Walking on Cars were up in Derry, Northern Ireland as part of the Other Voices music weekend. I had some free time on the last day of the Other Voices music weekend before performances in the evening and had my camera with me from the previous day of work, so decided to try to hook up with one of the many bands hanging out around the city.

I got chatting to a band manager from Dingle who was working at the event, and she suggested Walking on Cars. A few phone calls later we had a plan and location – Bennigans Bar, just a few minutes walk away. The owner was really helpful, allowing us to take over half of his bar for the shoot. Regulars even gave up watching the rugby to accommodate us.

The set-up was fairly straight forward as we had limited time and equipment. We decide just to use two members of the band to keep things as simple as possible – piano, guitar and vocals. This was a one camera shoot on a Sony FS700. I used 3x LED lights and Canon EF lenses with a Metabones Speed Booster. I only had limited audio kit with me so had to make do with the mics we found lying around the bar hooked into my Zoom H4N. We used 1x vocal mic and a 1x shotgun mic.

The guys performed pretty much flawlessly for the five takes we ran through to make sure all angles were covered. They are definitely talented musicians. More info on the band can be found below:

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The video was cut and graded in FCPX with multi cam using my own FCPX plugins. You can download them here for free

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I was there to capture some of the atmosphere of the occasion on camera for NITB

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to shoot some mountain bike action, so I hit the trails in the Mourne Mountains area of Northern Ireland with Colin Ross.

Colin has been racing downhill for years. He has competed at National and International level, riding for the Irish Team on many occasions.

He owns and runs a personal training, coaching, and guiding business ‘Rosco Lines’.

Website: www.roscolines.com
Facebook: facebook.com/roscolines

Music: Skee-Lo by Plump DJ’s

Shot on a Sony NEX FS700
Edited and graded in FCPX

Thanks to Damien Gallagher and Billy May for the help and BTS photos!

Twitter: @honchomedia
Facebook: facebook/honchomedia 

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It was really important to not interrupt the natural element of the families interactions, so New York director Mac Primo insisted that nearly all the shots would be captured as they happen, and not set-up.

This presented a challenging situation in terms of lighting, ncamera set-up and sound. We needed the family to be able to roam around their house as normal throughout the week without any kit getting in the way, and without camera/crew set-up becoming too dominating. Our gaffer came to the rescue and helped us set up 8 Kinoflos in as discrete as possible locations around the house, which hardly restricted movement at all and provided a beautiful natural light source. It was a compromise between being as unintrusive as possible and getting the best lighting/camera set-up.  We did spend additional time lighting certain shots and interviews but apart from that, the Kinos did a great job.

We had three cameras on location, a combination of 60d, 7d, and 5d mkiii. Chris Heaney picked up most of the screen shots on his 5dmkiii because it dealt with any moire or aliasing issues better than the other cameras. Mac was fond of the hand held look for this commercial so we used a lot of fast prime lenses for a super shallow depth of field and let the cameras move into focus rather than pull to focus on many of the shots.

The audio setup was also quite a challenge – syncing up three DSLR cameras while being ready to shoot, run and gun style, at any time.  Any shots which we knew needed audio would be slated with a ‘time of day’ digislate.  This was one of the most difficult aspects of this shoot, and I’m sure our sound guy Mike McKnight, and editor Andy Keil were cursing us.

In the end, the many people involved in this production worked well together to pull of another great set of commercials…

The event has three routes which cater for most abilities, from beginner to the more experienced cyclist.

For more information visit www.giantscausewaycoastsportive.com

For those of you interested in the technical side of things, the video was shot on a Sony NEX FS700 with Cinegamma4, and graded in FCPX. It was one of my first outings with the camera so I’m still trying to fine tune the settings.

Recently I have been learning DaVinci Resolve 9 and graded a version of this video in it, but for ease of workflow I reverted back to grading in FCPX. Exporting XML from most editing software packages does not maintain retiming information. Since I shot alot of this at 200fps I retimed quite a few of the shots, and since I have not yet figured out a workflow for round-tripping retimed shots, I went for the easier option.

In my opinion the grading in FCPX is quite powerful anyway. Add in some key features like more detailed qualifying, motion tracking, key-framing and pivot controls and I would see no need to leave the program except on the highest-end projects.

What surprised me as well was how much information the FS700 held in highlights and how far the AVCHD codec could be stretched. The Cinegamma 4 picture profile I shot in goes all the way up to 109 IRE, so cloud detail in bright skys was handeled very well. The Cinegamma4 profile does however allocate more dynamic range above the mid grey level, so detail and noise in the darker areas is sacrificed. Once I get more time with the camera I intend to create a picture profile giving a bit more information to the blacks… or just use Cinegamma 1

See below for before and after comparison.

This commercial aimed to show the best that Northern Ireland has to offer.  We shot at many locations over the past year or so, from the North Coast of Antrim with big wave surfer Al Mennie, to a fireworks display at the new Titanic building in Belfast.

This was the same shoot that my Canon 7D died on while out with surfer Al.  My Ewa Marine casing failed and totally submerged my 7D in salt water.  Luckily the footage off the memory card was still salvagable after using data recovery software.

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Behind the scene photos…

Camera: 60D
Edit: FCPX used with Optical Flow for slow motion