Alcatraz – BTS from Vincent Laforet on Vimeo.

It’s important to remember that being a filmmaker or photographer is both a craft and a business.   We all need to make enough money so that we can not only pay our bills, pay our employees, re-invest in our business and gear, and hopefully have a little extra to put toward future personal projects.    

The dark little secret is that some jobs we’d do for free… for me this was one of those!  (And no – I didn’t do it for free!)

I was contacted by the Red Bull Media House and TJ Walker from Boombox,  to go shoot footage for the upcoming Red Bull King of the Rock – a global one-on-one basketball tournament held in the yard on Alcatraz! 

 I’ve been fascinated by the island since I first visited it as a young teenager.   Al Capone – the attempted escapes – the birdman …  such incredible history!    The place is absolutely magical – and at times a little spooky.

Our job was to go and shoot a series of time lapses  and some RED EPIC footage for use in the TV promo.    The challenge is that our crew had to be very small and we had to get on and off the island by boat.  So we kept is as compact as possible.    We had a total of 5 cases and somehow brought enough gear to shoot w/ the Epic on the Kessler Shuttle Pod (8ft.) and to shoot five 5D MKII cameras simultaneously for time lapses.   We were able to get 13 time lapses that afternoon and a bevy of live action footage as well.     The National Park Service was incredibly accommodating and a pleasure to work with.   We were able to shoot in locations closed off to the public (we even got to go on the roof!)  and we had the Island to ourselves after the last ferry had left the Island… it was absolutely amazing!    The total silence was a bit spooky I must admit.  Nonetheless I was sad to leave the island after sunset on a private boat back to San Francisco.   A huge thanks goes to TJ and Boombox, as well as the RedBull crew and Todd at H5 Events for taking care of many of our logistics!

Besides video/ and time lapses we also played with audio.   We used the the Mitra 3D audio mic and got some pretty stunning results.  Normally I would hire a sound engineer but in this case we couldn’t have gotten an extra body on the island.  And to be honest we weren’t asked to do audio – but I was able to "throw it in" if you will – given how little effort we had to put into collecting the audio.   (But pls don’t misinterpret this – there is NO SUBSTITUTE for a solid audio engineer on all of your jobs.  None.)   You can hear some of the audio in the piece above or check out our previous post on the Mitra 3D audio.  (You can also still take advantage of a 15% discount on both the "Pro" and "Indie" version of the mic Go to www.3dmicpro.com and use coupon code VL3D2011 during checkout.)

That’s it for now.   Hope you enjoy the video.

One Degree from Vincent Laforet on Vimeo.

The angle of video of a Canon 600mm f4 EF Lens with a 2X converter on a RED Epic,  is roughly one degree. (1 Degree, 45 arcminutes horizontally to be exact.) 

As you’ll see from the image above – all you need to convert the RED Epic from the PL Mount to the Canon EF-Mount is a TORX screwdriver. There are no wires or connections to deal with, it’s an incredibly elegant design and this can be done in the field.  Care should be taken to avoid dust/dirt of course.   The conversion can be done in 30-90 seconds depending on how careful you want to be,  given that the IR filter is of course exposed as is the case when a lens or front cap is not present.  Also of note:  if you look carefully at the detail shot above, you’ll notice that RED has a rotating ring, similar to a PL mount, that double-locks the Canon lens onto the Epic.  (You have both the regular Canon click lock + the rotating ring now to secure your lens.)   Gone is ANY flex inherent with the Canon mount that many of us are used to when you work with follow focusing units and/or motors.

 First:  I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU WEAR HEADPHONES WHEN LISTENING TO THE VIDEO BELOW.  

Second: we have a discount code that you can use to get a 15% off of the "Pro" or "Indie" version of the mic (also below.) 

Mitra 3D Mic Pro from Vincent Laforet on Vimeo.

What differentiates an Indie film from a major Hollywood Blockbuster?  (Besides the fact that the Indie is probably better ;)?)  

It’s not the special effects, the anamorphic lenses or the super technocranes…  

It’s the quality of the sound.

Sound is extremely important to filmmaking – in some ways more than the images themselves.  Sound helps to fill out the space we are seeing on screen. It makes the image immersive and clues us into the environment of what’s being shown to us, so that we can deduce what is happening beyond the screen’s edges.

You can look as far back as Fritz Lang’s 1931 thriller, M, to see examples of how off screen sound can be used to create tension or imply the existence of something beyond the screen’s edge.  In that film, Lang uses the familiar tune of the killer whistling to foreshadow his arrival on screen or create his presence without actually showing him.  Skip forward 41 years to 1972, when Walter Murch was named the first ever "sound designer" on Apocolypse Now by director Francis Ford Coppola for his creative contributions to the film’s audio track.  Since then – Sound Designers have been an integral part of filmmaking.   I for one will never release a narrative film of any length without it going through sound design first – no matter the deadline!  

To that point here’s a great mic that I’ve been playing with for a little over a month that I wanted to share with you.   I was contacted by the maker a few months ago and asked to try it out.   The moment I recorded my first clip with it (at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge – a shot you’ll see in the video above) and laid the audio down on the same track as the video – I played it 20 times in a row.  Literally.   I felt immersed in the shot – and it reminded me of the quality of audio that I heard in the opening battle scene of Saving Private Ryan.   Given that I didn’t have to mix anything or do anything fancy with the audio in post – I was hooked.    

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an expert on Audio.  But I do know good sound – we all do.   What amazes me about the audio within the clip above and the Mitra 3D Mic Pro is that it’s raw audio out of the mic and recorded on a Zoom H4N.    It hasn’t been mixed: no equalizing, bass boosting, trebble tweaking done YET.  And it sounds amazing.

A similar result can of course be obtained by a skilled audio technician with two mikes, positioned accurately and mixed together.  The beauty of this for me is that I am not a skilled technician – and was able to get audio like this right out of the box using a $300 audio recorder.

Also – feel free to take advantage of the discount code below:

 Go to www.3dmicpro.com and use coupon code VL3D2011 during checkout for a 15% discount.

The basic thing you need to know about this microphone, is that it has two high quality mics that are spaced apart roughly the same distance as your ears are from one another.   It also utilizes a sound modifier technology which captures immersive sound just like we hear it.    Most, if not all mics out there are mono mics – and a normal stereo microphone cannot record the same information in the same manner.   The beauty of this system is that you can handhold the Mitra mic or put it on a small tripod and let it roll.   Just monitor your levels and you can have this incredibly immersive sound out of the box.   You can then mix it into 5.1 if you want as well.  

I think every film crew that needs good, natural sound should take a look at one of these – especially time lapse photographers/videographers.  It adds an ENTIRE NEW DIMENSION to your video.  There are two versions – the PRO and INDIE versions which differ mostly in the XLR outputs and related electronics, however both mics have the identical sound processing engine, and both record the same quality audio.

Special thanks to TJ Walker from Boombox Group Productions for allowing us to use the footage from our shoot on Alcatraz.  More to come on that soon…