVX100 that shot in 24P and allowed for gamma curve changes in camera priced at $3,700 in 2002—was perceived as a game changer. A lot of indies gravitated toward this camera for their cinema projects. Then affordable HD cameras hit the market with full HD 1920 × 1080 resolution by the middle of the decade, and it appeared the genie was let out of the bottle. Today, consumers can purchase mini point-and-shoot HD cameras that James Bond could use on his spy missions.

Yet, all of these cameras—whether HD or not, whether shooting in 24P or 30P, whether recorded on P2 cards at 100 Mbps—look like video, feel like video—that uncinematic, flat, overly sharp look that make cinema-makers and photographers cringe.² Why? Because video cameras are so crammed with features (needed for ENG work and for ease of use for low-end consumer cameras) that it becomes everything for everyone. Video cameras can shoot family reunions, reporters can shoot news, sporting events can be caught in full HD glory—but none of those video cameras capture the look and feel of cinema (without special 35 mm lens adapters). Video cameras are full of compromises, such as high zoom ratios with fixed lenses that do not come close to the quality of the glass found in Zeiss or Canon L series prime lenses, for example.

Vincent Laforet, whose photographs have appeared in National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Time, Life, and Newsweek, among others, remembers purchasing a Panasonic DVX100 (the miniDV 24P camera), but he quickly became “totally disinterested” in it, he tells me in an interview. “I was not impressed with lens, depth of field, and the look and feel of it” and he returned it in a week. Jeremy Ian Thomas, a colorist and editor at Hdi RAWworks in Hollywood, discusses how he felt as a former student at the Los Angeles Film School, where he was constantly confronted with the limitations of video: “I’d be shooting on these crappy DV cameras. You’re looking at the image and even with HD cameras it doesn’t look like a movie to me, and I immediately found out that that had to do with color. And it had to do with creating looks. And creating a vibe for the movie by doing certain things to the image” (interview with author).

Whether or not someone prefers to shoot HD video on a standard video camera or on a DSLR, what can’t be argued is how photographer Vincent Laforet redefined the argument overnight. Although Nikon released the first DSLR that shot HD video (the D90 with 1280×720p resolution), it was Canon’s 5D Mark II that captured the hearts of filmmakers. It not only utilized full HD 1920×1080P video, but did so with a full frame sensor (36×24 mm)—essentially equivalent in size to a 65 mm VistaVision cinema camera. The Canon 5D Mark II was announced on 17 September 2008.

Laforet, one of Canon’s “Explorers of Light” educators and a former Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for The New York Times (2000–2006), had an appointment with David Sparer, Canon’s senior manager of Pro-Products Technical Marketing. It was a Friday. The team just unpacked the prototype Canon 5D Mark II. Laforet took a peek, but they wouldn’t let him touch the camera until he signed a nondisclosure agreement. Indeed, when he found out it was the world’s first DSLR camera to shoot full-size HD video, he begged Sparer to let him borrow one for the weekend. But the cameras were to be shipped out to other photographers for testing on Monday, so the answer was no. Laforet made a pitch.

“This camera is basically going to sit for two days doing nothing,” Laforet remembers saying. “Just let me borrow it for a few hours and I’ll give it right back, so I can try shooting a sample movie.” They eventually agreed, and told Laforet that Canon would not sponsor the movie. “You are just borrowing the camera entirely independently from Canon, and doing your own little thing. If the movie turns out good, we’ll use it—if not, we won’t,” Laforet remembers them saying.³

He came up with a scenario and shot Reverie over a weekend (see Figure I.1).

FIGURE I.1 Still from Vincent Laforet’s Reverie, the runaway Internet hit that changed Laforet’s life overnight.

(© 2009 Vincent Laforet. Used with permission.)

When Laforet first saw the results of the 5D Mark II on-screen, he knew this was different from any type of video he had previously examined. “I was literally stunned a number of times,” he mused. “I could not believe my eyes. It’s one of the best still cameras out in the world. But between the size of the sensor and the lens choice and the way it captures light it’s absolutely stunning.”

After Laforet put Reverie online (Canon liked it), it received over a million views in a week, and Laforet’s life changed overnight. The day after the upload, he received three different film project offers within a day.

Ultimately, the difference between ENG video cameras and DSLR video cameras seems to revolve around the fact that DSLRs did not come out of the ENG video camera world: they came from the stills camera world, from where cinema originally evolved—an important distinction for Shane Hurlbut, ASC.

SHANE HURLBUT, ASC, EMBRACES THE CANON 5D MARK II

Hurlbut, who most recently DP’ed Terminator Salvation (2009), was originally trained on ENG cameras—a number of years ago as a student in mass communication at Emerson College in Boston. One eventful summer made him change his “religion.” Over a summer break, one of his friends returned from USC film school and asked him to help shoot a movie in their hometown in upstate New York. He reminisces, “So I thought, ‘All right I’ll help Gabe out and learn.’ It was all nights, so I started working on that project and fell in love with film. I just started looking at it and it was so different than TV and I thought ‘my God this is it.’ So I went back that next semester and I changed everything I had from TV and mass communication to film and then I did a four-year film degree in one year.”⁴

Video just does not look like film. HD (at least at the prosumer level) may have been a game changer for news, sports, and event videographers—but not for many filmmakers.

The American Society of Cinematographers—that elite group who will give membership only by invitation—sponsored an event to show off the Canon 5D Mark II at Sammy’s Camera in Los Angeles in February 2009. Hurlbut, among other ASC members, attended. “I went to Sammy’s, and everyone was playing with it,” but many weren’t convinced at first, because of the stills camera form factor, and weren’t sure on how to best harness its potential as a cinematic tool.

But Hurlbut saw the potential right away. “They had Vincent Laforet’s film, Reverie, playing up there on a monitor. And I looked at that spot, and I thought, ‘Whoa, that came from this camera?’ And then I put the 5D in my hand and a light bulb went off. I knew that this was going to change everything. I was all in” (speech at Hdi RAWworks, 1 May 2010). He bought the Canon 5D Mark II that evening. “I realized that this is a game changer. I thought it was revolutionary. Then my mind just started thinking completely out of the box, ‘What if we could do this, this, this, this, and this,’ and it began to inspire me even more as a filmmaker.” He worked his way through the various menu functions and taught himself how to use the camera. When McG, the director of Terminator Salvation, called Hurlbut and asked him to direct and shoot a series of webisodes to promote the movie—all based around a first-person perspective of a helmet cam—Hurlbut was all over it. It would allow him to take advantage of the Canon 5D Mark II. “The cameraman was the actor,” Hurlbut says. “It was so exciting.” Bandito Brothers Productions produced the webisodes for Warner Brothers. Bandito Brothers directors were very impressed with the look of the Terminator webisodes, so they asked Hurlbut to DP their feature about the elite Navy SEALs where Hurlbut got to experiment more with the 5D—75% percent of the feature was shot with the Canons. (Speech at HdiRAWworks, 1 May 2010.)

“Where did the idea of motion pictures come from?” Hurlbut asks. “It came from a brilliant individual, Louis Lumière. When he looked through his pin-hole camera, he asked himself the question, ‘I wondered what it would look like if this image moved?’ SHABANG!! Motion pictures were born. Why were the keys to the castle given to the ENG manufacturers to design our HD platform? Their specialty is capturing the news and sports. When I look at their images they don’t look cinematic. I feel that the HD platform has now come from the right source, still photography.” For example, Hurlbut explains, “I like to shoot a shallow depth of field, so the audience is drawn to what’s in focus.”

Up to this point, the HD video camera chip technology just doesn’t quite do it for Hurlbut because the video looks overly sharp and has way too much depth of field. “New make-up is being designed, diffusion is being added, new LUTs (lookup tables) are being engineered all to try and make HD look good,” Hurlbut says. “The Canon does all of this automatically without all the re-invention. You need to think much more out of the box, stop looking at all the numbers and drink the DSLR Kool-Aid, along with its limited color space and digital compression. This is what makes it look cinematic and organic, I call it digital film.”

Because of this, Hurlbut embraces the DSLR over the high-end HD video cameras. “If I am shooting anything else, then I am shooting film,” Hurlbut states. He often gets some strange looks when pulling out his 5D, especially when he hands it to the Technocrane technicians. “When I grab my 5D Moviemaker package, people who never worked with the still photography platform before view it like [a] UFO has just landed,” he laughs.

But despite its alien look in the film world, Hurlbut tries to keep shooting simple. “What I like to do is try to keep it as close to the process of exposing film as possible.” In the short produced for Canon, The Last 3 Minutes (see Figures I.2 and I.3), he notes how he used “my lighting monitor which becomes my viewfinder. It is intimate and my portal to view the light and composition.” Not a big black tent with tons of wires running out of it, with waveform monitors, computers, and large HD monitors inside, nor did he utilize a digital image technician (DIT) seen on the set of Battlestar Galactica, for example. By embracing the simplicity of the Canon technology, he was able to keep the production simple, small, and intimate with the director and the actors, not a big circus. The camera becomes the DIT as well as the video playback technician. “Small footprint, big vision,” he smiles.

FIGURE I.2 Shane Hurlbut, ASC, looks at his field monitor as he adjusts the focus ring on the Canon 5D Mark II for The Last 3 Minutes. “I light to the monitor,” Hurlbut says. Note the red tape on the monitor setting the 1:85 aspect ratio; the 5D Mark II does not output HD when shooting in live mode, but standard definition.

(Photo by Kurt Lancaster)

FIGURE I.3 The shot from The Last 3 Minutes that Shane Hurlbut set up as seen in Figure I.2.

(© 2010 Hurlbut Visuals. Used with permission.)

As Shane Hurlbut says, the camera “is exciting to me. And I think out of all this it’s going to start a massive revolution.”

Neil Smith, one of the pioneers of all-digital postproduction for the RED camera was not so easily convinced as Hurlbut and Laforet about the potential DSLR cinema revolution.

NEIL SMITH’S TAKE ON THE DSLR CINEMA REVOLUTION

Neil Smith, a white-haired Englishman who retired from Microsoft, financed a grad school degree in neuroscience and became a documentary filmmaker. A few years ago, he started and today still runs an all-digital postproduction house, Hdi RAWworks (hdirawworks.com), specifically for digital file-based workflows down in The Lot in Hollywood.

He attended the Collisions conference about the merging of filmmaking and DSLR cameras near the end of August 2009 at the Los Angeles Film School. Not only did Smith observe Shane Hurlbut, ASC, and Vincent Laforet speak, but Smith’s Hdi RAWworks company put together their material that was to be projected at the conference. He looked at the work on a 60-foot screen and remembered thinking, “This is serious; this is cinematic-quality images.”⁵

Rodney Charters, ASC, also convinced Smith to consider the potential of DSLRs as a cinema camera. As the DP on the TV series 24, Charters purchased a Canon 5D Mark II and used it primarily for effects plate shots in the series. Neil Smith met him when he was shooting a CBS pilot, Washington Field, on a RED camera. He used Smith’s posthouse for the postproduction work. Charters needed to get shots of the White House, Smith explains. “You try to film out in the streets of Washington, DC, anywhere near the White House with a RED camera and see what happens when an SUV with dark windows pulls up and six beefy chaps get out and beat the crap out of you,” Smith laughs. Charters, Smith continues, took the stealth approach. “He and his AC got his 5D Mark II, went outside, and took some background shots of the White House. He pretended to be a museum tourist. He got a shot where a cop car goes right in front of him, and nobody is stopping him,” Smith adds.

Smith wondered how the HD video capabilities of the Canon 5D Mark II would compare to the 4K resolution of a RED camera. Would it be cinematic or look as though it painfully stood out with a video aesthetic? Back in a screening room down at The Lot in Hollywood, they projected Charter’s White House footage on a $100,000 2K DLP projector. “We put it on the 20-foot screen downstairs,” Smith remarks, “and I looked at it and I said, ‘Ooh, that doesn’t look as bad as I expected to look.’”

“We are a RED house,” Smith continues, “we know image quality; we graded the first 4K images off of the first RED. We understand all about color space and resolution.” So even to consider using a hybrid DSLR that line-skips its images because the CMOS sensor processor is too slow to handle it was more than a leap of faith. It was, for the digital purist, like asking the ugly duckling to dance after turning down the prom queen (see Appendix 1, “Image Resolution”). But in the right hands, the ugly duckling can shine. Smith asked Charters to do the ultimate test. Shoot a series of demo shots at The Lot with the RED One, Canon 5D Mark II, and the Canon 7D and intermix the footage and see whether anyone could tell the difference.

They presented the work at the HD Expo in New York in the fall of 2009 in front of 200 filmmakers, Smith explains. “We asked everybody, ‘If you can guess absolutely correctly which is RED, 5D, and 7D, we will buy you the best meal you ever had,’” Smith challenged. “We have not had to buy a meal.” Despite the numbers and resolution charts, the 5D and 7D hold up against the RED—at least in the 2K world. However, 4K resolution is an entirely different story. For now, though, Smith is pushing the HDSLR cinema revolution, and he feels that Canon will beat out the other dedicated video cameras due to Moore’s Law—faster, better, cheaper—the HDSLR cameras can only get better, plus Canon has the sales distribution and mass market on its side.

In the end, Smith feels that the DSLR model for shooting movies “is a new form of filmmaking. This is cinéma vérité reborn.” He adds: “There is something about the form factor about these cameras which allows you to work with actors in a totally different way.”

Greg Yaitanes, a director of the TV series House MD, agrees with Smith. When they used the Canon 5D Mark II to shoot the last episode of House in spring 2010, he said in an interview with Philip Bloom, “This was beyond a cinematic look. It gave a new level of being able to pull the actors out of the background and pull them … right to your face, and give an intimacy that I haven’t seen in digital or film.”⁶

In addition to its size, Smith says the Canon sensor has a certain cinematic look to it. “To me, these HD digital SLRs have a 35 mm film aesthetic—there is something about the sensor and the color science,” Smith muses. “You know, Canon had been making good 35 mm [still] film cameras for years; they’ve been making good 35 mm digital cameras for years. There is something in the sensor design, something in the spirit of the machine, the soul of the machine that is very organic. There is something that Canon engineers do with these sensors and their color science that produces a very film-like aesthetic.”

Smith feels that due to “the form factor, the price, the image quality, and the new techniques of filmmaking” that it will “revolutionize anything with a micro budget. Anything under a million dollars where they used to consider a large HD camera they will now consider two or three HDSLRs.” Due to Moore’s law, Smith explains, “faster, better, cheaper” HDSLRs will just get better; he predicts that it will begin shooting RAW HD video in another year or two. Because Canon has the R&D and the marketing, he feels it will remain king of the HDSLR cinema world.⁷

LUCASFILM TAKES ON DSLRS–WITH THE HELP OF PHILIP BLOOM

Lucasfilm apparently agrees with Smith. Independent filmmaker Philip Bloom, who, like Smith, dismissed the value of the Canon 5D Mark II, bought one and tossed it aside because he couldn’t control some of the features manually. As a professional DP, he wanted that control. But late in the spring of 2009, he saw the potential. He started shooting some projects with it. He wrote about his experiences and put samples of his work on his blog (philipbloom.net). People noticed. Within several months, he became one of the key HDSLR experts, being invited to give workshops and asked by Canon and Panasonic to test out cameras for them. Rick McCallum, the producer of Star Wars (episodes I–III) noticed as well and invited him out to Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California, in October 2009. Mike Blanchard, the head of postproduction at Lucasfilm, called him up. They wanted to know how far the cameras could be pushed cinematically—can a DSLR be used as a cinema camera?

Bloom arrived with his equipment and shot around the countryside of Skywalker Ranch (see Figure I.4). He converted the files to Apple ProRes overnight and cut together a rough edit by morning. The big guys wanted to see it projected on a 40-foot screen. That was the true test. Bloom knew the work looked good on his computer screen. And his stuff looked good on the Web—but on a cinema screen? That was the true test.

FIGURE I.4 Still from Bloom’s Skywalker Ranch, a test video he shot for Lucasfilm to see how it would look blown up on a 40-foot screen. “My heart was racing,” Bloom says. “I watched as the edit played and they loved it.”

(© 2009 Philip Bloom. Used with permission.)

For George Lucas and his team, Bloom says, “If it looks great on the big screen then that is the most important thing. Not codecs, limitations, bit rates, et cetera. All those are very important, but the most important thing by far for them is how it actually looks and it passed with flying colors. That is what they really care about.”⁸

Bloom blogged about his experience at Skywalker Ranch:

Bloom passed the test and Lucasfilm used Canon 5Ds on selected scenes in the upcoming feature Red Tails, a story about an African American fighter squadron in World War II.

Mike Blanchard, Lucasfilm’s head of postproduction, wasn’t sure if the footage would hold up on-screen. “Certainly when we just look at the footage and put it on a big screen it holds up way better than it has a right to,” he says. A lot of people get caught up in the numbers game, comparing one type of camera to another, he continues, such as the argument that “film is 4K, blah, blah, blah. You know, it’s really not, because nobody ever sees a projected negative.⁹ So by the time you do a release print and [put it] through its paces, it’s no way near [what] a lot of people claim that it really is. So the great part about working at Lucasfilm, for people like Rick [McCallum] and George [Lucas]—working for them—is that you just show them things and that’s where it ends. We don’t do little charts about how it doesn’t have that or it doesn’t do that. We make it work. And that’s just a beautiful way to do work, because it opens up everything.” (Interview with Jared Abrams, 15 April 2010; http://www.cinema5d.com/news/?p=3216).

HOLLYWOOD EMBRACES DSLR

When the finale of House MD (2010) was shot, director Greg Yaitanes and his team went with the Canon 5D Mark II. They previously shot on film. He noted that there is a stark difference between those who are shooting stories and those who are shooting test charts: “… [S]omebody could sit there and say to me, ‘Well, you know, I looked at the specs and this doesn’t line up and this and that.’” But Yaitanes said the proof comes from working “out there in the field.” We “told a story and people have had an emotional reaction to that story, and, frankly, again, that trumps everything”—and they’re continuing to use the 5D in the 2010–11 season.¹⁰

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT

This book is designed for people who want to open up the possibilities of using DSLRs as a cinema camera—whether you’re shooting a wedding, a student thesis film, a documentary, video journalism, an independent film for a festival, or a feature. It’s designed to help the DSLR shooter create cinema-quality HD video with the fewest possible people and equipment—to maintain a small footprint of the one-person shooter, if needed, but with the ability to maintain a big vision, as Shane Hurlbut noted earlier.

Ultimately, HDSLR shooters can learn how to make their work look better by reading this book, but hooking that cinematic look to a good story is more than key. It’s essential. It’s what will impact an audience.

Philip Bloom, one of the gurus of DSLR cinema, best sums up the purpose of this book, as he explained to me the DSLR vision over breakfast at Venice Beach’s Sidewalk Café:

This book is about taking that passion, that desire to shoot HD video with a DSLR camera, as if you were shooting film—and not as if you’re shooting on an ENG or prosumer video camera. This camera doesn’t function like one of those. Instead, you must think like a cinematographer, rather than a videographer.

The simplicity of pointing and shooting a DSLR camera as if you were shooting a video camera with everything automatically set is not the way to go.¹¹ Just as a cinema camera requires a solid understanding of lenses, focus, composition, depth of field, exposure, lighting, ISO (film exposure speed), color balance, and separate recording of audio, the DSLR shooter needs to approach projects in a similar way.

WHAT’S COVERED IN THE BOOK

This book assumes you already know how to shoot and edit. At the same time, the importance of basic cinematography will not be assumed, and even if you already have this knowledge, the review may be beneficial because the examples draw from a DSLR perspective. In either case, the first part of the book covers what I call the cinematographer’s toolkit, the tools needed by DSLR shooters to attain a cinematic look, the “film look”—or at least an HDSLR cinema aesthetic that sets your work apart from normal video.

Chapters 1 through 5 include either a checklist or a set of steps, so you can plan each element as you begin to master it, or use each checklist as a helpful reminder. All the chapters include working examples from some of the best DSLR shooters in the field to illustrate the technical and artistic expression of cinematography. It’s not an exhaustive overview of DSLR shooters, however. Only a few were selected for this book—based on availability and the author’s sensibilities. There are many, many others that just could not be included. Chapter 6 covers postproduction workflow, while Chapter 7 provides an overview and exercises on storytelling so you can quickly think about the number one reason to get a DSLR in the first place: to tell good stories.

The goal isn’t to master the entire art and craft of cinematography in these chapters, but to expose you to some of the basic principles so you can begin shooting DSLR projects cinematically. Ultimately, the film look is actually different from the cinematic look of HDSLRs, which I refer to as the HDSLR cinema aesthetic; however, I do refer to the film look throughout the book as a shorthand, a simple way to explore that cinematic look that’s far different from conventional video.

Part I, “DSLR Shooter’s Toolkit: A Cinematographer’s Guide to Crafting Astounding Images and Telling Better Stories,” includes the following chapters:

Part II, “Master DSLR Shooters at Work: Case Studies,” presents five international case studies of master DSLR shooters at work. It includes examples of short fiction and short documentary projects.

Part III, “Getting the Gear,” comprises the last two chapters of the book and breaks down what kind of equipment you can get on a variety of budgets.

This is one of the most exciting times to be a filmmaker. Potential filmmakers and students got excited with miniDV and the later prosumer HD, but these didn’t really break through to the cinema world, other than with a few exceptions. When it comes to the HDSLR cinema revolution, there’s been nothing like it in the history of cinema. The closest we got was the breakthrough by Richard Leacock and Robert Drew, who developed a portable 16 mm syncsound film camera that changed how documentaries were made (see, for example, Primary, 1960).

What kinds of projects and what styles of filmmaking will develop from HDSLR cinema? You, as a DSLR shooter, will pave the way for a new kind of cinema, a cinema that could never have been previously attained on such a small equipment budget.

Show us what you can do.