We shoot a lot of local news in Frankfurt. There are many runs and marathons here so we film at almost every sport event that involves running. As you might know, we have been using DSLRs for 90% of our commercial work for the past three years. Since the last month we are filming a lot of things with our new Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. It is not a news camera but I decided to test it at a news shoot. While filming the Frankfurt Marathon, one of the biggest sport events, a week ago I had the idea of making a little motivational video that shows the struggles and the good sites of being a runner.
Below is the video called “Running is more than just a sport”:
Most of the clips in this short film were taken with DSLRs over the last 18 months. The blurry, grainy low res shots were captured with a mobile phone. The footage that looks the best in terms of image quality is ProRes footage from the Pocket Camera. The idea was to show important moments of a race. This film is not about matching footage from multiple cameras to make it look the same but to show the variety of perspectives, of cameras.
The opening shots with the slow and thoughtful music were captured with the Pocket Camera on a slider that was on the ground. It just looked insane with all the cups lying on the street and the people running and walking over them. After capturing different angles on the ground I had wet knees but also one of the best shots of the whole film.
I decided to give the different cameras different looks, almost like different people had captured them and in the end the footage was just put together to one film. I decided to use the OSIRIS LUTs inside of After Effects for the first time and was pretty amazed by them. To put it in easy words: LUTs are color grading presets. If you don’t have much time presets are always welcome. I wanted to give the Pocket Camera footage a cold and contrasty feeling so I pushed the ProRes codec pretty far without seeing much unwanted artifacts or noise. The low resolution clips from different mobile phones looked crappy so I added some film grain and a little bit of vignetting to make it look like vintage tape footage. The DSLR footage (mostly Canon 7D and 600D / T3i) also got a vintage look but not so extreme.
The video below is a side by side comparison to show you how the original footage looks like and the graded (final) film.
The music for short film and this BTS video provided by www.BeatSuite.com
If you are as fascinated by the footage from the Pocket Camera as we are then stay tuned because we will share a color correction and grading tutorial soon with you!
Written by Moritz Janisch