Engine and Sony F65 Capture Festival Selection for ‘III’
The Sony F65 was used to shoot ‘III’, a short film shot by DP Tony Gardiner, post 
produced at Engine and now selected for the HollyShorts 2012 Film Festival
in Hollywood.
| 'III' was shot at the beginning of the year to test the new Sony F65 digital cinema camera. Tony works at a camera rental company, 3rd Gear in Sydney, where an F65 was delivered early this year. Because at that time this was among the first rental companies in Australia to receive an F65 and only limited footage from the camera was available, 3rd Gear decided to make a short film instead of capture standard test shots. | |
 |
|
| Tony hired director Nick Kacevski and his brother, producer George Kacevski from Engine, for the project. The shoots covered three different light scenarios involving a beach in the early morning, a forest in full daylight and a night scene. Each location would also feature talented performers and varied conditions to put the F65 through its paces. Engine was used as the production and post production facility. | |
| |
|
|
Over the next week Tony Gardiner organised shoots at three locations and times of day. At sunrise at Tamarama Beach, martial artist Hakan Manav performed in heavily back-lit conditions when the sunlight was glinting off the waves, testing the way the camera handled roll-off into the highlights. In the forest location at Coopers Park, featuring mixed sunlight and shadows, he shot contortionist Bree Robertson, and at night he worked with dancer Traves Ross in an abandoned factory in Alexandria. He worked with natural light for the first two scenarios, only using a few bounce lights for the forest shoot, and for the night scene he tested a mixed lighting situation with 1K tungsten Fresnel lights shining on the dancer, plus HMIs in the background for a daylight effect. |
|
  |
|
|
He then took the footage to Engine for a brief post production. The CEO at Engine Calvin Gardiner said, “We wanted to work on ‘III’ because it was worthwhile in terms of refining digital workflows and future planning. More and more of the work we do is shot digitally and ‘III’ in particular combined RAW, compressed and high-speed workflows.” Once in post, the F65 footage was ingested to Engine’s server with both RAW and SR codec footage processed into proxies via Da Vinci Resolve. At that time Resolve was one of the only systems that could process both RAW and SR footage. They wanted to have access to both in post to test how well the two codecs would cut together and how they would look side by side on output. |
|
 |
|
|
Because the footage was offlined in Final Cut Pro and onlined and graded in Flame Premium, comprising Flame, Smoke and Lustre software, the native, RAW and SR footage was reprocessed into 10-bit DPX. Since the original intention for the shoot was as a test to post online, not release or general viewing, the output was to different ProRes formats. Furthermore, as it was made as a test, it was also completed within a very short timeframe. Nevertheless, the images are able to show what the Sony F65 can achieve with a well planned digital workflow, and Tony and Engine are consequently working on an anamorphic F65 shoot. www.pro.sony.com.au www.engine.net.au |
