Trophy Wife
brief pause, we ended up lighting the scene with a couple of assistant’s flashlights through pieces of diffusion that our resourceful Key Grip, Kevin Ball came up with. So it’s nighttime and we’re at 3000 ISO, wide open and the footage came out amazing. Now we regularly shoot the F55 at 3000 ISO, and it’s the first camera where I can actually plan on using available light, not just to bump up they background, but at times, for the main source.
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Now we regularly shoot the F55 at 3000 ISO, and it’s the first camera where I can actually plan on using available lights...
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One scene in a high school janitor’s closet, all the lights go out on our actor couple. The writer and director wanted a completely black scene and have the actor follow the dialogue by shining his practical cell phone at his wife and himself. My fingernails got shorter that night, but I was totally amazed how great it looked, but more importantly, how funny it played. We experimented with one scene shooting at 5000 ISO, since it was just for playback on a TV in another scene. When we finished setting up, I went to the DIT station to remind the camera assistants to put the cameras at 5000 because I’m looking at a great picture and Heather LeRoy, our A camera first AC, graciously replies that the cameras are already at 5000. The picture was so clean, no noise in the blacks, though a little too bright… we had to stop down the lens because lighting to 5000 ISO is a challenge. Also, no more re-lighting when the director says let’s go to high speed. We just bump up the ISO without even a worry of noise because the black levels never rise up into a milky gray and don’t become dirty or noisy at all.