52 Week Anamorphic Cinematography Challenge Week 19: Portrait - Messy

Well not only was this week's video late, but my god the issues that were behind its tardiness. But only a couple days late and we are here now! This week's prompt was "Take an amazing portrait of someone, make a mess while you are doing it."

I had a few ideas for this week but none of them were really going to work for what I wanted to do. Luckily what I was making for dinner would work for this week's shot, at least well enough. So I decided to shoot a slow motion shot of my fiance seasoning the raw burger meat we were about to throw on the grill.

One thing that was cool about this week was it gave me the opportunity to test out some new gear! So let's go ahead and watch the video real quickly.

So this week was actually shot differently than the rest! WOO! Change! I shot this week on the Sony a6300 in 1080p, 120fps recorded to 24fps, 6400 ISO, 1/400 shutter, in XAVC S at 100mb/s. 

Despite not shooting in RAW, this camera created great images and gave me the ability to shoot at a higher frame rate for slow motion. Also since this camera shoots 4K this will give me the opportunity to shoot at true 4K and squeeze images rather than stretching them when I am not shooting for slow motion.

I also had to shoot on a different lens than normal for this week because the a6300 has a bigger sensor than the BMPCC. This meant that not only would a 35mm not work without vignetting, even a 50mm wouldn't work! So I had to jump all the way up to 80mm using a vintage 80-200 f3.9 telephoto lens.

Now onto the shoot. The bad things for this week were all not directly related to the shoot, but affected the post production. Due to numerous issues with my computer I actually had to go into data recovery mode just to be able to post this week's video.

My OS on my editing machine got messed up and I had to reinstall it. Then the drive that had all my fonts on it, including the one I use for my titles, took a dump on me. As soon as I was able to recover the data off of the drive, I was able to make my title cards. Phew!

Other than those technical issues, the shoot for this week was a breeze.

Not only did I get to shoot with a new camera, but I also got to shoot with some new lights! Through Patti Healy-Kelly an Hanson Fong, I now have a set of continuous quartz halogen lights that put out a whopping 750 watts each. 

So for this shoot I set up one of them so that I would have enough light for not only the shutter necessary for slow motion, but also the F stop needed for the anamorphic lens. 

The nice thing about using a hot light like the one I used is that there was not an issue with flickering when shooting slow motion, but that was only shooting at 120fps.

Well that's it for this week. Again, if you are participating in a 52 week challenge, cinematography or photography, please share your image for this week in the comments below!