Bleu De Chauffe in Manchester
“Fortunately, the photographer on this project also took care of the casting. I’ve been working with Alex Bather for a long time, so our shooting styles are very complementary. We kind of know how to move with each other, and so he refrains from using flash so that I can get the same shots he’s getting. I used to work for a fashion house as their cinematographer before going independent. And so I was doing this sort of shoot all of the time working with different photographers. After a few years working like this, I became very comfortable doing fast past shoots and then finishing the grade and edit myself. Working this way gives you a certain mental fitness when you are having to be spontaneously creative all of the time.”
“Like many of the projects I do, this one came in fast and needed an awful lot done in a very short period of time. I only got a sense of how big the project was when a ton of bags, sweaters and clothing landed at the studio. It was then that I realized that there was a lot of product that we needed to show. And so my initial panic was how do you show everything?”
“Shooting photography and film on the same day can get a bit messy working out the logistics for the shoot. When this sort of project comes up you’re always hoping you’ll get a big space to work in. But not so with this one as the apartment was very small; but it did have an amazing window as backlight. But there was no time to diffuse the light, so you have to work with daylight at exactly the right time of day.”
“Alex and I wanted the same narrative for the stills photography and the socials video I was shooting. So we bounced a few ideas around and came up with this particular narrative which we knew would work for both the photography and film. Given this shoot was going to happen so fast, I decided to keep my camera and lens choices super simple. Because the space we were shooting in was really small, I needed a full-frame camera with a large enough image circle to take a wide 14mm lens. The whole rig was going to have to fit on a small lightweight gimbal as well, so this meant I needed a compact setup.”
“The Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K has a massive 43mm image circle and can shoot 3:2 Open Gate. So it was a no-brainer given it easily fits on my smaller DJI Ronin Rs gimbal and can take EF lenses using a low-cost adapter. My main lens on this shoot is my old and trusty Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8. This lens has been so worn down to that point it just produces a very unique look. I love the way a lens can evolve as it becomes more vintage over the years. And that’s what I have got here. As my lens gets older, it just looks better and better.”
“The other lens that really surprised me on this project is the Laowa 14mm f/4 Zero-D. This is a super affordable DSLR lens that has a 115 degree field of view with pretty much zero distortion. The other thing I gotta say about this lens is it’s compact too, and lightweight.”
“So it made the perfect combination with the Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K. It just produces a nice look with wonderful flares and great skin tones. I think these wide-angle shots look fantastic with a look that is similar to cine primes. They call this the ‘Dreamer’ lens and it certainly lived up to that name. You just need to take a look at that scene where the girl is lying back on the sofa with the big window in the background. If you saw what the apartment really looked like, you wouldn’t believe it was the same place. And that shows the power of a full-frame sensor when shooting 3:2 and how it can easily transform a scene!”
“The great thing about this camera is you can experiment with LUTs, whether they are the BMD LUTs or something unique and different. Changing LUTs with the BMCC6K and DaVinci Resolve is super easy, so I figured why not have some fun. The LUT I settled on was by Juan Melara. This LUT essentially outputs Alexa colors but in Gen5 BMD Film log. The output won’t match LogC Alexa footage, but it gives you the benefit of the extra highlight range of BMD’s Gen5 which means you don’t need to manually grade highlights back down into the grade. I just love that there are so many people doing custom LUTS for this camera because it just adds to the overall creativity.”
“What I love most about this camera, is that it’s an evolution of the Blackmagic Pocket Camera 4K that has been my trusty camera for ages. I figured I would have trouble with this shoot using my other BMPC 6K because of the S.35 sensor and the tiny spaces. So being able to have the exact same form factor and operating system in a full-frame camera was a game changer for the sort of work I do.”
“In some of the setups with the large window in the apartment I was really pushing the dynamic range of the camera to the edges. But with the highlight recovery in DaVinci Resolve, I felt very safe shooting this extreme. You have gotta be impressed when doing the grade and seeing all of the highlights and skin tones settling into just the right look. It’s insane how BRAW and DaVinci Resolve can easily make all of this happen. It’s almost poetic in my mind.”
“There's a lot of work done in DaVinci for a lot of these images. Especially when we're dealing with high-contrast shots where the lighting is often controlled by the photographer. So bringing back the details in post is the name of the game when shooting fashion projects like this one. I did get some control of the lighting, such as the pub shoot where I added fill using the tiny Aputure MC LED video light. But mostly, I used the capabilities of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K and BRAW to work with the available light. What I did find with this full-frame sensor is it captures a lot of light, so it was essential to use external NDs. I didn’t want the bulk of a matte box on this shoot, so I opted for the screw-on VND on each lens.”
“The crew for this shoot was small, with only a stylists and co-ordinator to help with the photography and videography. To be honest, the apartment was so small we couldn’t have had the crew any larger than this, anyway! Although the shoot ran for two days, a lot of the secondary stuff didn't really make it into this edit. The first day was pretty much everything you're seeing in the video, with I think some of the stuff from the second day towards the back end. There was just so much product to cover. You have to draw the line somewhere and still get all that footage the client will be happy with. For me, it's important to keep it strict in terms of what goes into the edit, because you don't want to go over 60 seconds.”
“The only thing I would have loved to do with this shoot was some lens whacking (free lensing), where you unscrew the lens from the camera and shoot through the lens resting on the mount. You can have a lot of fun with this technique and it can look cool with this sort of shoot. You just tilt the sunlight into the center of the lens. You never know what you’ll get until you’ve got it!”
