3. ELISE ESTRADA – LIPSTICK

Elise Estrada - From Canada

One of the more interesting jobs I worked on in 2011 was a combined music video reality TV show for Rockstar Music in Canada, who were over in London on the UK leg of their talent scout for ‘Rockstar Academy’. It’s kind of like the Hills crossed with all those other fame shows and we shot the whole thing on DSLRs, which was a challenge, to be sure.

DOP Neil Gordon on the Redrock

First the music video: Elise Estrada is a big popstar in Canada and somehow the team at Rockstar Music had found me on the web, seen my music videos and seen that I’d shot a lot on DSLRs so got in touch. A few Skype calls later and they’d persuaded me to come out of music video retirement and shoot the video for Elise’s new single, Lipstick. The guys needed a video that would meet the standards of all those uber polished female solo artists you see in her segment – i.e. glossy, beautiful and slick. Most videos featuring female solo artists on shot on film as it’s just much more flattering, so we were being asked to step up with the 5D and deliver something that could compete. Hmm. The brief was to shoot around London, capturing Elise performing in recognisable locations but we were going to have to do it renegade style, stealing every shot. What’s wrong with this picture? Well, in normal music video production you shoot these types of vids on 35mm and you have very large makeup budgets and lots of room for flattering lights. What did we have? A 5D, two lite-panels and a set of Zeiss ZFs (Duclos mod’ed) from DP Neil Gordon. No pressure then. Did we get away with it? You bet your ass we did. We ran around in London, with just a Redrock shoulder rig, those two litepanels mounted on it and nothing else and it looked fantastic. I saw Alex Buono‘s (DOP Saturday Night Live) presentation at Photocine Expo where he talked extensively about shooting the title sequence for SNL with only natural light at night and here we were doing pretty much exactly that.

Lite Panels mounted above and below to create a soft look

We shot in a taxi, in a phone box, on the Milennium bridge, in busy streets and not once did we get stopped and asked to move on our way. I shot renegade style on Ladies and Gentlemen but here almost the entire shoot consisted of us taking our 5D rig and a JBL ipod dock out into the busy idiocy of central London and we did it with complete impunity. The Zeiss lenses are very very special, and though we could have done with some faster speeds, generally we got away with most of our lens choices. One note though, it’s worth making sure you get a decent adapter as one of ours wasn’t a tight fit and it really cocks you up when you’re focussing as the lens jumps around when you turn the wheel. I always find myself learning something new every time I go out on a big job with the DSLRs and this was no different: TWO F*&%ING LITE PANELS: ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Probably didn’t need caps, yo, but I’m used to great big ring-lights, poly, soft boxes, all that shizzle. But no. Just two cheap led panels. Shocking. Shooting on the Milennium bridge with the whole of London lit up behind Elise was just magical. We already knew it would be, but just in terms of providing production value, when you play to the strengths of these cameras, man do they step up. One big problem we did come across was phasing in public lighting. We were shooting NTSC spec so 30p which meant stepping up to 1/60th shutter. However, all the lights phase at 1/50th meaning we had the choice of either letting the lights flicker or plumping for a smoother, more video look to the footage. Inevitably we had to go with the latter as the flickering was just unacceptable. Had we been shooting 25p then it wouldn’t have been an issue. 29.97? What a joke!

Kind of looks like we're floating... low-light performance...

So, evenings we were shooting Elise and during the day we were shooting this reality TV talent show with groups of wannabes trooping in to audition. Two 5Ds, 5 mics, 2 zooms, 1 ex1. Data management… oh dear. Luckily we had a data wrangler on set but even so, just managing the media for the whole shoot was an epic ball ache. It’s interesting trying to shoot a TV programme on DSLRs because you just can’t do it the way you normally would on, say, an EX3. That’s entirely down to the way you work the zoom lens. For TV you need a great big long zoom lens to give you the flexibility to shoot in real time, but we just don’t have that luxury on DSLRs. Our compromise was to have one of us shoot the judges with the 24-70L and the singers with the 70-200 IS f4 L which is just a brilliant lens all-round (apart from being a bit slow of course). If it had been my production there’s no way I would have shot on DSLRs but they wanted that glossy look and it did look good, to be fair. Our final obligation on the shoot was to shoot a set of interviews at a restaurant and, once again, we had no light. What we did have was enormous fish tanks and fast 50mm lenses. Neil was on the Zeiss 1.4 I was on the Canon 1.2L – nice. Funnily enough we were rocking two very different setups – I was on the full Redrock shoulder rig while Neil was running super light with what we call the lollipop rig, literally just the Redrock Nano ‘Grippit’ handle attached to the bottom of the camera with a litepanel on top, pulling focus off the barrel. Light, simple, agile and it did the job beautifully. One thing that does bother me slightly is that, when you’re shooting reality tv, it kind of needs to look vaguely real. The wonderful thing about the 5D is that makes things look unreal, better than reality, maybe that’s what this needed but it kind of feels like a conflicted concept.

Redrock nano Grippit - the lollipop rig

I’ve seen Jamie Oliver using the 5D on his show 30minute meals, not as main camera but as a bonus camera and that’s great but I guess where we’re now at is that DSLRs are simply another tool in the kitbag and nothing special to shout about anymore. What I really admire though is people who’ve had the guts to embrace them as their one and only camera system and to hell with the consequences. People like Kevin Shahinian, Khaled Mohtaseb and UK director Suki Singh as well as the veteran Monte Hellman and of course Field Marshall Hurlbut. I did it myself with Ladies and Gentlemen and believe me, it ain’t easy. In other news this weekend I get to try out the 5D with cache record… do I believe it’s real? Not really, but if it’s a hoax then I’ll enjoy being punk’d!