So, last weekend I finally started my first big film project acting as DP and director. We were on a very tight schedule, determined to shoot six demanding scenes in only two shooting days. Things got pretty hectic, but we had a lot of fun and in the end we managed to get everything done just in time.

Before getting into details about the shooting, the equipment we used and the problems we ran into let me first tell you a bit about ‘Glassworks’. A few months ago my dear friend Phil who is a talented musician currently working under the pseudonym xun finished his first ambient album ‘Frameworks’ (you can stream it on his bandcamp profile). I love his music and since I already created the album artwork I was eager to use some of the tracks on upcoming shorts I wanted to shoot. Talking to Phil about this we came up with the idea to both make a promotional video for the title track ‘Glassworks’ and at the same time tell one of the stories I wanted to tell in a short film. One thing led to another, in the end I wrote a script for it and both Phil and I agreed that Glassworks and my ideas on how to adapt it on screen were a perfect fit. Glassworks in motion was born!

We teamed up with an exceptional friend of Phil’s, a woman both talented in acting and being the kindest person in the world – she played the female part in the story while Phil himself took on the male part. I directed and shot the whole thing, my girlfriend acting as 1st AC and mastermind keeping everything together. Without her everything would have descended into chaos! You should keep in mind, you always need someone who can keep track of things, especially when the whole concept comes from a DP and a musician ;-)
Everyone of the crew committed so much to this project, which I am very thankful for.

As I already mentioned earlier, we were on a very tight schedule. We started shooting on Saturday morning at around 5am trying to get a glimpse of the sunrise; unfortunately it got very foggy, which in the end was good, because we got some even nicer shots on a large empty field due to that. The first scene takes place at an old abandoned railway (see the still on top of this entry); unfortunately, the railway we shot on was far from old and abandoned; we probably got lucky due to the early hour though and no trains passed while we shot for about 4 hours straight.

Of course I used my 550D for all of the shots upgraded with the official battery grip. The lens I used most was my 50mm/f1.8 which I stopped down to f2.8 to get the sharpest image possible. I didn’t stop down further than that in any of the shots to keep the nice shallow DoF we all like so much. For stabilization is mostly used my DIY bodypod made out of a cheap monopod (I got the idea from Cheesycam). I’ll shoot a video-review about it soon, so stay tuned for more info on that one. Let me just tell you that it performed so well, I did almost all shots with it and very rarely used my Goldphoto tripod. I love it when the camera breaths to a certain extend; I feel you get a lot more emotion across than with a 100% steady image.
To focus properly I used my recently acquired LCDVF (watch my video review here) – my first real field test with it. I want to say it performed awesome, that I will never ever buy a Z-Finder in my whole life, but that would be a lie. It worked okay, I was able to focus with it much better than without, but it did have some drawbacks. After shooting for a few hours I felt it getting harder and harder to focus with it properly; I can only assume this is due to the 2x magnification, which really is a bit small after some time. Whats even worse was that the VF constantly fell off my camera – I know I praised its steadiness in my video review, but whenever I walked around with the camera and wasn’t careful enough, I accidentally threw it down with my hand/arm/various other body parts. I now see why Zacuto changed all the Z-Finders which are now mounted directly to the camera. Another really nasty problem was fog on the lens: for some reason, the lens of the LCDVF was covered in fog like all the time due to the humid weather. This was so annoying, I constantly had to clean it! The Z-Finder seems to have a Anti-Fog lens, which sounds pretty tempting after experiencing this.
I’m now thinking about biting the bullet and paying the 400 bucks for a Z-Finder. It’s half the price of the 550Ds body, which is quite a lot. But the LCDVF does have so many drawbacks and the Z-finder seems to be more than worth the money.
But for now I’ll stick with the LCDVF and get myself something else first – a external monitor for the camera!

… which leads me to another problem. Since I wanted to do a lot of low level shots, I very often wasn’t even able to put on the LCDVF to focus. With the camera on the ground I couldn’t see anything of what I was shooting and had to do annoying trial & error shots. That’s when I realized the need of a external monitor. I’ve been searching for an affordable solution for some time now, but didn’t really think of it as absolutely necessary. It is! I’ll keep looking and keep you posted on this topic.

Now that I’m writing about all of this I’m even happier we did this shooting – I’ve learned so much in just two days about all the equipment I use and the equipment I thought about getting; I realized why things like external monitors, camera stabilization and follow focus are not only nice2have but actually do contribute to the final product. When it comes to follow focus e.g. I could have used one at various occasions trying to pull focus from Phil back to Larina (our actress) and the other way around.

I also put my DIY slider into test at this shooting. I’ll make it short: it was no good. I got the idea from this forum entry,
but I wanted to make it more stable which in the end made it even worse ;-) I guess there’s a reason why these things are so expensive. Anyways, I got my eye on the Indi-Slider and the Indi-FollowFocus from IndiSystems. They seem to be nice, I’ll check both of them out soon.

Apart from the mentioned difficulties with the equipment I managed to capture some nice shots; in the end, the 550D is a great camera that produces amazing footage. In our final scene which takes place in a dark and grungy building the 550 had to show its low light capabilities. I performed quite well, especially since we didn’t have any additional lightning equipment. We did bring some fluorescent lamps I found in the attic but didn’t consider the flickering it produces on video. In the end we used the available light which also was quite nice since the afternoon sun gleamed through the broken windows into the building creating nice light & shadow effects. Nevertheless I had to shoot at ISO800 and sometimes even at ISO1600 (nasty nasty grain). I hope to get rid of some of this in post.

The scene I’m most proud of: we made some shots in the woods at night using our car’s headlights as light source ;-) You wouldn’t believe how well they performed! Check out some of the photos below and see for yourself.

This is pretty much everything important I can think of right now – everything I thought you guys might be interested in. As usual, if you have any further questions just post them in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them.

You can check out some making of photos and stills from the movie below. I also made a little teaser to give you guys an idea of the mood the film is going to be in. I hope you like it!

Making of photos:

Thanks a bunch to Sabine for the making of photos!

Screen caps: