Arri-news 2014

really accurate, so even handheld at T1.3 I was perfectly happy pulling focus myself. With a 50 mm at T1.3 your subject’s eyeball will be in focus but their ear and the front of their nose will be soft; the peaking means you can see exactly what you’ve got. I found the whole viewfinder setup, with its focus and exposure tools, to be fantastically fluid and effortless. What kinds of different lighting conditions did you encounter? We had pretty much every lighting situation you could imagine. There was bright midday sun, dark subjects against hot windows, night-time interiors and exteriors, and mixed lighting with fluorescents and tungsten. I was amazed how well the AMIRA handled all of that. The internal ND filters were very useful and we used them all the time. If I wanted to keep shooting at T1.3 but things suddenly got brighter, I could make a quick adjustment to the internal filter and keep my stop. How did the director and producer respond to your images? They were just delighted and couldn’t praise the images highly enough. All the recent feature films we love were shot with the ALEXA, from Dallas Buyers Club to Gravity , so for a director or producer to have images of that quality on a documentary is something they get incredibly excited about. Especially shooting in Log C and then using a good color tool to show them the pictures; it just puts a big, beaming smile on their faces. Did the CFast 2.0 workflow allow you to turn footage around as quickly as you needed? It was remarkable that we were able to film a football match in England, edit it on-site on laptops, upload that to YouTube and broadcast it to a village in Ghana within a three-hour window. There was a lot of pressure to make it work, with 200 people sitting in the village hall, waiting to see their boys who had just played a match over 3,000 miles away. No other camera system could have delivered such great images so quickly. DP Johann Perry ARRI NEWS 17