Camera Selection

For our scene assignment's, Michael and I both chose to shoot with the Canon 7D DSLR. I DPed Michael's project, he DPed mine, and we really wanted to achieve a cinematic, shallow focus look, so the DSLR seemed to immediately be the best fit. In fact I think he described what he wanted from me as a DP as a "DSLR" look.

I definitely wanted the 7D for my scene because in thinking about how we would be shooting an exterior scene at night, I wanted the background to be out of focus and inky, with background orbs of light in soft focus. The majority of my shots were to look like this, with the subject illuminated relatively bright and the background dark, however I also called for some shots of the subjects in shadows and darkness. The 7D allowed for these low-light shots to still turn out visible enough, so that the viewer can see the subject a bit more defined than the background, even though we didn't put much light on them.

Had we used another camera, we would have faced a harder time crushing the depth of field. This would have proved unsavory for my shoot because I really only wanted the characters to be in sharp focus during their dialogue. I believe a larger depth of field would have distracted from that and drawn the eye towards other things happening in the frame. Another camera might not have renders the background lights as soft orbs but rather as distinct, and that would have made the image look flatter to me, and less cinematic.

I wish I had seen Vincent Laforet's "Nocturne" before I shot my scene, but I recently saw it after and was like, "Yeah! See, that's sort of what I wanted to do!" I mean of course I don't yet have all of the practice and knowledge to make it look this smooth yet, but the way his subjects are lit and the background blurs light is the look I was thinking of when I started to plan my scene assignment! He shot using ambient light on a Canon 1D Mark IV

Nocturne from Vincent Laforet on Vimeo.

The main disadvantage of shooting with the 7D were the limitations on what we could do in terms of moving the camera. Originally I had called for a dolly shot that had we done it would have been difficult, using prime lenses and keeping our actors in focus as they walked toward the camera.  We ended up not having the equipment to do that shot, and while I would have liked to try it just for the experience, I think that we were better off for it. We instead recorded that part with a shoulder mount, which made it still just as difficult to keep everything in focus, but was much less time consuming so that we were able to attempt that shot over-and-over much quicker, until we got what we wanted.