Hey, this is Paul at the SlowgrowingFocusPulling.com, and I haven't done one of these in a while.
But something really cool happened recently, and it seems like a good occasion to tell
you about something I made for the gig.
But first, check out this scene from Martin Scorzezzi's early film Mean Streets, where
Harvey Keitel's making his way through a bar.
And you can see the aesthetic really evokes his drunken haze, using some really interesting
camera work.
More recently, Darren Aronofsky has pushed this look to its extreme limits, especially
in his early work Requiem for a Dream.
And in these shots that by now are kind of film legend, it's hard to imagine a better
way to evoke that sort of narcotic paranoia that he was going for.
What all these directors were using was something called the Snorri Cam from mid-last century,
and in this still, behind the scenes, you can see it mounted on Jennifer Connolly.
And what you'll notice mainly is that it was designed to mount really heavy, large, traditional
movie cameras, but also it's very much keyed to the movements of the torso, rather than
the head.
What we've had for a while is a standard GoPro helmet mounting option, where you could
not only point it forward, but you could twist the sort of gooseneck extender back around
so that it's pointing into your face.
But when push comes to shove, the video quality on a GoPro just sort of sucks.
I mean, even the newest 4K models at high bit rates blow out highlights, and the contemporary
practice of color grading everything with really flat log profiles just isn't possible.
I mean, I get it, attacking GoPro is sort of like walking into a war zone.
They have a huge legion of users.
The corporation feels to me sometimes like political lobbyists fighting to protect their
trade name.
I mean, they cut exclusive deals with sports celebrities to make their products look good.
But getting back to that gig I mentioned, it was out of nowhere that a really solid
cinematographer reached out to me after watching a commentary I'd made like this, but about
the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera.
And what he had in his mind was doing this sort of shot that you normally would get on
a GoPro pointing in, but kind of upping the game with the capabilities you get on the
Blackmagic Pocket, including Cinema DNG RAW, and something that he could grade with his
arealexes that were his A-cameras on set.
So I started thinking about things like stabilization, and the way that if you blow up an image onto
a multiplex screen, it needs to be smooth enough that it doesn't nauseate the audience.
And what came to my mind was a viral video you might have seen of a camera mounted on
the head of a chicken that ended up looking kind of like a steady cam.
And so I figured that since humans are at least a little more evolved than chickens,
though maybe you wouldn't know it these days, things were probably going to work out alright
if I mounted this thing straight on the helmet instead of on the torso like the snorri cam.
So the first thing I asked the effects crew out west was whether they could mount a reinforced
stud on the front of the helmet with a quarter inch 20 socket, and they nailed it.
But the next step was to put counterweights in the back anticipating all of the weight
in the front.
But since that was going to be a moving target, I figured I'd need to be able to stack more
weight onto the back, and so after I received the helmet from them, I further modified the
counterweight mechanism to be able to add weights incrementally.
And I happen to have some stackable screw on weights from an old steady cam Merlin that
I don't use anymore because I've transitioned to motorized gimbals, but you can really use
anything that will add weight incrementally.
On the camera side, I needed something that would extend it out past the minimum focusing
distance of the lens.
And for that, I used a fairly standard indie filmmaker device called an articulating arm.
They have quarter inch 20 bolts on either end and using one tightener in the middle,
they tighten up all of the movable joints.
And then on top of that, with this particular product called the camera, our tough friction
arm that I've linked to in the caption to this video, there were notches to make sure
that it would stay in place.
One of the cool things about the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera is that in addition to
the quarter inch 20 screw on the bottom for tripods, it also has one at the top.
So I was able to just use that to screw in the articulating arm.
And then once that was all solid, I could adjust the camera into position for getting
the shot that I wanted.
So when this chicken, that's me, started running with this, I couldn't have expected how incredibly
smooth it would look.
Now you'll see when I point it forward that it has a different look and it's not as stable
and it really bears out the fact that when you are fixed solidly to the human head, all
else is forgivable in the background.
But if all you have is the background, then it just doesn't have that same stability and
you're better off using like a three axis motorized gimbal, just handheld pointing forward.
But actors can really play with this, you can get some really interesting looks when
you move your head more dramatically than usual.
And part of this is related to the fact that the lens is so wide.
In this case, I used a Rokinon 7.5 millimeter native Micro Four Thirds crop lens.
And on the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, because the crop factor is three times compared
to 35 millimeter, it didn't have that full blown fisheye effect, but it certainly distorted
dramatically.
And yet I think that's the aesthetic of this whole rig.
It's meant to be that snorri-cam hysteria, and I didn't have a problem with it.
Moreover, you can play with focus isolation, that's to say shallow depth of field, because
the focus is not going to change, it's fixed on one location.
And to do that, you open up your aperture as wide as you can, so long as you're able
to get your exposure right by compensating for that with your ISO, but as usual you don't
want to adjust your shutter speed for that purpose.
So how did it all work out in the end?
Well, it's not like I can take the footage I shot and throw it on the internet.
But I like a lot of what I got.
And the larger experience is something I figured I'd blog about in a more traditional post
later that's talking about bridging the worlds between independent film and Hollywood pictures.
But meanwhile, what emerged to me quickly from this episode was to understand that Hollywood
is extremely risk averse, with hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent every day,
and the celebrity profiles of the cast.
I appreciated how they wouldn't want to do something if they felt like they could do
it another way, with less risk.
There was the idea that if something bad happened, that extra mass up there, as comfortable
as it felt to me, was just not worth the risk.
So it was difficult buying confidence to get the helmet onto Will Ferrell's head, and
even Tony Hawk's.
The irony is, as soon as cameras started rolling on Tony Hawk's first scene, he got into a
big accident, and it shut down his involvement for the rest of the day.
So as these things go, no matter what footage you get or don't get, you'll never know
what makes it into the final cut.
As for this thing that I named the Moony Cam, the pretension was just to describe a
father-son project over a Thanksgiving visit, where we both thought we were making something
that might be used in a comedy that would make people laugh.
If you go to the Wikipedia page for the Sonori Cam, you see that it's actually named after
two brothers, the Sonori brothers.
With this little gadget, I took me and my dad's last name and sort of hooked it onto
a Sonori history, and it's not like it's an invention, but it's definitely using technology
that just became available in the last year to capture really high dynamic range in a
film color space, in really tight spots where you just couldn't mount something like an
airy Alexa.
So thanks for checking this out, and if you make one of these things, I would totally
love to see what you shoot.
There's more information in the caption under the video, with links if you care to follow
the focus-pulling streams.
I'll catch you next time.
