Major Project: Test Shooting Interviews

Today was a chance to test shoot an interview setup now we have our two cameras. It was important to ensure both cameras give off a similar look, otherwise, the footage would look very odd. It was therefore improtant to establish not only where cameras would be positioned, but how the settings differ. I noticed that with the produciton cinema the iso was limeted to 200, 400 and 800. The whitebalance was also limited whereas the URSA had customisable presets and auto whitebalance. Below is some of the test shoot footage:




One of the biggest issues with one of our shoot locaitons was how it would look aesthetically on camera and how it didn't have a visual giveaway into what the person does. This was with our prisoners mental health expert Peter Jones. He is a great contributor and has a lot of valid, useful and interesting things to say, and I believe he can bring a lot to our docuementary. I did attempt several times to shoot in his office at home but had no luck and so we were to film in his local parish hall. After scouting images on google, I found this wasnt an idea locaiton, everything seemed very yellow and because rooms were empty there would be no depth to anyt of the shots. As a result I test shot an interview with a green screen. The outcome was poor and trying to light the individuals facetones etc to mathc the background would be difficult. Even wathcing tutorials on YouTube when green screening interviews, they all looked rough and not very effective. After trying I found it wasnt worth the risk. Looking bakc on previous green screening I had done it can look really effective but wiht the codecs available on my budget it will always look slightly off in some way or another. The video below made a nice tutorial, but again didn't look quite right.





Another avenue I wanted to explore with this test shoot was storage issues. Shooting in 4k can present large issues surronding transfer speeds and also the amount of storage used.  To shoot UHD, the 128GB card will last 17minutes of footage whereas HD will last 66minutes. When shooting hour long interviews this can present itself as a bit of an issue. In order to overcome this it would be worth checking the time it takes to didge footage ionto an SSD Drive. For its fast transfer speeds I will be using the Samsung T3 drive. I recorded until the memory was used up in UHD and went to ditch the footage to the drive and it took a total of 6minutes This was a reasonable speed and would need to be careufl in planning. I wouldn't like to do this ideally but is a sacrafice for the loo we want. Stopping contributors from talking halfway through would be an issue and is somehting to take into concideration.


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