How Graveyard Carz is Shot on a Shoestring - No Wimpy Cameras!

Shot with the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and its little brother, the 7D, Graveyard Carz is a reality show about performing automotive restoration work on Chrysler muscle cars. Springfield, Oregon, production company The Division, which posts episodes of the program to Koldcast.tv while shopping it around for possible cable deals, calls it “part car show, part investigation, and part comedy.” (A blurb at Koldcast promises, “the only thing more messed up than the cars is the cast.”)

Left to right: Daren Kirkpatrick, Mark Worman, Josh Rose

It’s not a big operation. The Division comprises three executive producers: visual designer Casey Faris, lead editor Aaron Smith, and CEO Mark Worman. Worman is also on-camera talent – the show spotlights his dedication to restoring classic cars with all-original materials. “We’re really the underdog,” Faris tells StudioDaily. “We only have three guys, and everybody pretty much does everything. I help shoot, and I edit and mix, color-correct, and do the 3D and the graphics. Aaron and Mark do most of that stuff, too. Mark, obviously, is in the show, but he does a lot of the producing and business end [of the operation] and I’m more on the technical end.”

The show has been in gestation for a while. A full-length pilot (each episode runs more than 40 minutes long) was finished two years ago, but didn’t generate any industry interest. “It’s hard to get people to sit down for an hour to watch a show, especially if they’ve never heard of it,” Faris says. When The Division made a shorter sizzle reel, though, it generated a bit of heat, and Faris and company started to make industry contacts. The company has juggled four different reality show concepts, but the three decided Graveyard Carz was the one to throw their weight behind. They made the decision to go ahead and shoot a six-episode series, then shop it for telecast through Australia-based World Wide Entertainment.

Production has definitely evolved. For one thing, the tactics for recoding sound have been a little unsteady. For the first episode, the team used a set of wireless Sennheiser mics transmitting to a Presonus FireStudio box connected to an iMac. That was less than ideal. Faris remembers one shoot where the team couldn’t drive its Dodge Magnum close enough to the car that was being featured in a scene. They set the iMac up for audio recording, powering it with a power inverter connected to the car’s battery, and transmitted wireless audio from 50 feet away. Unfortunately, the car’s hood was popped up between the production and the iMac, contributing to a large number of RF hits on the recordings. “It was kind of a nightmare,” Faris admits.

Later, the team tried to jury-rig an audio system using an old Canon VIXIA HD consumer camera, which predated The Division’s use of DSLRs. “The VIXIAs have a nice image, although if you try to color-correct them they fall apart, and the sound isn’t terrible,” Faris explains. “They sound a lot better than the 7D.” A headphone-jack splitter was employed to record one mic on the left channel and one on the right channel of the VIXIA’s stereo track. “We had this little VIXIA with these ghetto wires all over it, and that’s how we recorded most of the audio for episode 3.”

Starting with episode 4, a two-channel sound recorder is used, writing audio files to Compact Flash cards. A plain-vanilla clapboard at the start of each shot helps editors maintain sync, a system that works well enough for the kind of short takes that are featured in the program. One issue that came up? When troubleshooting an issue with drifting sync in one day’s footage, Faris realized he had made a mistake by using the 7D’s still-picture function during the video shoot. Snapping stills created enough of a glitch in the video stream to throw audio sync off by a couple of seconds.

Worman examines a masking job on the 1970 Roadrunner.

But the images coming out of the HDSLRs are solid. Faris has an inexpensive Canon 50mm f/1.8 EF lens (the “nifty 50” of Canon lore) on the front of the 7D which, combined with the crop factor of that camera’s sensor (because the camera doesn’t use a full-sized sensor, you’ll get tighter framing than you might expect from a lens of any given focal length), makes it especially suited for close-ups. And, because the camera does 720p/60, it’s the go-to unit for slow motion. “Even though it’s a thousand dollars less, I think it’s a better camera for video [than the 5D],” Faris says. The 5D generally has a Pentax lens mounted on it and although Faris says that lens captures an image that leans more toward the yellow, it’s easily matched with the other lenses during color-correction.

“The quality of the images is not on par with a RED or a hugely expensive camera,” Faris notes. “But for the price? They are absolutely wonderful. As far as I’ve heard from professionals, all of our footage looks great compared to shows on Discovery and TLC. If someone new is watching the show, a lot of the time they ask, ‘How do you make it look so pro?’ That’s mostly in the editing, but you have to have a good camera. You can’t do it on a little wimpy camera.”

Check out Graveyard Carz by visiting the show’s page at koldcast.tv.