To promote D-Eb31e on indiegogo we decided to shoot a test trailer and a segment explaining how the costs are going to be spread across the production.

This trailer shoot also gave us a good opportunity to test out our Kit and the workflow we had planned.



Overall it was a good shoot and this is what we created:

To better promote the indiegogo page we decided to shoot a trailer and a promotional video with Lucy explaining the concept of the film and why we need the budget.

The first attempt of lucy's talk was shot in the photography room with a DSLR, however due to some complications with the Audio we decided to reshoot it on the same day we would be shooting the trailer, using the URSA to better show off our production values.

The URSA was a pleasure to work with, however the battery only lasts about 1,5 hours and the card can record 25 minutes, and takes about 40 to unload. It was good that we figured this out on the test day as i believe now Laura has added in the rental of a CFast card in the budget to be more efficient

This was also an opportunity to test out the actual workflow that we will use in the final film. The footage was offloaded on to a hard drive using ShotPutPro, a file transfer software aimed at digital imaging technicians which also verifies that the copy was successful without any errors by comparing both sets of files.




The trailer shoot itself was a really nice opportunity to test out the high speed feature of the URSA, filming up to 120fps for a full hd shot. We managed to get some really nice results and hopefully the trailer will be compelling to watch and instructive for us as a crew.

Here are the dailies:

We learned about proper practices in setting up these professional cameras, but also had the opportunity to test them out and compare them.

Here are some of the comparisons between both cameras:


Based on these tests i am leaning towards the URSA due to it being slightly sharper, and having better color management since we are using Davinci to grade. There are limitations such as card a

During our first camera workshop i got the chance to compare both the C300 and the URSA, two high end cameras that we might use for both "Through the Medium" and "D-eb31e". Therefore i shot a few test shots with different settings to see how both cameras look.



Comparing size and form, the C300 has a nice form factor, and can be mounted on various acessories such as the Glidecam or the Motion Control Slider. It has a familiar menu, same as the XF305 and can handle high ISO's. It's also connected to the Samurai Blade, therefore can do 10bit in Avid's DNxHD.



However this also means that a cable needs to be connected to the blade, and the blade needs to be mounted on to the camera. The plus side though is that if we want we could create two sets of files, one internally for backup, and one using the blade as our main source.

Looking at the image, it's a pretty clean image, however there is a bit of artificial sharpening. This can probably be fixed by changing the settings on the camera.

Also using the provided LUT to convert it back to Rec.709 gives a pleasing image, but loses information through the black areas. This can be fixed by color grading before applying the LUT, however the color representation seems a bit too "videoish". (Note: This is just my personal opinion)

The Blackmagic URSA is big and bulky, so it would possibly only work on heavy duty tripods, handheld for short amounts of time or on a heavy duty rig.



However the image quality (when appropriately lit) is phenomenal in my opinion. It has good natural looking sharpness even in ProRez, and using the DaVinci Resolve (free software) it can be outputed to a very pleasing version of Rec.709 with great colors, or also converted to linear light for Visual Effects use, or other film stocks such as Kodak and Fujifilm.

RAW recording, as i discovered whilst trying to get a beautiful shot of Shahid shaking a fanta bottle in slow motion, needs two CFast cards simultaneously, as odd frames are put on one card and even frames on the other. Because we only had one card, and were also trying to do 80 frames per second in raw, only half of the frames were captured, and after one point the camera started dropping frames due to the write speed needed. Also processing times in Davinci for raw are MASSIVE, whereas ProRez on a high end computer or even a Macbook Pro work at realtime.



I'm leaning towards the Blackmagic URSA as the main camera i want to use, however if we need to do specialist shots (Glidecam, Slider, Low Light) we might use the C300, depending on availability.

Here is a compilation of the test shots with and without LUTS: