July 7, 2009
The veteran indie producer recounts the production path of Megaconda, his latest "monster" movie.
By Fred Olen Ray
About a year and half ago our company, Retromedia Entertainment, decided to finance a giant monster movie with the idea that my son, Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray, would be its first-time director. I’ve had a bit of luck producing creature features in the past, having made such creepy crawlies as Silent Venom, Hybrid, Dire Wolf, and Glass Trap, so it seemed like the natural thing to do.
The goal was to produce a show that would appeal to a worldwide DVD market with a chance at U.S. television as well. It was called Reptisaurus and starred TV’s "Buck Rogers," Gil Gerard.
For Reptisaurus, the production decided to go with the Sony HVR-V1U HDV camera, shooting in the 23.98fps mode. I liked the idea of having a physical tape back-up as opposed to a P2 or SxS card. The tapeless workflow scared me and I wanted something tangible in case everything else collapsed, even though our post house, Filmlook, in Burbank, CA, heavily advised against it.
Quality-wise, I had read somewhere that the TV series Deadliest Catch was using the V1U, so I felt fairly secure in using the camera.
I also thought the HVR-V1U was a good option in that Final Cut Pro had just recently made it possible to capture the footage in 23.98 via their then-new ProRes codec, eliminating any need to transcode the files later within the system. The transfer time lagged behind at a rate of about 60 percent, which is pretty darned slow, but after capture the footage was 23.98 and ready to edit.
I immediately starting seeing certain issues with the HDV footage, albeit after the fact, but mostly it amounted to what I thought might later become QC issues, which is a huge concern in delivering to international broadcast standards.
HDV, recording at 25mps, has its issues. I think the diagonal pixels also create issues of their own, but the real killer is noise and artifacting, often in dark areas or solid color areas where it can become quite noticeable.
What we found was that these problems were greatly reduced when zero or less than zero gain was used. In one particular instance the director of photography increased the gain to make up for the fact that he did not have the proper lighting set-up and in doing so created an armada of artifacts and digital noise in an already dark scene.
We tried to counteract this in our color correction DaVinci session at Filmlook by bringing down the black levels and using creative vignetting to mask the troublesome areas. At the end of the day the show passed QC but I wasn’t as happy as I thought I’d be with the whole process.
HDV peccadilloes aside, we were very pleased with the end result of Reptisaurus and it has had some success. Looking forward I thought that maybe we’d try again with another movie like it, but bigger and better this time, taking what we’d learned and growing from there.
We settled on a giant CGI snake because I figured something that had no legs would be a lot easier to animate and we’d already done a flying monster. I read about a huge fossil had been uncovered in South America of a prehistoric snake they were calling a "megaconda" and decided this would be the star of our new movie.
In May of 2009, we began shooting Megaconda, another giant monster movie aimed squarely at the straight-to-DVD and television market.
My oldest son, Chris, would again direct, this time from a screenplay by SciFi Channel veteran Steve Latshaw (Stan Lee's Lightspeed, Curse of the Komodo). Under the SAG low-budget agreement we added TV’s Greg Evigan (BJ And the Bear, My Two Dads) and Stella Stevens (The Nutty Professor, The Poseidan Adventure) to the cast for star power.
We decided to shoot the entire feature in HD and felt that we needed a better camera that went beyond the limitations of an HDV camcorder like the HVR-V1U, but something a lot less pricey than hiring the Sony F900 Cine Alta we were normally using for our television work.
While the show was to be a very low-budget affair I wanted a better image quality than we had had on Reptisaurus and it still had to be affordable.
We also wanted to buy instead of rent.
From left, director Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray and DoP Matt Freund with their EX1 rig while shooting Megaconda, featuring an onboard Ikan monitor, Cavision matte box and Hoodman viewfinder shade.
Enter the Sony XDCAM PMW-EX1.
In this camera I believed we would be getting the right balance of quality and economy, and since we had previously used the EX1 with a Letus Extreme 35mm lens adapter as a B-camera on Dire Wolf (2008), we were already somewhat experienced with the tapeless SxS card workflow.
We loved the look the Letus achieved, but at the same time were put off by the extra time it took to change lenses and weren’t sure that every shot would require the shallow depth of field that the Letus afforded.
We were determined to build the cheapest camera package we could and still achieve a shallow depth of field when we wanted it. We knew this would require us to use the standard fixed lens that came with the EX1 and at the same time we would need to be very clever in how we used it.
We started out by buying the camera, $25 worth of screw-in filters off of eBay and a Cavision matte box from B&H in New York.
We acquired an inexpensive follow-focus unit from a company in India for a fraction of even the most economical one available in the US. We purchased a Ikan 7" on-board monitor, five 8GB SxS cards and two MxR Express Card adapters with two SanDisk 16GB SDHC cards as a back-up in case we ran out of SXS cards. Our final purchase was a 250GB Nexto field hard-drive to off-load the cards and a Sony Express Card reader.
We accomplished the desired depth of field by shooting with the stop wide open. To achieve this, our director of photography, Matt Freund, employed a screw-in Pola filter, engaged all of the EX1’s built-in ND filters, used the longest telephoto lens the camera allowed and backed up as far from our subject as necessary in order to capture our shots. The results were much better than we had expected and there was zero down time in changing the lenses on the Letus adapter.
I think the frame grabs here adequately show the end result: 
 
Some of these shots were taken at high noon in bright sunlight and still managed a pleasingly filmic look. To stay true to our B-movie roots, we chose the historic Iverson Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, CA, as our principal shooting location. Its rocky terrain provided an endless variety of interesting compositions, as it has for almost a century, starting back with Samuel Goldwyn’s Ben-Hur (1925) and beyond.
We’ve also had very good success in using the EX1 with greenscreen compositing. We reduced the camera’s detail level to -20, and adjusted the frequency to +40 to help smooth out the jagged edges around the subject and so far we’ve had no trouble pulling excellent mattes using Red Giant’s Primatte compositing software.
After editing in FCP’s XDCam Codec we output the final assembly in the Quicktime ProRes codec for DaVinci color correction. The final result was quite pleasing and the tapeless workflow developed beautifully without a hitch. Better still, the Nexto 250GB drive was able to hold the entire movie’s worth of clips without ever having to delete a single file, making it an excellent third source for backing up the footage!
Megaconda is pretty much behind us now, but the possibilities of working with the EX1 are just beginning. Check out the end result when Megaconda crawls into a video store near you.
| COMMENTS (4) | | 08/31/2009 | | I hope Chris is doing well. I used to work with him and miss the football and card conversations. |
| | 08/21/2009 | | Hey Fred. Great article. I own an EX1 and have really enjoyed shooting with it myself. Keep up the good work. |
| | 07/08/2009 | | Very interesting, just one question about the follow focus from India, can you be more specific?
Thank You |
| | 07/07/2009 | | Great article. We used an EX-1 on a feature I just directed and were really happy with the results. We started out with a Letus as well and loved the look of it, but it was killing us on set-up times. We phased it out after the first few days and even without the adapter the footage was still killer. I have some screenshots up at http://christophersharpe.com if anybody's interested. |
|
|
|
More...
|
|
|
|
|