Gearing Up for the Jungle
"We didn’t go in trying to show every gadget we could," says David
Allen, DP and series producer on PBS miniseries Deep Jungle, part of
the Nature series. "It turned out to be a tour of cinematography
techniques." Camera crews headed deep into the jungle to capture
previously undocumented animal behavior.
Viewers will see researchers adapt the Thermascan, designed to monitor
heat stress in industrial machinery, to photography of nocturnal
creatures and use a 1000 fps industrial video camera to study the
Red-Capped Manakin’s mating ritual.
The standard camera package included an Aaton XTRprod and an Arri
16SR-2 or 16SR-3 High-Speed; Zeiss prime lenses and 10-100mm and
12-120mm zooms; wide-angle Canon and Zeiss zooms; and a long lens, such
as Allen’s 300-600mm Canon. Many had periscope systems ending in a
selection of wide-angle C-Mount lenses for a frog’s eye view. A Sony
DVW790 DigiBeta camera was often taken along for sync-sound and
low-light shooting.
Categories: Creativity, Project/Case study, Shooting
