EYE IN THE SKY SPECIAL
AERIAL FILMING GEARS UP FOR 2020 P42
December 2019
£4.99
MIGHTY TITAN
Rotolight’s smartest LED light breaks the mould
MULTI-CAM ROCK
New Kevin Godley video uses 12 cameras
JOIN THE DOTS
Consolidating the recording-to-cloud workflow
NORTHERN EXPOSURE THE IMAGERY BEHIND HIS DARK MATERIALS
ALSO DO YOU NEED 5G? | SCHOOL’S OUT | THE AERONAUTS INSIDE HOLLYLAND TX | MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN | CAMERA LISTINGS
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W E LC O M E
BRIGHT PUBLISHING LTD, BRIGHT HOUSE, 82 HIGH STREET, SAWSTON, CAMBRIDGESHIRE CB22 3HJ UK EDITORIAL Editor Julian Mitchell julianmitchell@bright-publishing.com Staff writer Chelsea Fearnley Contributors Adam Duckworth, Ash Connaughton, Phil Rhodes Chief sub editor Beth Fletcher Senior sub editor Siobhan Godwood Sub editor Felicity Evans Junior sub editor Elisha Young ADVERTISING Sales director Matt Snow 01223 499453 mattsnow@bright-publishing.com Sales manager Krishan Parmar 01223 499462 krishanparmar@bright-publishing.com Key accounts Nicki Mills 01223 499457 nickimills@bright-publishing.com DESIGN Design director Andy Jennings Designer Bruce Richardson Ad production Man-Wai Wong PUBLISHING Managing directors Andy Brogden & Matt Pluck DIGITAL Head of Digital Content Daisy Dickinson Instagram @definitionmags Twitter @definitionmags Facebook @definitionmagazine
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WELCOME
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f the electronic OEMs listen to some of this industry’s technologists then the arrival of 5G might make high-resolution mobile workflow far easier. Can upload speeds ever be as fast as downloads? If you persuade those OEMs to allow it in their 5G chipsets then possibly. In this issue for the first time we have taken a close look at how 5G can impact the production world – with a possible bandwidth of 1GB/s on your mobile device, we think that it could fundamentally do that. Professional livestreaming at the moment depends hugely on the internet performance of venues; for instance, if you’re streaming a band to fans elsewhere, you have to rely on the bandwidth the venue can provide for you. Streaming President Obama’s farewell speech cost the White House and the production company $40,000: and that was just in internet fees. 5G will be an enabling technology for sure, but will also be exposed to the vagaries of network traffic, as is 4G – but there are other ways to guarantee your service. Using solutions like private LTE and CBRS allows you to become your own carrier and you can then do what you want with your purchased bandwidth. Could we all become 8K broadcasters in the future?
MEDIA PARTNERS & SUPPORTERS OF
JULIAN MITCHELL EDITOR
Definition is published monthly by Bright Publishing Ltd, Bright House, 82 High Street, Sawston, Cambridge CB22 3HJ. No part of this magazine can be used without prior written permission of Bright Publishing Ltd. Definition is a registered trademark of Bright Publishing Ltd. The advertisements published in Definition that have been written, designed or produced by employees of Bright Publishing Ltd remain the copyright of Bright Publishing Ltd and may not be reproduced without the written consent of the publisher. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. Prices quoted in sterling, euros and US dollars are street prices, without tax, where available or converted using the exchange rate on the day the magazine went to press.
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CONTENTS
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S E T- U P
06 TITLE SEQUENCE
The beautiful Motherless Brooklyn includes an Oscar-worthy turn by Ed Norton.
09 INTERVIEW – MARC DANDO
High-end recording company Codex has been bought by view-and-review company Pix – it’s a match made in the cloud.
DR A M A
12 HIS DARK MATERIALS
We couldn’t unpick the cinematography from the VFX, so we’ve covered both.
24 WAITING FOR SMITH
Darling of the eighties music video, Kevin Godley, wanted a one-take multi-cam shoot.
30 THE AERONAUTS
This winsome tale of weather-mad Victorians took some grading.
32 SCHOOL’S OUT FOREVER
A large format indie movie with a condensed schedule was a huge production challenge.
FE ATU RE S
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42 FRESH AIR
The latest gear and techniques from the aerial filming world.
51 THE FIFTH ELEMENT
5G won’t be around until the end of next year, what will it mean for pro video?
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G E A R TE S TS
62 ROTOLIGHT TITAN X2
Rotolight’s latest LED design has a surprising new feature: electronically adjustable diffusion.
65 HOLLYLAND MARS 400S
A new camera TX/RX unit for the rest of us comes from China.
66 CAMERA LISTINGS
Our unique camera listings now offer kit essentials and recommended accessories.
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I N T E R V I E W | S E T- U P
JOINING THE DOTS ACQUISITION N E WS
Production futures are pushing workflow companies together to prepare the ground for what is to come J U L I A N M I TC H E L L / P I C T U R E S X 2 X
B
ack in the day, when digital cinematography was a nascent technology, there was a land grab by electronic image manufacturers, who wanted to establish the status quo and the pecking order. Initially, there were a few digital cameras – some were extensions of university projects and others arrived through the passion of individuals. However, right at the start, there was a camera made by Thomson called the Viper and it had a party trick: it was able to record a fully uncompressed Raw signal straight off the sensor with a mode called Filmstream. This was very new back then. This was enhanced by the Viper’s ability to record Raw image data with all camera correction settings switched off,
allowing post to apply corrections to the Raw data the way you want it to and not the way the camera would do this. Not all digital cameras available in the market did this – they still applied small amounts of correction to the image, giving you less control over the image correction and grading process once in post. The problem was that recording such a large amount of data required new storage technology. There were solutions: a Germanmade recorder, the Director’s Friend, was the size of a shopping trolley and its fans sounded like a tractor when they started up – inevitably, it wasn’t what the market wanted. New companies sprang up with more promise, like STwo and Codex, with platforms that became hubs for all the
different flavours of footage, for online and offline distribution. In fact, it was Codex that eventually carved that niche for itself at the high end, with a system that matured in the right direction for all concerned, building in security and extremely fast transfer drives to deal with the gargantuan amounts of data needed for cameras like the Arri Alexa
We are already quite a global business and have engineering setups across the world
ABOVE X2X chief design offer, Marc Dando (left), and X2X CEO, Eric Dachs (right)
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D R A M A | H I S DA R K M AT E R I A L S
FROM DUST
TILL DAWN DOP Justin Brown stays true to his source materials when recreating Philip Pullman’s series of novels for the screen. Plus, we talk to VFX supervisor Russell Dodgson about how he brought the daemons to life WORDS CHELSE A FE ARNLE Y / PICTURES BBC
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H I S DA R K M AT E R I A L S | D R A M A
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D R A M A | S C H O O L’ S O U T F O R E V E R
SCHOOL’S
OUT
With an insanely short schedule, DOP Thomas Hole shot School’s Out Forever for Rebellion Studios using some cutting-edge large format gear WORDS PHIL RHODES / PICTURES REBELLION STUDIOS
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S C H O O L’ S O U T F O R E V E R | D R A M A
IMAGES Sorting some bounced fill on the set of School’s Out Forever
S
hooting a feature film in just a few weeks is difficult. And doing that on a tight budget is even more difficult, but between July and August 2019, that was the task facing director of photography Thomas Hole on Rebellion’s School’s Out Forever. The company is perhaps best known for games such as Sniper Elite and a series under the Alien vs Predator banner, but recently took a bold step into screen production with the purchase of a £100m production facility in Oxfordshire. Plans include a slate of content based on the company’s other properties, including a television production titled Mega City One based on the Judge Dredd comic series and Rogue Trooper, based on the game of the same name, to be directed by Duncan Jones. School’s Out Forever is based on Scott K Andrews’ post-apocalyptic novel of the same name, published in 2012 under Rebellion’s Abaddon Books imprint. Hole became involved, he says, via director Oliver Milburn. “We worked together years ago when he was a VFX supervisor – he’d had this feature come up as a pitch and said, ‘Tom, I feel like you’re the right guy’. That was last summer. Rebellion actually funded a teaser, which is very rare for a company to do. They funded a scene, we shot the scene in January, then the producer Emma Biggins
said it was all funded and was going to go ahead,” he explains.
THE PREP PROCESS “I went into prep on it in July,” Hole continues. “We started shooting at the end of July through to the end of August, so it was a super tight schedule. We shot the whole feature in a month.” Most of School’s Out Forever was shot at Eltham College in Mottingham, and at a school in Ipswich. “We shot our interiors in London and our exteriors in Ipswich. It was about 70% interiors and 30% exteriors, and all the exteriors were pretty much night exteriors.” With scenes, including a climactic finale, cutting rapidly back and forth between two locations covered weeks apart, Hole compliments the script supervisor Rebecca King, saying: “I’d never seen continuity so busy.” While the weather was kind, the resources available to Hole and his crew were stretched by the demands of the narrative. “We had really big scenes with no generator. We had no generator for the whole shoot, which was tough. Going into a feature without really big heads was very tough, because we were still lighting huge things. I used a lot eight-by-eight Litemats, which are super low power. That was our moon,” he explains.
We were the first narrative in the UK to use the Panavision Panaspeed lenses D E C E M B E R 20 1 9 | D E F I N I T I O N
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F E AT U R E | A E R I A L S P E C I A L
FRESH
THE UK AERIAL FILMING INDUSTRY IS BOOMING, WITH PLENTY OF INNOVATION AND EVEN SOME NEW PLAYERS. WE HEAR THE LATEST NEWS W O R D S J U L I A N M I TC H E L L
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ilm Production is benefiting from being part of the fastest-growing sector of the UK economy. There is a huge amount of content being produced and being bolstered by the new streaming channels – can we say boom time yet? Aerial cinematography is one of the growth areas within production and you can understand why. Take the Downton Abbey movie, for instance. How do you take a perfectly good-looking television series and turn it in to a movie? What’s the one thing that shouts ‘movie aesthetic’? You could argue it is a sweeping aerial shot: even as an establishing shot the best aerials are nothing if not cinematic. Emma Boswell, director of operations at The Helicopters Girls, describes their part in shooting Downton Abbey: “The castle really lent itself to low-level aerials, so a lot of the film’s scenic shots were taken around it. The closing shot of the film is a drone shot of the castle, which starts low and pulls out slowly to manoeuvre around the landscape at sunset. It was important to DOP Ben Smithard that the light was perfect, so we were working to make sure we were able to shoot at the right moment.” The drones were also used to track the post boy arriving and cars driving up to the castle. The scene with the steam train was particularly exciting for Ben Smithard, who
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told us that he rarely gets to use helicopters to shoot aerials. The aircraft was a Freefly Alta 8 with Mōvi Pro stabilised gimbal, carrying an Alexa Mini LF with Zeiss Ultra Primes. Boswell notes: “We had a separate iris hand unit for Ben to control as he likes to work that way; he’s got such a clear vision about what he wants and he’s just a great person to work with.”
NEW PLAYERS Another sure sign that the good times are here is when a new company enters the market from another territory. For the UK aerial business this is quite rare as relationships are built up over many years,
aerial cinematography is an expensive business and you need to know the company you use will get the shot in the best and safest way. New to the UK aerial business is a company called XM2 Aerial with engineering and some production based in Melbourne, Australia and with connections with Pursuit Aviation in the USA: XM2 are essentially the same company as Pursuit Aviation in the US. Aidan Kelly from XM2 explains where the company has come from. “We were established in the US and Australia with offices in both countries. We managed to get on the Jordan component for Star Wars late last year and on that shoot
TOP The Jet Cam, capturing 450mph stabilised imagery by Pursuit Aviation RIGHT Pursuit’s Arri film camera rig with 1000ft mag ABOVE XM2’s Tango drone on the salt flats
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A E R I A L S P E C I A L | F E AT U R E
We were able to do a 1000-feet IMAX reload on the ground with motors running in about two minutes
we met a lot of the UK crew and made connections there. We had been waiting for a project like that to be able to establish ourselves in the UK. “Off the back of that we established the UK company in early January and we really kicked off things in early June here in Pinewood. We have just finished some work on Bond 25, No Time to Die, and Fast & Furious 9. We want to build the business
up here in the UK similarly to how we have done in the US. We can offer anything from ground base up to 40,000 feet including drones, helicopters and even jets. We are also able to offer small camera rigging with remote stabilised heads on the ground.” XM2 developed a drone for the Star Wars shoot to carry the Alexa 65 camera which was used for five weeks straight in Jordan. “We were also carrying an Arri 435
film camera around on that same drone,” says Aidan. “We actually developed those drones ourselves; we have two main drones in our arsenal, one’s called the Sierra and the other is called the Tango. The Sierra is the one we developed to originally carry the Alexa 65 and for the same production we developed the three-camera Alexa Mini array with a toe-out format. Just recently on Fast & Furious 9 for the Thailand and Georgia shoot we changed it to toe-in. “We also have XM2 Labs, our engineering workshop, all set up in Melbourne to work up our new designs for things like Sierra and Tango. That capacity came from the need to fly an Alexa XT M on Pirates of the Caribbean back in 2013 and we have just carried on with that facility.” A big plus for XM2 was working with drone regulations which have been active in Australia for a while now. “We had the regulations over ten years ago which allowed us to develop our craft quite early on,” says
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N E X T- G E N C A R R I E R S | F E AT U R E
THE FIRST 5G DEVICES SHOULD APPEAR IN LATE 2020, BUT FOR THE PRODUCTION WORLD TO BENEFIT, UPLOADS SHOULD BE AS FAST AS DOWNLOADS
F
or years, technologists have been predicting the role of the cloud and high bandwidth in production’s dayto-day running – and many of the prophecies are coming true. But production was always hard to pin down for telecoms carrier companies, as it likes to move out of controlled areas, like studios, into locations to make content. How do you then apply the smart distribution of data from the middle of a field? Recently, we have talked to a couple of companies that are designing futures for the media and entertainment world that
W O R D S J U L I A N M I TC H E L L
are based on next-gen carrier technology – namely private LTE (Long-Term Evolution), CBRS (Citizen Broadband Radio Service) and, ultimately, 5G. The companies in question are Frame. io and the new X2X, which is the group name for Pix and Codex. Michael Cioni from Frame.io uses the buzz phrase ‘camera to cloud’ with gusto (Definition November 2019), while Marc Dando from X2X is reticent to use buzz phrases to legitimise such a complex next step. Codex manufactures high data recording solutions, while Pix maintains a highly
secure view-and-review online platform for highline content (see ‘Joining the Dots’ on page 9 of this for more).
BONDED CELLULAR Companies that produce bonded or blended cellular systems are always looking for new revenue streams and have identified the Media and Entertainment (M&E) space for growth. This makes total sense and Definition was close to a very practical demonstration of how sensible it is to use cellular bonding in production: when a race was proposed between a
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DEFINITION’S CAMERA LISTINGS
BASED ON:
ARRI ALEXA LF DRAMA His Dark Materials was shot on the Arri Alexa LF; a large format for a big production The decision to shoot in 4K with the Alexa LF was DOP Justin Brown’s, as he sensed the BBC was in a position where a 4K shoot would be needed for other broadcast platforms. “The Alexa LF had just been released, so we snapped up the opportunity to use it. We were the first TV project to use the Alexa LF but, because of how late His Dark Materials came out, we’re probably like the 5000th production to release something,” he laughs. “I’ve trusted the Alexa forever; the colour profile, the highlight range and the gain floor is the most cinematic of all the cameras.” Brown chose Zeiss Supremes and Master Primes, which covered the Super 35 frame he was shooting. The Master Primes, however, were switched out for something wider by the DOP in episode 4, who chose to work in full-frame mode. Consistency is in the capable hands of colourist JeanClément Soret, who Brown says, is “confident the series is consistent with the filmic look” established through a LUT developed by Technicolor in the first two episodes.
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SPECIFICATION SENSOR – FORMAT AND SIZE
Full-frame CMOS, 36.70x25.54mm – 4448x3096, ø 44.71mm
FRAME RATES
Arriraw: 0.75-150fps ProRes: 0.75-100fps
LENS MOUNT
LPL, PL
RECORDING OPTIONS
4448x3096 Arriraw and ProRes 4.5K open gate and 2.39:1, 3840x2160 Arriraw and ProRes 16:9
EXPOSURE LATITUDE
14+ stops from EI 160-3200
DRAMA KITS
I N A S S O C I AT I O N W I T H
RECOMMENDED KIT The kit recommended to accompany the Arri Alexa Mini from the experts at CVP ARRI WCU-4
The Arri WCU-4 is a three-axis wireless hand unit with integrated lens data display. It works with Alexa Plus and Studio cameras, and UMC-4, SMC-1 and EMC-1 motor controllers. It includes a hand unit, hand strap, lanyard and one plain focus ring.
ARRI CFORCE MINI RF
Based on the widely accepted Cforce mini lens motor, this includes the latest iteration of Arri’s whitecoded radio module with improved interference resistance and six additional radio channels.
ARRI TRANSVIDEO STARLITE WVS
The Transvideo Starlite WVS from Arri is a combination monitor/ recorder with a built-in wireless video receiver. Compatible with Arri-WVS transmitters, this five-inch touchscreen OLED monitor provides recording with H.264 compression.
ESSENTIAL KIT
Discover key components from the CVP camera kit, including mechanical accessories and a fluid head
CINEMATOGRAPHY ELECTRONICS CINETAPE 2 KIT The Cinetape 2 is an ultrasonic rangefinder, now with wireless communication and smaller, lighter and faster than the original Cinetape.
ZEISS SUPREME PRIME LENSES With a versatile look and gentle sharpness, the Zeiss Supreme Prime T1.5 lenses are designed for cinematic large format sensor coverage, making them the ideal choice for current and future camera systems.
WOODEN CAMERA/ANTON BAUER 26V GOLD MOUNT PLUS This shark fin plate attaches two 26V batteries, such as the Anton Bauer Dionic 26V battery, directly to the back of the Arri Alexa LF, 65, SXT and every Alexa down to the Classic EV.
MILLER CINX 7 FLUID HEAD
A lightweight and durable pan-andtilt fluid head, the Cinx 7 has a max payload of 25kg and is packed with features designed to meet every cinematographer’s needs.
SEE THE LATEST FROM ARRI AT THE CVP | ARRI CREATIVE SPACE Creative Space is an exciting collaboration between CVP and Arri, taking up a stylish residence in Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia. The showroom presents the latest Arri technology, including the Alexa LF and Signature Primes. To arrange a visit to the Newman Street showroom in London, call 020 8380 7400 or visit cvp.com
SEE MORE ON THIS MONTH’S KIT:
cvp.com/definitionkit
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COOL FOR CATS Theatre’s cinema moment
BOOM BOOST UK production has never been so prosperous, but is it coping?
THE VISUALISERS They span image disciplines and are now indispensable
ON SALE 3 JANUARY 2020
BSC EXPO PREVIEW The launches and seminars of 2020’s first major trade show
ALSO AVAILABLE ON THE APP STORE
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