Thoughts of evolutions as a DP

Lately I’ve been reviewing my own work as I prep my latest show in Budapest, Hungary.

What’s been super interesting to me is that I’ve been going through my work and picking out frames that feel good to me and I was shocked how much my work has changed even in the last 5 years, and how much pickier I am now in my lighting and cinematography.

It’s very useful to find this out and ascertain what sort of things I want to produce now and in the future.
It also shows me that for ten years or so I’ve let the colour grading process of my work happen with less of my involvement. At first I felt that was a good thing to allow other people to tweak and change my work, which is true as too much control can tend to make all the work look the same. But logistically I was also coping with the fact that I’m often on other jobs and having to grade my shows remotely.

But looking through the older material, even The Witcher I can see that I’ve exposed and lit the shots to be darker and I’ve allowed those shots to be graded much brighter than I’ve intended, which has a tendency to make the facial lighting look messy as the shadowed side of a face starts to compete with the lighter side.

So going forward I think I’ll begin to be a little pickier with my colour grading and try and push my work to a higher standard.

I guess it’s nice to see, after many years of doing this job, that my work is still improving and evolving.

New Equipment and New Ideas

As I get back to a full working life again, and wave goodbye to months of freedom to go cycling whenever I liked, I have started to get my head back into the possibilties that new, cheaper equipment can provide for a TV show.

The DJI RS2 gimbal came out and I immediately bought one. During 2020 I purchased a Red Komodo 6K camera as my personal shooter, and the mini RS2 gimbal suits it perfectly. It always interests me how one device can become a gateway for others, and then lead to new shooting ideas.

Once a camera is smaller, the bits that hold it become smaller. Now you can put them in intersting places you couldn’t before. Maybe you can send out a 2nd Unit to shoot stabilised driving plates with the RS2, Komodo and a Tilta Hydra shock arm instead of the main unit Movi Pro & more expensive Flowcine Black arm?

Well you could, if the Hydra, a brilliantly priced bundle of car rigging parts, had a fully working arm. Tilta did a great job with the Hydra, don’t get me wrong, but it has a fatal flaw. A larger shock arm such as the Flowcine Black Arm has a “sway” module at the end of the spring section that allows the camera payload to shift side ot side and forward and back with a damper on each axis (or 2)., The Hydra, missing this, introduces Vibration into the shots as the rigid arm can only absorb shock vertically and then everything else is trying to be fixed by the coil isolator next to the camera.

I had a sequence to shoot on the last show trying to get smooth plates with a good camera at speed on a motocross race track. Super difficult to do! The Hydra, RS2 and Komodo fit the bill for weight and size, but that vibration would not work. So I designed a part to try and remove it.

A motocross track isn’t a friendly place for testing camera rigs. Next time put the weather cover on!

I designed a piece of alloy to simpy connect an off the shelf two axis bearing from a vehicle between the camera payload and spring arm of the hydra. One piece repeated 4 times to bind together as pairs compressing the bearing joint (with a safety stop also) and then interfacing with Tilta’s 25mm hole spacing connector.

An image render in Fusion360 of the assembly with my part repeated in blue and red

I managed to get through our grip on the show a local firm to machine these parts. They weren’t too cheap but speed was important. I received the parts and bought 2 cheap dampers from Amazon.

finished parts in raw alloy attached to the Tilta coil isolator and with cheap dampers attached

It turns out, that my slightly risky plan of a combined 2 axis system, as opposed to two separate bearings with separated dampers, paid off. The 2 dampers actually worked together to damp each direction, largely because they mount with a spherical bearing housing, meaning they can tip and lean as the pins slide in and out. It actually really worked!

We filmed using this at a full motorcross track and despite a failiure on the firsdt day that bent the damper on the spring arm (I had to pull one out of another bit of kit to repair it) we got the shots we needed.

The much smoother Hydra Arm including my ghetto Sway Module -Note there’s no damper on the spring arm when I shot this. The first one got bent so I had to put another on there. It wasn’t as easy I thought it would be as it was an interference fit. but a lunchtime spent hammering it on sorted it.

But then on the other hand, I also shot GoPro cameras at the same time. Despite the lower quality file and dynamic range, the clean shots are actually WAY smoother on the GoPros. We’re only a couple of years away from these action cameras being a great match for our main cameras in quick cuts and action sequences. So much easier to use too.

… All this playing with dampers and spring arms had me thinking too. Is it time I buy my own Black Arm? I had a look around and Gremsy, from Vietnam, who made the H16 Gimbal I used for season 1 of Tin Star have made their own version of the Black Arm. It’s way cheaper and modular so I can also use the sway module on a crane. So I bought one of those for my next show.

So now I have my own shock arm that can take the Movi Pro or the RS2 gimbal. Now what can I do?

I have a shot on the next show tracking behind a piece of luggage, focusing on the wheels then tilting up to see the person pulling it. Now I can get the Movi really low without doing a weird crouch walk. I can add a scaff tube adaptor to the Mitchell Plate on the dolly and then use the shock arm and Movi Pro skimming the ground. It won’t matter if the dolly has a rougher surface to ride over as the spring arm and isolators will remove all of that. I also won’t be operating risking my back and will be able to concentrate better on framing and operating the tilt.

Now I’m thinking of all the other times I could use this tool, now it’s in my kit!

New face who dat?

So recently I’ve been putting up the old Merlin photos on The Merlin Archive and going through them included seeing old pics of myself. As a transgender woman, it can be weird interacting with old images of myself.

My transition so far in the film industry and in life on the whole has been wonderful really. Everyone is very supportive and I have not an ounce of regret other than in not having done it years before.

Here’s how I look today…

Recent testing

Just before the 2020 lock down, which I really hope gets called The Reset, but will probably only be called The Great Pause, with business carrying on as usual instead of building on the wonderful insights about life and our cities while traffic and commerce were halted, I shot a bunch of tests for an upcoming series for ITV called ’Grace’ that I was due to start prep on. I may indeed get back to this shoot in July or so, but you just never know.

These tests were mainly for me to experiment with different lenses and cameras. Especially for me to investigate the use of the Red Monstro sensor for the show. I’ve only shot a few things on Reds but I quite like them and any tests I’ve done of the Monstro blew me away.

You can see the first test below. I’m hoping to dive into the Red Monstro more and would also like to check out the Canon Sumire Prime lenses also if I get back on to this show again soon.

Coronavirus Life

Well everyone in the film & TV industry suddenly has more time on their hands.

I’m currently locked in London at my shared house in Whitechapel. I was due to start prep on new series ‘Grace‘ for ITV but the week before that we got the instruction to self isolate and frankly I’d seen it coming having traveled through Hong Kong in January and watching the exponential growth of the cases reported in China. These days we all move around so much and the full spread was sadly inevitable with the current leadership of the US and UK. The response in places like my home of New Zealand is a testament to informed, empathetic and communicative leadership these major countries would be smart to follow.

So what does it mean to be a DOP right now? The world is consuming our content like never before but it’s so clear that in this situation my career and job is inessential, despite that demand.

So I’m tooling around my house, fixing things, adjusting computer files, cleaning. Just basically living as well and safely as possible until such time as we get to go back out on set.

I can’t see this happening in any sort of hurry as a film crew is an ideal incubator for a virus. I tend to catch everything going around on set as I work long hours, without breaks, get very tired and we’re all in each other’s space constantly. I dare say the ”honey wagons “ (lavatories/restrooms) will be far cleaner once we go back to work as people in general have had to learn how to wash their damn hands. It’s about time.

My latest project to keep myself busy other than gardening has been to go back through all the drives I can find and add images into a grand archive from the show Merlin that I filmed between 2008-2012 in Wales and France.

you can find these pages here at The Merlin Archive

One thing that has been great in doing this project has been to look back at 5 years of my progression as a DOP, and how actually using a DSLR as a tool on set was so brilliant to help my lighting, but also created this amazing vast record of the production with some seriously good promo shots in there once I got better at grabbing these frames.

It definitely makes me think it would be worth having a raw DSLR again to do this on set. I’m always there, whereas the on set photographer isn’t always paid for. I also have full access to the images which is great for me to create more promotional images of my own.