"Indies should not discount lighting," warns Illya Friedman, a camera sales rep at Wexler Video. "You need people who are competent with lighting, which will create the look more than any other single element on your shoot. Having some sort of lighting package in order to set your scenes will make a huge difference."
As a step in the right direction, Friedman recommends Arri’s Softbank lighting kits, which feature a variety of basic lights aimed at ENG-style setups. "If you can capture a scripted project in close to an ENG style, you will probably save yourself some headaches," he says. "If you need to get in quickly and set up a scene but can’t afford a grip truck, the Arri Softbank kit is a marvelous sort of Swiss Army kit for the independent. It’s real instruments, real units, and decent stands. Competing consumer products are less expensive, but in lighting you get what you pay for."
Lighting It
For lighting actors directly, he says he’s been impressed with the LED LitePanels Mini. "It’s sort of a sun-gun profile," he says. "It rides on camera, but if you need a soft indirect source that doesn’t scream lighting, it’s a wonderful fill source. The kit comes with diffusion and gels and you can use it as a gentle fill. It creates almost no heat, so it can be great working with actors— the less hot lights you put on them, the better." (An infrared version of the Mini has just been released.)
For indies working on a shoestring, Friedman says an investment in a wireless mic package, like the UCR-211 kits from Lectrosonics, can help them play fast and loose. "Nothing gives you away faster than a boom," he says. "If you’ve got a guerrilla shoot, working without permits, wireless radio mics will let you go unobtrusively into an area without a boom operator. Good long-range UHF diversity wireless mics are probably the single biggest enabler for filmmakers looking to shoot clandestine."
Friedman notes that, however you decide to record audio, you should make sure you’re always recording an audio track to the camera, whether or not you think you’ll need it in post. "Some people will try to shoot video formats film style, without recording sound on the camera," he explains. "That is definitely a mistake. When you shoot progressive, you’re always using non-drop-frame time code. You can still have mixers and wireless mics, but you always want to send some kind of reference track to the camera so you don’t have to worry about possible sync problems later."
Jeff Cree, director of HD development at Band Pro Film & Digital, notes that indie filmmakers are becoming less defined by the type of equipment they use. " AFI students do their thesis projects on F900s now," he says. "We’re seeing that level of indie project coming in, as well as everything else down to HDV."
For HDV sets, Cree is recommending the new HDM-EV85 8-inch LCD monitor from ERG, which is designed to take the same batteries as an HDV camera. "You used to need separate battery systems for the monitors and for the cameras," he says. "So ERG just came out with an 8.4-inch HD monitor with analog component in and composite as an option, and it basically has the same battery plates on it you’d have for the 7.2 volt batteries on an HD type camera. It’s very cost-effective— under $3000— which at this display size in an HD monitor is unusual."
Lensing It
On high-end projects, Cree sees lenses as a major issue. And, when push comes to shove, indies are budgeting for lenses, especially if they hope their movie will find a home on the big screen. "We’ve had a number of independent features cut down on their monitoring capabilities to find a better set of lenses," he says. "They see the difference on the screen, especially when they do blow-ups. You’re multiplying your image 100 times when you go to the big screen, so having the highest performance with good geometry is very important. Initially, people working in video were used to using zoom lenses, and they provide some economy of movement and effort in a production environment, but we’re seeing more people go to prime sets."
Prime lenses mean better geometry, which makes effects work easier later, and more sensitivity, which draws better footage out of low-light situations. Plus, Cree notes, the infamous backfocus problem that bedeviled HD shoots has been solved with devices like Zeiss’s SharpMax and Century Optics’s HD Collimator, which are used to check and quickly adjust backfocus every time lenses are changed on set.
Cree says Zeiss DigiPrimes are a popular choice, especially with the new 3.9mm lens rounding out the line by offering a 100 degree angle of view with minimal distortion. "All of the new lenses are being designed to have the least amount of breathing and the highest performance as far as sensitivity and aperture opening," Cree explains. "You can maintain sharpness and high performance while still keeping depth-of-field control."
One of the missing links in HD cinematography to date has been the ability to shoot anamorphic. No less a perfectionist than George Lucas was forced to crop pixels from the top and bottom of the 16x9 HDCAM frame in order to get the 2.35:1 aspect ratio he wanted for the last two Star Wars films— all because experiments with anamorphic solutions available at the time didn’t maintain enough horizontal resolution. But at NAB, Canon introduced the ACV-235 anamorphic converter, which squeezes an image by a factor of 1.32:1 before recording it to a camera’s 1.77:1 imager, yielding an image in 2.35:1 aspect ratio. It works with any 2 / 3 -inch lens and camera combination, which Canon’s Larry Thorpe argues is a distinct advantage over creating special anamorphic lenses.
"From an optical design point of view, it’s more challenging than doing anamorphic in the lens," says Thorpe. "If somebody did design a state-of-the-art 2 / 3 -inch HD lens with an anamorphic front end, that should work quite well, maybe as well as our approach. But the advantage of putting it between the lens and the camera is that it can be any lens and anybody’s camera, and that’s a big advantage from a DP’s point of view— they can rent their favorite camera with their favorite lens." The adapter’s main liabilities are price and form factor— it’s essentially a $20,000 black cylinder that sticks out of the front of your camera. But if you love widescreen and you want to one-up the Star Wars movies, it may be worth the investment.
Be Like Mike
If your camera guy is carrying lots of gear, where does he put it without sticking all the geegaws onto the camera itself? Enter the Fig Rig, named for noted indie maestro Mike Figgis, who uses a lightweight two-handed camera stabilizer resembling nothing so much as a steering wheel to stalk his actors on complicated handheld shoots. It offers mounting positions for a variety of controllers, mics, and other gear, keeping them all at hand and close to the camera. Replicas of Figgis’ rig are being produced for the rest of us by Manfrotto, which sells them through Bogen Imaging for $299.95.
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