behind the scenes
Excerpt from Issue 7
Icon Films unleashes
in 4K 60p
Icon Films, which is celebrating 25 years in the film production business, recently broke new technical ground in the making of its long-running series River Monsters. Two episodes of season seven of that series were shot using a 4K RAW 60p workflow, bringing stunning clarity to the program’s imagery. In light of what was learned from the endeavor, Icon has adapted its standard HD production workflow on River Monsters to a UHD workflow.
Capturing Monsters on the F55 Interviews by Peter Crithary Written by David Heuring All Photos: ŠIcon Films 1
Mid shot of Jeremy front on with big Stingray catch. Episode: Silent Assassin Photographer: Daniel Huertas 2
Capturing Monsters on the F55
Who We Are
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A continually growing, ambitious and evolving indie producer, Icon Films has produced over 350 hours of high-end factual content for the UK and International market. Icon Films is the producer of River Monsters, a show that has been Animals Planet’s highest rating series over the last eight years, and the highest rating series in the Channel’s history. Presented by angling legend and explorer Jeremy Wade. It is distributed by ITV Studios Global Entertainment. Season 7 launched April 2015 and was the most watched season premiere ever on the channel. Icon Films brings together international funders working with BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, National Geographic Channels, Discovery Networks, PBS and Arte. Our work is internationally distributed by ITV Studios Global Entertainment, BBC
Worldwide, Zodiak Rights, Fremantle Media International and TCB Media Rights. We have a track record of ratings, originality and excellence, across the breadth of factual content including history, travel, science and wildlife says Managing Director Laura Marshall. This combination of hybrid vigour and robustness coupled with maturity gives us the ability to deliver logistically challenging productions to audiences with our distinct brand of top quality storytelling. Recent productions include Return of the Giant Killers, (1 x 60 BBC), Ben Franklin’s Bones (1 x 60 WNET), Spawn of Jaws 2 The Birth (1 x 60 Discovery Channel), Survive The Tribe (6 x 60 National Geographic Channels), Multi Million Pound Mega Yachts (1 x 60 Channel 4), Britain’s Medieval Vampires (1 x 60 More 4, PBS), Africa’s Fishing Leopards (1 x 60 BBC), Betty White’s Smartest Animals (2 x 30 mins GAC), Big Foot Files (3 x 60 Channel 4).
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Capturing Monsters on the F55
Harry Marshall My wife, Laura, and I originally set up Icon Films in the basement of our house in Bristol. She had been working as an agent in a literary agency, and I’d been working at Channel 4 Television. In the beginning we had 4 people: a researcher who has gone on to become a celebrated composer and a PA, who is currently the Head of BBC 1. So I obviously made good choices. Back then, our focus was natural history and in particular Indian and Asian natural history. We were making films on the Himalayas, films on elephants and tigers. My title is Creative Director, and my job has been to come up with ideas – and that hasn’t changed much. My wife is the managing director who looks at the fiscal and the contractual, and that has really freed me up to be the creative. In the old days, I was coming up with ideas, writing everything up, and meeting the broadcaster. Now, rather than making two/three hours a year, we’re making 30 or 40 hours a year, and we’re somewhere north of 100 people. Icon Films is unusual for a British production company in that about 60% of our production is funded from North America. That’s because when we began, we were making fairly high-end, expensive natural history films, and the only way we could fund them was through co-production. So we developed relations with American coproducers like National Geographic, PBS, and Discovery. When we broadened our production into more popular television, we were able to take those contacts with us.
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River Monsters obviously has quite a lot of natural history in its DNA, so many of the same skills are required, including the ability to function in challenging environments. And we continued to work with those original partners whose trust we had gained when we had a much more natural history focus. It’s been such a dynamic industry. Responding to the advances in technology, to the emergence of different markets, and to the changing tastes of audiences, while retaining our core ethos, has, I think, been our greatest achievement. When you look at the programs that we made 25 years ago and the programs we make now, I think you can see the same signature. We have certainly been interested in challenging environments. We’ve always worked with the idea that there has to be authenticity, and there’s no fudging a tiger or a river monster. You either have filmed it or you haven’t filmed it.
MS of Duncan Fairs filming Jeremy holding a Giant Trevally Episode: South Pacific Terrors Photographer: Ross Hamilton
“Now, rather than making two/three hours a year, we’re making 30 or 40 hours a year, and we’re somewhere north of 100 people.”
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“Jeremy Wade, for example, who presents River Monsters, is someone who’s been fishing for the last 40 years.” You’ve either caught it or you haven’t caught it. You can’t cheat and be authentic (the buzz word of the moment) – this is, and has always been, what we’ve tried to retain. Over 25 years, we’ve asked, “Is this an Icon project? Are we proud to put are name on it?” And I think that that’s been very important to how we’ve evolved. When it comes to presenters, I think audiences have a sixth sense, and they can smell fakes and phonies. People want someone who really knows what they’re doing. It’s a matter of depth and authenticity. We work with experts. Jeremy Wade, for example, who presents River Monsters, is someone who’s been fishing for the last 40 years. If he wasn’t making River Monsters, what would he be doing? He’d be fishing. We want to hear from people whose wisdom we’re going to take with us. We will always need credible presenters, because in an age where you have 7
Arapaima Episode: Body Snatcher Photographer: Brendan McGinty
Jurassic Park or Avatar, what is true? But if you have a presenter you trust, who has this avuncular integrity, then at least you can trust what you’re seeing. You need this honest broker, in an age of infinite media possiblity, who’s going to be your gold standard. Television is 24/7 now. Years ago, you had three channels in the U.K., and at the end of the evening they played “God Save the Queen.” What we’ve got now is a faster and faster churn, so the life of programs becomes shorter and shorter. River Monsters is an absolutely aged theory. We’re now into our eighth year and we’re still developing new films. Not many programs make it to series nine. Successful programs get repeated and seen again and again, and they are replicated. Brands wear themselves out much more quickly. It’s pretty relentless. River Monsters came about because I was working with an editor who had met a fisherman with an incredible story about man-eating catfish in the Himalayas. It was that combination – man-eating catfish and the Himalayas. The Himalayas was a place that I’ve actually spent quite a bit of time making films, but I thought, “Surely not – so far from the sea, fish that eat people? That’s just sharks,
that do that – isn’t it?” And I thought there was something truly terrifying about a river monster, because it’s not what you’re expecting. It’s all about the shock of the new. We managed to get it commissioned as a one-off, and Jeremy [Wade, who presents River Monsters] went off to northern India. The first time he came back, I looked at the rushes, and the fish that he had caught was not, in my opinion, a fish that could have eaten someone. It wasn’t big enough. So I said, “Jeremy, we’re not interested in ‘what if?’ That’s the usual kind of bullshit. We’re interested in ‘this is.’ We need to say ‘This is a fish capable of eating a human being.’” And that’s what we did, but it took 3 trips. For River Monsters, we had a test called the “f*** me” test. If, at the moment the fish broke the surface of the water, the audience says, “f*** me!” then we knew it was good enough. This fish certainly passed that test. That has been the test, and only once has Jeremy returned from an expedition without being able to catch the fish that he set out to catch.
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Capturing Monsters on the F55
I’m blessed with a pretty wonderful production team. Andie Clare is our Director of Production, I call her the Rochdale Hornet, and she is very much on top of the new technologies. It’s not that I’m not, but that’s what she does, and I absolutely trust her. I began working with film. We shot on Kodak, and when it got to about 4:30 or 5 o’clock in the evening, it was too dark to film, even for graining % or 1000D, 500D/ pushed six stops. Now we’ve got infrared and thermal cameras. We shoot everything in at least 4K if not 6K. We have octocopters that deliver the most unbelievable aerials. We have underwater housings. So the technology has come an awfully long way, and we definitely embrace it. We are the first company delivering Natural History to Animal Planet and Discovery in 60p UHD. I’m loving UHD. Sometimes it’s a little unflattering to the presenters, who might look a little better when the focus isn’t quite as crisp and sharp. That’s something you have control of in the postproduction process. You can manipulate scene by scene. It doesn’t have to be flatly applied to every single scene in the show. But I am a great believer that you can never add. You come away with what you’ve got, and all you can do in the edit is take away.
Jeremy Wade Fishing Episode: Canadian Horror Photographer: Brendan McGinty 9
I saw some high dynamic range imagery of River Monsters at Jackson Hole film festival earlier this year, and I thought it was just extraordinary. Suddenly Jeremy’s lure was unbelievable, so vivid, so distinct coming through the water, which previously you couldn’t really see. The whole point about this lure is that it’s designed to stand out and be attractive, and yet you couldn’t actually see it very well. Suddenly, bang, you could, and that meant you could use it very purposefully. The whole show is about catching fish and attracting fish, and that’s what a lure does. Suddenly the technology is playing to the editorial. Fantastic. But in the end it’s still down to the camera team, so again we are blessed.
“I saw some high dynamic range imagery of River Monsters at Jackson Hole film festival earlier this year, and I thought it was just extraordinary. Suddenly Jeremy’s lure was unbelievable, so vivid...”
Jeremy placing Saw Fish back in water Episode: Chainsaw Predator Photographer: Poppy Chandler
CU of Jeremy Wade looking down at a red feathered fly Episode: Canadian Horror Photographer: Brendan McGinty 10
MS of crew in helicopter about to film aerials Episode: Canadian Horror Photographer: Brendan McGinty 11
Capturing Monsters on the F55
Cinematographer Brendan McGinty I began as a stills photographer. Both of my parents were stills photographers. So I grew up with still photography, and then moved into shooting on film 20-something years ago. I actually came through drama, and I still shoot a lot of drama and commercials, which is slightly unusual. In documentary, there’s lots of handheld, and I like to think I bring a lot of the aesthetics and working practices of drama shooting and commercial shooting into documentary. About five years ago, I worked on a series called Austin Stevens Adventures. I shot about a dozen of them over a couple years. It was an adventure documentary series, but one of the directors I worked with, a fellow called Chard, brought me onto River Monsters, in the very early days of the series. We had made five or six films together.
“I’ve lost count of how many River Monsters I’ve shot – probably between 15 and 20.”
I’ve lost count of how many River Monsters I’ve shot – probably between 15 and 20. They’ve taken me to some very exotic places. The first couple I did were in the Congo. They were very memorable, particularly since it wasn’t really an established genre of shooting. If there was an established look, I was unaware of it. So for me, it was an open canvas for how it could be shot. The Congo is an extreme environment. I’ve filmed in most countries in the world, and I can’t think of anywhere more difficult and challenging. We ended up going upriver for days with a tiny little crew, and getting ourselves into some quite dangerous situations fairly frequently. There was a real team spirit. It felt very true documentary in the sense of we didn’t know what would happen day to day. 12
memorable. I did a feature length one in Guyana, while I shot on a 35mm imaging camera. We tried to take a more cinema-style approach, because we were shooting feature length, and it was just a very epic journey. I was shooting high resolution at the time, 4K, and that’s quite a few years ago.
Jeremy holding Goliath Tigerfish Hydrocynus goliath Episode: Demon Fish Photographer: Daniel Huertas
It was completely unscripted, and the stories developed as exactly as they unfolded. We shot two films back to back, “Demon Fish” and “Congo Killer.” In the first film, Jeremy desperately tried to catch a fish. On the final day of the shoot, he caught this fish, which was extraordinary, and the drama of that is in the film. There’s no contrivance there. There was no forcing or heightening of the drama. That was my induction into River Monsters, and hopefully I established a certain look for them early on. This was quite a few years ago, and there wasn’t much around by way of super 35mm cameras, but I was using quite a lot of super 35mm imaging for all the dramatic construction stuff, but also a lot for weird abstract stuff of Jeremy, trying to get a sense of what he was going through on the journey. From there, I’ve gone on to do films with Jeremy in South America, Mongolia – Chernobyl is very 13
Shallow depth of field was involved, but more importantly, I wanted to bring more color depth to the documentary genre. I was tired of shooting on 8-bit-color cameras or even 10-bit-color cameras. The optics of traditional video-style lenses designed to focus through prisms were never giving me what I was used to seeing in the commercials world or the drama world. I had a lot of experience with super 35 mm lenses, and super 35 mm imaging, and larger, medium formats. I’m a complete cinephile. I live and breathe cinema. As good as video and broadcast and ENG-style lenses and cameras got – and they did get very good at one point – I was always frustrated by the look that they delivered. I shot some work I’m very proud of on those cameras and lenses, but because I’ve kept my feet in both worlds, I was always pushing for more potential. I’m still with River Monsters. I just shot one in Thailand a month ago. I love them. No matter where my career takes me, I would always want to come back and do River Monsters, because of Jeremy and also because of Icon, a great company. I’ve got good relationships with them and they’re good people. They’ve always encouraged the best in my work, and when I’ve tried stuff, they’ve always embraced it and supported it, which is not the case with a lot of other companies. I shot a 3D film for them as well, which was very hard to do, particularly since I shot it all handheld, which was at the time supposedly not possible. That was a big push again from me to do something different.
Capturing Monsters on the F55
Jeremy Wade sizes up a Dunklosteus skull Episode: Prehistoric Terrors Photographer: Jackie Forster
I’ve always had a very comfortable facility with handheld, and I don’t separate it out as neatly as a lot of people do. I’ve never subscribed to the idea that TV and documentary are about handheld, and drama is all on dollies and cranes. I use both for both worlds. But handheld is very much a signature of River Monsters. I’m not sure if I’ve put a camera on tripod for that show. I’m quite particular about handheld as well. When I watch TV, I don’t like a lot of the handheld that I see. It can be brilliant, but it isn’t always. It’s as different as the types of grip equipment you can get. I’m not necessarily saying that I like very smooth handheld. I like very aggressive handheld if the script or the story is suited to it. For example, in River Monsters I’ve had scenes of Jeremy very aggressively trying to pull a fish onboard. We’re in terrible currents and we’re spinning around. I quite like to employ very aggressive handheld to that, very quick reframes, being responsive to the energy of the subject with the energy of the camera work. If Jeremy’s flicky and erratic in his motions, I echo that with a flicky, erratic style in the camera work.
“...handheld is very much a signature of River Monsters. I’m not sure if I’ve put a camera on tripod for that show.”
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MS of Jeremy Wade casting a line Episode: Canadian Horror Photographer: Brendan McGinty
I did a film in Columbia where Jeremy was catching a ray. There were meant to be only small rays there, but Jeremy caught this absolutely enormous ray. It was so big it broke his fishing rod, and being there in the moment next to him was terrifically exciting. I’m shooting handheld. I can be very responsive to Jeremy falling over and nearly going in the water. He grabs the line with his hands. He starts hand-lining. The drama in something like that could never be scripted in a million years. Real life with someone like Jeremy is far more exciting. There’s always a large degree of unknown and a slight chaos to the shoots, which I love. The scripts are, at best, broad strokes. It’s like a piece of paper with the director’s dreams on it. You’re asking channels to hand over a lot of money for a proposition. I respect the business angle, but anyone 15
“I like to shoot Jeremy on a wide lens very close. For a lot of the action, I’m as close to him as I can get.”
Capturing Monsters on the F55
who has done any amount of fishing knows you can’t guarantee anything. But it gets back to the authenticity. When we went out to Chernobyl, in the script Jeremy was going to catch the fish in the first act. He couldn’t get the fish that he hoped to get, but he ended up with something far more interesting that came out of the accident and the adventure we went through, something better than anyone could have imagined. I almost always use cinema-style lenses, but for something like River Monsters, it’s cinema-style zooms. I’ve used everything that’s out there, but my personal favorites are the Angenieux. I don’t think anything can compete. Their DP range of lenses is extraordinary. I think they’ve very much built and designed their glass around the look and feel of cinema-style prime lenses, whereas some of the other
Shot of Crew and Helicopter Episode: Canadian Horror Photographer: Brendan McGinty
lens manufacturers, Canon and Fuji, have come from a different perspective. They haven’t been in that world as long as Angenieux. Particularly when it comes to flare or bokeh, I prefer the cinematic quality of Angenieux. I use the 1642 mm a lot, and every bit of that range is perfect. That said, for the last River Monsters I did I was using a mixture of Canon and Fuji glass. Canon and Fuji have really pushed the boat out recently, and they’ve shown tremendous versatility. I used the new Canon zoom, and that’s an incredibly versatile lens to have on a cinema-style camera. It gets you from a pretty wide frame to a pretty tight frame in one zoom. That’s never existed in the world of cinema before – or if it has, it’s been mounted to a crane, because it’s heavy. To have a handheld lens that does that is really an interesting proposition. I like to shoot Jeremy on a wide lens very close. For a lot of the action, I’m as close to him as I can get. For every reason, he looks great on that lens. I’m putting the audience right next to Jeremy. He is pure authenticity and I’m adding to that by putting the audience in the front row. The point of view that you get from a longer lens further away would be different for the audience, more voyeuristic. When I’m right next to Jeremy, almost dangerously close, I think an audience probably unconsciously feels that. I think they feel some of the vicarious thrill of being in an exotic place with Jeremy doing something very extreme on a dangerous river. 16
Capturing Monsters on the F55
Obviously, night scenes on River Monsters I light. I go with very simple, very lightweight lighting packages. On the Congo films, I brought the first LED lighting they’d ever even seen, never mind used. I was a very early adopter of LEDs, and I was using Litepanels. I worked with a gaffer in America on a commercial and he was an agent for Litepanels. So I had a very early introduction to LED, which at the time, no one was using. The 1x1 Litepanels are small, lightweight and work on batteries. I would only use one light, maybe two, always natural sources, essentially firelight or a bit of moonlight if it was night. Working with available light is actually a hard thing to do. Particularly when you’re shooting places like jungles, the light can be very hard to deal with. You get very high contrast ranges, and the early cameras really struggled with that level of light and shade. You’d have hard shafts of light compared to pitch black bits under trees, and the cameras just weren’t capable with dealing with some of that. I’d always be looking to play a scene in a certain direction, maybe keeping the light behind them, for example. I have always used flare aggressively in my work – tons of it. I did one River Monsters on sharks in South Africa, and the whole thing is about flare. If I was shooting straight into the sun, the sensor couldn’t handle it, and it would just burn out. It was kind of interesting, but frustrating at the same time, because I was used to camera systems and lenses that could withstand that. For me, it’s not only an innovation but a relief to shoot with Super 35 mm lenses and optics, with cameras with extended latitude and extended color depth which can handle the sun burning past the edge of someone without completely destroying the image. I can hold the flare in the lens as well as holding the 17
Jeremy Wade fishing at huge rapids between Brazzaville and Kinshasa Episode: Demon Fish Photographer: James Bickersteth
silhouetted subject of the flare. That, for me, has been a big innovation. For some of the episodes in season seven, we shot with the Sony F55 in RAW at 4K. Sony has really pushed the boat out with their new offering of cameras. I used some of the early incarnations, and they didn’t quite get there, but the F65 in particular is an astonishing camera, and the F55 I think is a very powerful tool as well. Picture-wise, I thought the camera delivered an extraordinary amount of latitude. I’d say it was up there with the ARRI ALEXA and the RED Epic Dragon. The F55 and the F65 are in that world in terms of latitude, certainly. I think something like the ALEXA is getting left behind in terms of resolution. I’m sure ARRI are going to do something about that, but the latitude that those cameras offered was always a real deal breaker. As a cinematographer, latitude is very, very important, particularly when you’re shooting in environments when you have little control over light, over what’s going to unfold. It’s not like you can go again. It’s not like you can necessarily shoot from the direction that you want to shoot in order to take best advantage of the lighting. Dynamic range or latitude in the lighting is a very big deal in documentaries, and I think the F55 has got exemplary latitude. It depends on whose test you read as to which of those three cameras has the edge in latitude, but they’re all great. They’re all up there in a cinematic league.
“It’s great to be shooting on cameras that can see all the beautiful articulations of blues and greens in the water, whereas on other camera systems, it’s just a blanket of green or a blanket of blue.”
16-bit color is something I’ve been used to using for a few years. It makes a huge difference in terms of the look that one can generate, particularly in post, because often while you’re shooting you can’t really see. You won’t be able to monitor or see 16-bit color, but it’s great to know that it’s there. Water, for example, is so different at different depths with different colors and different times of day with different lighting. It’s great to be shooting on cameras that can see all the beautiful articulations of blues and greens in the water, whereas on other camera systems, it’s just a blanket of green or a blanket of blue.
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Capturing Monsters on the F55
WS of Jeremy Wade standing on a jetty Episode: Canadian Horror Photographer: Brendan McGinty
I shot up in Canada and the Great Lakes for an episode of River Monsters, and it’s so beautiful up there. It’s absolutely exquisite, and framing these jaw-dropping landscapes, it’s great knowing that the camera is going to see every gradation in the sky, every nuance in the light in the leaves. I’ve had the inverse of that. I’ve had cameras that I knew were failing me. I was seeing the best of the landscape, and the camera was never going to quite bring that home. I’d be out in Ethiopia at sunset in the desert
looking at the most exquisite landscape. It’d be heartbreaking for me to get back and see the images. They had the same graphic quality. It was the frame that I presented, but it was never tonally and even texturally what I’d seen with my eyes. I’ve been fortunate to be in the most beautiful parts of the world, but I could never see or even explain to people what I’d seen in Mongolia in the Gobi Desert or wherever I’d been. Now, we’ve actually approximated something that the human eye is seeing, which is beautiful. The F55 has extraordinary lowlight ability. The native ISO is 1250. I was quite keen to deliver as much as I could, and to compromise as little as possible, so I generally stayed at 1250. You can obviously push it a bit more and end up with something more like 3200 with very little noise, and that is pretty extraordinary. A few years ago, that would have been unthinkable – science fiction. Combined with fast lenses, you can really shoot in almost no light at all. For the Great Lakes episode, Jeremy was catching a Muskie, and we were shooting way beyond dusk. There was the tiniest
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bit of ambient light in the sky, and I was still able to shoot reflections on water, and silhouettes of Jeremy against the sky. I had some fast T-1.4 primes. We could get these very atmospheric moments through the lowlight capability. I shot the first of the films that were 4K RAW at 60p. The images were S-Log2 and S-Gamut3.Cine. The frame rate was actually 59.94p, which compromised the light level. I’m used to shooting in Europe at 25p, and when you step up to, let’s call it 60p, you’re halving your light level. So, as much as I was amazed by the camera’s amazing low light potential, due to the delivery requirements of the channel, I was halving my available light by going to this format. I had to shoot 180-degree shutter, so I’m down at 120th of a second exposure time instead of a 50th of a second, using only half the sensitivity of the camera. I have subsequently used the camera for other projects in 25p, and it has incredible low light performance. I can see why people like 60p. They love it for sport in particular. People love the fact that you can follow high speed action with 60p without any flicker. You’ve got more fluidity to the action, and I would say that there’s an increase in perceived resolution. You’re not actually increasing the resolution, but your perception of resolution is increased by seeing more frames per second.
“...it’s great knowing that the camera is going to see every gradation in the sky, every nuance in the light in the leaves.” 20
Capturing Monsters on the F55
Musky Episode: Canadian Horror Photographer: Brendan McGinty
I’m probably old fashioned in that I’m still more of a fan of 25 or 24. I grew up with cinema, and I still shoot some cinema, so I’m more comfortable in that world. Initially, 60p looks alien. But I came around to it. There’s a push at the moment for resolution. People are selling a lot of high-resolution televisions. I think people are going to want to see some of that resolution on their screen, You could, of course, put a camera on a tripod, and you’d have that same perception of resolution, because the minute I start shooting handheld at say 25p, the blurring that I’m inherently getting from the movement is going to decrease apparent resolution. The 60p is obviously reducing that and giving you more resolution, 21
because your shutter increments are that much tighter. So if you’re shooting a lot of handheld, 60p probably makes a lot of sense. If resolution is the thing you’re after, that’s the way to get it. The behind-the-lens NDs on the F55 were fine. There are obviously limits. You can only fit so many filters into a filter wheel, so some of the jumps are quite substantial between them. I wouldn’t have wanted to put more NDs in the front, because I was trying to deliver as clean an image as I could. I always use polarizers when I’m shooting outdoors, particularly on something like River Monsters. I’m shooting against the sky a lot.
“The amount of sky I can pull back into the picture with a polarizer is unrivaled, but more importantly, I’m shooting to the water all the time...”
everyone else was, because for me it’s more about a beautiful picture. I love slow motion, but I think it’s overplayed quite often. There was a delay in record, which was troubling and tricky to deal with. In a documentary environment, that’s tough. When Jeremy is fishing, I have to be ready for anything. We were generating an enormous amount of data. That was probably the biggest challenge, but a challenge well-met. With a 512GB card, we were getting 26 minutes. So, we were shooting an average of five terabytes a day, and in a threeweek shoot we shot over 100 terabytes. Even in the dramas and commercial world that is a lot of data. Our solution worked very well. We had two DITs who were basically on shift work, and there was a constant flow of cards back to them. While one was sleeping, the other was ingesting. They were laying off initially to drives just to get the cards down so that they could get them back out to me, because I was getting through a lot of cards.
The amount of sky I can pull back into the picture with a polarizer is unrivaled, but more importantly, I’m shooting to the water all the time, and I’m trying to see through the surface of the water or I’m trying to hide the surface of the water with reflection. Reflections on the water surface are key to a program like River Monsters. To shoot it without a polarizer would be unthinkable. We used either Tiffen Ultra Pol or Schneider True-Pol. There were a few downsides of shooting RAW and 4K on the camera at 59.94p. We were unable to shoot slow motion at that frame rate. That was missed a little bit. I wasn’t as worried about that as
On a documentary you shoot a lot. You’re shooting real life. You don’t know what will be a great moment and what won’t. So you shoot a lot more than you do in drama or commercials. The camera’s not quite always rolling, but there’s a version of that. If Jeremy’s fishing, I’m rolling. I’m a firm believer in process, so there’s a significant amount of footage where nothing happens, but that can be fascinating, too, and visually captivating. I think they are all integral parts of what makes River Monsters great. Given the format, that results in a tremendous amount of data. It all went off without a hiccup, but it was pretty labor-intensive. 22
Capturing Monsters on the F55
The viewfinder I found difficult. I knew focus was at an absolute premium, because I was shooting with very high resolution, and the difference between being slightly soft and being sharp is enormous when you increase the resolution. What you perceive to be sharp at 720 lines is hopelessly soft at 4000 lines. I did more double checking than I would have usually. I wanted the piece to be about resolution. I didn’t want to come back with anything shot wide open on the lenses at 2.8. I was more 5, 6, 8, even 11. It was a very self-conscious aesthetic. We didn’t want artificial, heightening, bristling sort of edge enhancement. We wanted a feast of resolution for your eyes. You want to see Jeremy out in the Great Lakes, but you want to see the texture of the boat and the little bubbles in the water next to him. We wanted to get a real sense of all of that. So, by day certainly, I was shooting slightly deeper stops than usual, and I think it worked very well. If you watch the film, there is a real joy in the detail and texture in it. I was using all of the focus tools. There is an edge tool and a peaking tool, and I was using those in the viewfinder. They were helpful, but I did crossreference from the monitor. I was a bit more cautious with focus than I’ve been on the 1080 show. Also, I was running a histogram in the viewfinder. It’s a tool that I’ve become used to using as a clipping indication and I found that very useful. I think I also utilized very high-level zebras in the viewfinder. I still find zebras a useful tool, but I don’t use them as some people do, for the middle range tonality. I just use zebras as alarm bells. Essentially if they’re in the very high, 95% level where if I’m seeing them, I know that I’m potentially losing that bit of the picture. There was a real joy for me in shooting skies. We had some very, very dramatic skies while we were out there, and often I was holding Jeremy in the bottom third of the frame, and in my upper two-thirds of the frame I knew from the tests that I had done that I could trust the camera to be holding all the detail. Similarly, when I was shooting against the sun on the water, I’d have very, very hard pings of light and trails of light moving across the water. Even though in my monitoring conditions on set, all I was seeing was the semblance of these highlights, it was good to know 23
“I was using all of the focus tools. There is an edge tool and a peaking tool, and I was using those in the viewfinder.”
Jeremy looking at native rock art at Rowan Lake Episode: Canadian Horror Photographer: Bess Manley
End of the day at Rowan Lake Episode: Canadian Horror Photographer: Josh Forwood
that the camera was doing its work and capturing those with the safety net of RAW recording. My advice to a colleague embarking on a similar project would be to not go into your data requirements blindly. Familiarize yourself with the focus tool capabilities of the camera, and use them all. They’re there for a reason. Have a close look at your lenses and make sure that you’re absolutely confident that the lenses are appropriately collimated, and that you are able to take focus judgments off the barrel as well as the viewfinder, because the viewfinder can’t show you 4K. If you’re shooting wide open at T 2.8, 2.9, and you think something looks sharp, particularly on a wide shot in a viewfinder, it may well not be on a big screen at that resolution. So your optics need to entirely be up to the game. You need to do some good old-fashioned lens tests before going out so that when you see six-foot on the barrel, you know that lens is sharp at six feet. You can’t just go to a facilities house, pick up a couple of zooms, and go off to the jungle to shoot at T 2.8, hoping that it will all be sharp with 4K. I would occasionally glance down at the barrel of the lens to know I’m at 12 foot. This is discipline that came from film, but I think it’s now re-applicable.
Episode: Canadian Horror Photographer: Lorne Kramer
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Capturing Monsters on the F55
Ross Hamilton I joined Icon Films in 2008. My role is a Production Technical Coordinator. When I’m on location, I operate as assistant camera, sometimes second camera and even sometimes principle camera. I also plan the workflow and look after the media on location. Before a shoot, I discuss what equipment we should take with the DP. I’ll then go about sourcing it. As well as all that I also offline edit. On River Monsters, we were midway through shooting series 7 when Animal Planet asked if we could deliver in UHD. This would mean shooting at 4K RAW. Up until this point we had been shooting 1080, initially at 50i on seasons 1-6 and then 25p on season 7. Working with HD material on location had always been manageable and could be downloaded and spot checked by the camera assistant (often myself) in the evenings, without losing too much sleep. Shooting 4K RAW at 59.94 would produce five times the data we would normally, so we knew we had to dramatically re-think our media management plan. After several meetings and a lot of data transfer calculations we decided we would take two additional crew members who would be full time data wranglers. Between the two of them, someone would have to be working 24/7 throughout the shoot to ensure the media was safely offloaded in time for us to keep re-using the cards. 25
Side profile of Ross Hamilton looking through viewfinder Episode: Canadian Horror Photographer: Rob Wootton
“On River Monsters, we were midway through shooting series 7 when Animal Planet asked if we could deliver in UHD. This would mean shooting at 4K RAW.”
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We were three weeks away from shoot, it was all systems go as I (along with the DP) began researching, sourcing and testing the additional kit we would need to shoot to this spec. Going to our local hire company and asking them to show me their best PL mount zoom lenses was particularly enjoyable! Two dedicated data wranglers on location, meant that for once I was hands off in that regard. At the end of each shooting day I would deliver the shot cards to the Data HQ (a spare room at our crews accommodation. There could be up to ten AXSM™ cards and five SxS per day). The media cards would first be copied to a Raid 1 hard drive system (we used Cal-Digits). The media would then be copied to two LTO 6 tapes (this was not a quick process). Once a checksum had been carried out on the LTO tape the hard drive would be formated and re-used for more downloads. Backing up to hard drives before backing up to LTO basically gave us a buffer, as the copy time of an AXSM or SxS card to a hard drive was much shorter than to an LTO tape, and we could fit several cards onto one hard drive. By doing this we could crucially re-use the AXSM and SxS cards 27
each day for filming. In terms of kit for this we used four MacBook Pros/Sonnet SxS readers/Sonnet QIO readers/Sony USB3 AXSM readers. The transfer checks were done using Shotput Pro. Other software used was Content Browser/Raw Viewer/Adobe Premiere/Media Encoder. The great thing about doing linear RAW on the F55 is that we could simultaneously record our edit proxies in the camera on the SxS cards. This material was copied to a separate Raid 1 hard drive. This was frequently used by the director and DP for reviewing rushes. In the field, we don’t watch dailies as religiously as, say, the drama productions do. The Director will usually be looking at a monitor when we’re rolling and so will have a good idea of what we’ve got in the can. That being said, every couple of days the director will come in for an hour or two to have a review. As the raw material was so data heavy we could not review any of it on location. The proxies were the only accessible copy of the media. With this being
“The great thing about doing linear RAW on the F55 is that we could simultaneously record our edit proxies in the camera on the SxS cards.”
the case we wanted to ensure the Raw material was going to turn out the way we had hoped, so we did extensive testing in the UK shooting and then reviewing the Raw footage, making sure that the in-camera tools we were using were giving us the focus and exposure results. When we first got our hands on the F55 and set it to shoot 4K RAW at 59.94, we quickly learned that there was some functionality that we weren’t going to have. One was the preroll, the cache. You lose cache and not only that, there is a two second delay when you hit record. When we are filming the fishing scenes on River Monsters we like to utilize around 4-6 seconds of pre-roll, so when Jeremy has got a fish on, you can hit record and know you’ve got that dramatic moment of the fish attacking the lure. So it was quite a big deal for us to lose that, given the nature of the show. We had to find out a way to still get that moment. Over the course of the two films we made at this spec we tried numerous methods. One option was to have two cameras poised on the action which would double our chances of getting that ‘fish on’ moment. Another option was to have one camera constantly recording throughout the day, re-formating when the card was full (if nothing had happened). This didn’t really work as we would always capture odd moments that we would be loathed to delete.
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Capturing Monsters on the F55
Given that we had lost pre-roll we had expected our shooting ratio to go up, just to try and get those explosive moments, which we did. You’re always praying for a bit of luck too, being in the right place and the right time when your turning over. For the most part, when shooting these 4K RAW episodes, we would have two Sony F55’s. The main DP’s (Brendan McGinty in Canada and Duncan Fairs in Fiji) would usually be on the wider zoom (Canon 15.547mm) and I would be on a longer zoom (Fuji 85-300mm). We found these focal lengths combined would give us good coverage. One big consideration for us when trying to meet this new higher specification was how we get the shots we would normally get with GoPro’s or other action cams, as these would not meet the new spec. When Jeremy has a fish on the line we always like to utilize a Go Pro on a pole to get an underwater angle. These shots are always dynamic and energetic and were something we didn’t want to lose. The only way we could attempt to get the same content was to upgrade (quite considerably) and get a Gates with either an F55 or a Red Epic inside. That meant some of the time, I had to be in a wet suit on the side of the boat ready to jump in at any moment and start turning over. Ultimately we made it work but it was far less practical than using mini cams. There were instances where we strayed from the Sony F55 and called in the services of the Red Epic. This was for use in a Gates housing. I started off using the F55 in a Gates, but felt restricted by the ‘monitor out’ being HDMI, and having to use a third party monitor. This 29
“...shooting these 4K RAW episodes, we would have two Sony F55’s. The main DP’s ... would usually be on the wider zoom (Canon 15.5- 47mm) and I would be on a longer zoom (Fuji 85300mm). ”
MS of Duncan Fairs in helicopter with Jeremy Wade and Clare Dornan Episode: South Pacific Terrors Photographer: Ross Hamilton
Greenland Shark Episode: Legend of Loch Ness Photographer: Jody Bourton
meant I lost some of the tools you would get when looking at a feed from the viewfinder output, mainly ‘focus peaking’. Although the third party monitor has peaking I didn’t find it that accurate. The Red Epic (in the Gates housing) uses the Red five inch monitor and therefore allowed me to use all the tools I would use if the camera was configured for topside. I felt much more confident judging exposure/focus with that.
Side profile of Duncan Fairs filming from a boat Episode: South Pacific Terrors Photographer: Ross Hamilton 30
Capturing Monsters on the F55
At Icon, we’ve taken the F55 everywhere you can imagine – the jungle, sub-zero, on the ocean – it’s always performed brilliantly. Initially the technical prospect of filming a River Monsters at 4K RAW 59.94 was a daunting one. The show has such a distinct look to it and I think we were all desperate to maintain that look despite the fact we were having to change a lot of the tools we would normally use i.e GoPros/preroll/slo-mo. Once we found inventive ways to capture the same material with new tools, what we have ended up with is a show that feels like a River Monsters, but actually ‘given the uplift in spec’ has improved picture quality. When I heard what a great response the series premiere received I was delighted, as this was the first film we had shot 4K RAW. I think it is testament to the endeavor and ingenuity showed in producing it. Jeremy with Black Piranha – CU of teeth Episode: Piranha Photographer: Barny Revill
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“At Icon, we’ve taken the F55 everywhere you can imagine – the jungle, sub-zero, on the ocean – and it’s always performed brilliantly.”
Filming by the river in Ethiopia Episode: Rift Valley Killers Photographer: Daniel Huertas 32
Capturing Monsters on the F55
Tom Cooper I’m the post-production supervisor at Icon Films. My responsibilities include looking after our in house edit suites and working with the production teams on workflow design. We have a really diverse technical team at Icon and my department ensures the offline infrastructure they need to produce their best work. When we heard that we were going to be delivering River Monsters in UHD everyone was really excited and determined to bring all our experience together to pull it off. The development of the River Monsters UHD workflow involved the Icon production team, post house Films@59 as well as the technical team at Discovery. We had to review the acquisition process, including cameras and memory card formats, backing the data up on location, transcoding and prepping for the offline, the NLE we chose and finally delivering the project and media to our post house – Films@59 – for the online. The Discovery tech specs required delivery at 4K and at 60p. River Monsters was one of the first natural history productions delivering to this standard so it was a learning experience for everyone. On paper there were several iterations back and forth before it was completed. Our initial approach was to build on our previous experience with River Monsters as we already had an established HD workflow. We had to identify what would work and what we would have to adapt. There was a lot that would stay the same but with three major challenges – the resolution, the compression and the frame rate. We had been acquiring a percentage of our rushes at 4K for some time already, with a lot of underwater footage captured on the Red Epic, but here we had to shoot everything 4K and maintain that resolution right through to delivery. 33
“The development of the River Monsters UHD workflow involved the Icon production team, post house Films@59 as well as the technical team at Discovery.”
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Icon Films River Monsters Series 7 & 8 4K Workflow
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Capturing Monsters on the F55
F55 2160p/59.94 XAVC 4K 600Mbps
GoPro Hero 4 1080p/60 H264 Quicktime 35Mbps
Red Epic 2160p/59.94 R3D 4K/5K 1200Mbps
Canon 5D MKIII Timelapse
Shared Storage Native Camera Files
Transcode Adobe Prelude/Adobe Media Encoder
Shared Storage Edit Proxies 1080p/59.94 DNxHD 90
25p Archive (Old RM eps) Interpret to 23.98
LTO-6 Replicated LTFS
Offline Edit at Icon Films Adobe Premiere 1080p/59.94 Sequence Animal Planet 42' CTC + 6min snap-ins Offline Edit at Icon Films Versions cut from AP 42' Playout + Snap-ins Animal Planet 46' CTC Discovery Canada 45'50" CTC ITVG 48' Seamless End of Edit Premiere Project
Archive Assets
Split Track Quicktime
AAFs/OMFs
Picture and Audio EDLs
Films@59 Storage ISIS & Storage DNA
4K Conform and Pregrade Adobe Premiere
Grade Baselight Pro Res 4444 UHD
Online Adobe Premiere Pro Res 4444 UHD
Animal Planet UHD Master XAVC UHD 59.94p
Animal Planet HD Master DNxHD 120 1080i/29.97
Animal Planet Supersize HD Master 1080i/29.97
Disc Canada UHD Master XAVC UHD 59.94p
ITVG UHD Master UHD 59.94p
Disc Canada HD Master XDCAM 50 1080i/29.97
ITVG HD Master HDCAM-SR 1080i/29.97
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Jeremy and two locals, hold the Monster Goonch Episode: Killer Catfish Photographer: James Bickersteth
Discovery were very clear about us capturing the highest quality images from the outset and maintaining that at every stage of the process. Based on the tech specs the two episodes we delivered from series 7 were shot 4K RAW 16-bit at 2160p/59.94 on a pair of F55s. Shooting 4K at a standard frame rate like 25p or 29.97p already produces a lot of extra media but shooting in RAW at 60p we had to deal with around 24 times the amount of media we were used to. This turned out to be between 80TB for each three week shoot. This had implications across the workflow for storage, processing times, transfer speeds and network bandwidth. Even though the resolution and lack of compression contributed most to the file sizes it was actually the frame rate which impacted us most in postproduction. We transcoded to ProRes Proxy 1080p for the offline to ease the load on our offline setup 37
but the frame rate had to stay consistent for the conform. So we were still dealing with double the amount of media and the need for beefed up hardware even with a proxy workflow. The frame rate had implications in the online as well as a lot of the software and storage that Films@59 were using had been developed with 4K in mind but not high frame rates. What all of this meant is that we were delivering the highest possible quality of images we could by pushing the F55 to its limits. We knew that we needed to capture everything live because we would not be able to push in or reframe in post and risk degrading the image. We did look at other cameras such as the RED but to deliver the most crisp and clear images we wanted to go as low compression as possible. One of the other big challenges in the initial Discovery specifications was a zero percent
Capturing Monsters on the F55
“Discovery were very clear about us capturing the highest quality images from the outset and maintaining that at every stage of the process.”
allowance for non-UHD material. No HD, no 30fps, no compression and no reframing in post. It limited the number of 2nd unit and action cameras such as GoPros, which couldn’t deliver at the right spec, and also our access to our library of River Monsters archive. The move to 4K is about delivering something bigger and bolder visually, but we had to retain the feel of a River Monsters episode. Editorially River Monsters relies on its archive so there was a challenge for the editorial team to make sure it felt like a regular episode.
For series 7 we were also commissioned to create HD versions of the episodes for Animal Planet HD and ITV in the UK. For these we had shot some extra 1080p/29.97 material on location and also used 1080p River Monsters archive.
single version which would work for both a 4K and HD delivery. So the specs did become a little more forgiving, but we are really proud as a team that we delivered those initial episodes to the highest possible standards demanded by Discovery.
As we moved into series eight, Discovery handed a new set of specs to us with a tiered system of acquisition. All along delivery had been at XAVC™ 4K so I think they realised we could still deliver an amazing looking product but allow some leeway in how we captured it and where we could introduce some non-UHD elements that were important to the feel of the show.
With series 7 we shot everything on two F55s but because it’s a caught-in-action documentary series not having that action cam like a GoPro did make it a challenge in the edit to deliver the River Monsters house style. So for series 8 introducing non-UHD cameras we were faced with the challenge of making sure these did not look out of place next to the F55. At the time the GoPro Hero 4 could shoot 4K but only at 29.97p, if you wanted 59.94p you had to work at 1080, so we had to compromise one way or the other to get those action shots from the side of a boat or car. We shot a few tests and sent them to our post house to view the results with their workflow team on a 4K screen. In the end we went with frame rate over resolution, it simply looked better keeping everything at 59.94p.
Tier one delivery was fundamentally what we had done with series 7 and that option was still open to us. We decided to take up the second tier which meant we could shoot at a compressed resolution, such as XAVC 4K, and also gave us an allowance for 10 percent non-UHD material. Moving to tier 2 for series 8 meant we could film and edit a
“The move to 4K is about delivering something bigger and bolder visually, but we had to retain the feel of a River Monsters episode. �
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Capturing Monsters on the F55
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Capturing Monsters on the F55
On the DIT side of things we also changed the workflow from series 7 to series 8. For 7 we had a solid base in a hut next to a lake which meant we could lay out several laptops, hard drives and LTO machines and get everything done in the field. The AXSM cards were copied off to RAID drives for a quick turnaround then onto duplicate LTOs. For 8 we have moved back to hard drives in the field and then transfer to LTO’s when we get back in the office. We don’t always have the luxury of a stable environment for kit such as LTO decks which are susceptible to humidity and dirt and the LTO production was becoming a bottleneck on location. Now we produce a duplicate set of LTO-6 tapes back in the UK and deliver those to Films@59 who index them using Storage DNA. When they receive our picture lock sequence they perform a “select and restore” from LTO of just the clips used in the final cut. For the offline we transcoded everything to ProRes Proxy 1080p/59.94 and cut in Adobe Premiere. At picture lock we delivered the project to Films@59 who then conformed back to the 4K rushes from LTO and applied pre-grade effects, still in Premiere. Everything was transcoded 41
to ProRes 4444 UHD for the grade in Baselight, then back into Premiere for post-grade effects and versioning. As far as the direction UHD is going it is only one way – higher resolutions and higher frame rates. We are currently delivering to the standards laid out in DVB UHD-1 Phase 1 and the road map that has been laid out means we will be delivering our films at more ambitious specifications in the coming years, with the move to even higher resolutions such as 8K and higher frame rates such as 120fps. Along with Discovery we’ve already started exploring the possibilities of HDR and the results so far on some of our rushes are breathtaking. As a company we are always pushing ourselves to deliver our films to the highest specifications and the whole team is proud that River Monsters has been one of the leaders in the industry when it comes to UHD.
WS of Lorne Kramer backing up UHD footage in the field Episode: Canadian Horror Photographer: Josh Forwood
River Monsters is Animal Planet’s most popular series, so it’s no surprise that it was renewed for season eight before season seven even began airing in April of 2015. The success of the show is often attributed to the drama the filmmakers create and capture. Marshall says that while Icon Films will maintain its dedication to quality programming, they continue to evolve. “We began with that bluechip approach to natural history films,” he says. “Over time, we’ve moved to a much more formatted type of programming, which involves quite a lot of drama and dramatic recreations. And I think as storytellers, fully blown drama is definitely on our horizon, and we’re excited by the challenge.
Episode: Legends of Loch Ness Photographer: Jody Bourton
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