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Fire Ants will have it's worldwide premiere at the renowned Flickers: Rhode Island International Film Festival between Aug 9th and 15th, this is it's 25th year and in that time RIIFF has become one of the best in the world for short films and had over 6800 submissions from 103 countries in 2021. It is both Oscar and Bafta qualifying and we couldn't wish for a better start to the Fire Ants festival journey.If you are around Rhode Island, pop along and support Fire Ants we believe that the fe...

Preparing for a shotWe’re fortunate in that as a production company we have what we need at hand during lockdown. In fact, in some ways, we relish the chance to try some new ideas and approaches.We're shooting this with our Red Epic as A cam and a sigma fp as a B cam. They do cut together surprisingly well - both being RAW and can be made to match fairly well on timelines if you're careful with dynamic range. (The Red is 2 to 3 stops higher in range than the sigma, yet the sigma is tiny and very...

Somewhere in Kent during lockdown, our family of four decided to make a short film to remember this time. However, what started as a small intimate project escalated into an international production involving over 100 youngsters from all over the world.CastingOur exterior shoot with minimal crew. Ersi slatingApart from our boys and our neighbours, the rest of the actors were auditioned and directed online.  I first approached Victoria Emslee (Downtown Abbey, Theory of Everything, Danish Gir...

One of the truly rare joys of being an indie is that when you view your cut and decide that you could do with one more scene or reaction shot there, you simply pick up the phone, pick up the right lights, get your kit out and dress your living room appropriately.This is what’s been happening the last few weekends – a routine we always knew would happen even before our main shoot.   It’s an ongoing job sculpting your film until you think it’s ready. We are 96% there, all we need is to shoot ...

This is a very short post to cover a few points about using the new Red Pipeline footage (IPP2) in Premiere Pro CC. The approach here is one of many and i’m not sure if it’s even the best way to go about this, but right now it works and i’ll try to explain why.(i also have tonnes of other blog posts about all sorts of things sort of waiting, just incredibly busy in post - once there’s a breathing space i hope this blog will be a lot more active.)IPP2 is the new colour pipeline from Red. It was d...

Is it always better to record the A7s via 8 bit UHD and downsample for HD delivery? Or is the in-camera scaling of the 4K sensor for HD, via the built in XAVC codec just as good?And what is the best exposure strategy for this camera too?Just so there’s a reason for reading the rest of this rather long post the answer IMHO is an emphatic yes. Click the image below to expand it and check XAVC on the left and a ‘properly’ exposed and post workflowed (if that is a verb) UHD version. Awesome isn’t it...

This has been my favourite light since i got it at the beginning of the year (actually last year now, how time flies). Review done.Okay, a bit more. I’ve always had an issue with most of the LED lights out there at the moment. They’ve never seemed ‘right’ to my eye, nor on most recorded footage, especially on skin tones. I’ve tended to use those panels for rim lights and accents rather than keys. Admittedly I’d not been using the really expensive panels but the expensive ones i’d seen, or the fo...

We’ve a bunch of exterior shoots coming up and i’ve been seriously considering the A7s over the FS700 because if it’s size and the fact that it can be rigged and gimballed easily. Last article we looked at issues of resolution and increasing colour depth by downsampling. We know that approach works well.Overall the dynamic range of the A7s appears to be roughly the same as the FS700, around 10 to 11 stops. (And if you read the rest of this blog you’ll know that i believe camera manufacturers ove...

Camera Rigs, Man Cages, Man Handles, whatever you want to call them, we all need them. Lets get away from the obvious question of why most camera manufacturers cannot design an ergonomic camera in the first place and seem to think that square bricks are the way forward, and jump straight into some of the options we’ve looked at, used and moved on from.This is specifically for the FS700 (and FS100 to a lesser degree).Why do we need to rig the camera? Well, because a shooting camera - be it handhe...

Welcome to my first retrospective blog about Marriage. This all started for me back in April last year (2012) when a chance encounter via email started between Kat and I. I'm not one to blow my own trumpet but when I found out Kat and Paul were making a film I just had to approach them. They needed accomodation quotes and I wanted to be a part of this amazing opportunity. There are many things in life that you need balls for, so I had to strap a pair on.The reality of doing a low budget feature ...

This is such a simple but elegant idea that i'm kicking myself that I didn't come up with it! The AirBox light solves one of the more annoying issues with all those LED panels out there -- how to diffuse the light so it's actually soft. Without any form of diffusion the hundreds of little LEDs combine to produce fairly harsh light and ropey shadows. Most LED Panels allow for some diffusion to be attached to the front but it's a little too close to the panel itself and doesn't always produce that...

Today we feature a Guest Post from Photographer Matt Linehan.It was the first time I’d been on a film set and I was bundled into a small room filled with makeup bags and boxes, told to sit on the bed – it was a bedroom – and told seriously to be quiet as it was a closed set.I had no idea what anything was for or what anyone was doing but I presumed I needed to be quiet until told otherwise, so sat their fiddling with my camera anxiously.“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea” I thought to myself.[i...

I bet you don’t get challenges like that in a studio films!!… Well, after that Herculian deed, I can happily say that the team’s bond stretched to the maximum but never broke, in fact it became stronger. Time against us meant we had no free seconds to argue, bicker, fight or be lazy. The unanimous collective was ‘let’s get it In the can’. Minimal compromises in the style of ‘ We’ll fix it in the post’ but again, vital when you’re on a roll.“Oh no”!!Of course we had our fair share of excitement a...