DP Trent Opaloch talks about the challenges of using the RED ONE and Sony EX-1 cameras in the harsh South African climate while making District 9.
“It was a hard, hostile environment,” Opaloch continues. “It was extremely dry, so there was airborne dust everywhere, almost like talcum powder, and it was very windy. After less than a week of shooting, my 1st AC called me over and said he needed to show me something. When I went to where he had the RED camera, he blew out about half a cup of dust from inside. He turned it over and more dust came out. It was like an ashtray. And I thought, ‘My God! We’ve got seven more weeks of this!’”
They also talk about the post workflow, and then there’s a particularly interesting section on the challenge of creating the right balance between the heavily documentary-influenced EX-1 footage in the movie and the more polished, ‘cinematic’ RED footage.
The style of this section is designed to look freeform—more like a documentary—and Opaloch went with the Sony EX1 for these scenes. “We wanted these sections to be handheld and look like a journalistic camera being operated by a semiprofessional videographer trying to capture everything that’s going on,” the cinematographer explains. “We wanted it to feel journalistic and somewhat like surveillance footage at times. A different mix of footage you might see if you watched a news story on CNN.
The two styles evolved during production. “At first,” he notes, “the idea was to have a lot of contrast between the two types of footage. Pete had said, ‘Go bonkers with the journalistic footage. Let the highlights blow out, let the camera find focus and have the iris adjust.’ But then an interesting thing happened as we’d run a scene with the RED on a dolly and it felt like a completely different film. How would you ever piece these things together? And so we met in the middle. We went a little less extreme with the EX1 shots and a little less [clean] with the RED portions.
Go read the full article, there’s a lot more great information.
