Cinema Raw

Shooting and Color Grading with the Ikonoskop, Digital Bolex, and Blackmagic Cinema Cameras

Kurt Lancaster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138425958
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135040314
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

With the next generation of raw cinema cameras you can finally shoot professionally with uncompressed raw motion pictures—without compromising your image or your budget. In Cinema Raw: Shooting and Color Grading with the Ikonoskop, Digital Bolex, and Blackmagic Cinema Cameras, Lancaster takes you through the birth of these new cameras and includes an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Digital Bolex. He field tests each camera and discusses the importance of shooting in raw and guides you through the raw color grading process so you can create stunning films. Interviews with professionals who have shot documentaries, shorts, and promotionals with these cameras are featured throughout, allowing you to learn field production techniques under real world conditions.

FEATURES:

• Behind-the-scenes case studies for the next generation of low budget cinema cameras

• Recommended gear lists to begin your raw shooting experience

• Full color post workflows that help you realize your boldest cinematic visions

• A companion website (www.kurtlancaster.com) featuring raw projects covered in the book; video interviews with the creators of the Digital Bolex, Joe Rubinstein and Elle Schneider; and resources for further study of raw cinema

PART I

Getting the Raw Deal

CHAPTER 1

Creating a New Paradigm

Behind the Scenes at Digital Bolex¹

GETTING THE BOLEX BRAND

Joe Rubinstein and Elle Schneider radiate energy like thousand watt bulbs, and it’s infectious. They’re fun to be around.² They certainly don’t suit-up with executive airs, as corporate spokespeople do at other camera companies. Some might think they should, especially when you take on the 85-year-old Bolex brand. They’re the South-By hipsters who upended the camera world during the spring 2012 music and film festival in Austin by announcing the first CinemaDNG raw camera for $2500 on their Kickstarter.com campaign.

And as some Kickstarter projects feel half-slapped together, this is what many people at first thought about the Digital Bolex announcement. Indeed, at first glance people may have felt a certain wannabe attitude—if RED couldn’t pull it off with Jim Jannard resources for their original Scarlet, if Canon couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do it with their DSLRs, then how could these upstarts make it happen? One such post at prolost.com, commented:

Aren’t these two just adorkable? I desperately want them to succeed. But after watching the well-financed and well-intentioned Red Digital Cinema company struggle to deliver on their promises, and abandon the “3K for $3K” design/price-point of their Scarlet camera, one has to wonder if these filmmakers-turned-cameramakers have any idea of the challenges they’re about to face.³

FIGURES 1.1 and 1.2
Joe Rubinstein, CEO and camera developer, and Elle Schneider, creative director of Digital Bolex. They’re the brain trust behind the Digital Bolex. (© 2013 Kurt Lancaster.)

Indeed, they are rebels who want to challenge the prosumer video camera market. As Schneider, wearing angled blonde hair sculpting her cheekbones, explains, “The establishment is going to hand you these tools, and these are the only tools that you’re allowed to use”—meaning compressed 8-bit video cameras, DSLR or otherwise. She feels that “[i]f any of these major camera companies had wanted to release a raw camera, they could have done so years ago.”

Their partner in Switzerland believed in them, and the Bolex company ended up donating to their Kickstarter campaign. But it wasn’t an easy win for Rubinstein, sporting shoulder-length brown hair, who spent nine months putting together a market research paper before contacting Bolex, asking them to partner with his vision for a digital Bolex, to use their brand name. Executives told him to contact their American distributors first. He did so. They told him to contact Bolex headquarters. He explained to them that he had already done that. Rubinstein says he contacted all of the American distributors and got them:

excited about the project, and then I asked them to contact Bolex and say, “Hey, this is actually a good idea.” So a lot of them did that. And I went back to Bolex, a month later, and I said, “Okay, so I’ve talked to everybody you suggested that I talk to, and they all said I have to talk to you, ‘cause, you know, you’re the real deal,” and they said, “Okay, write us a description of what you’re trying to do.”

And that’s when he told them that he had a market research paper. Rubinstein, if anything, is persistent.

FROM FILM EDITOR TO CAMERA DEVELOPER

Originally, Rubinstein wanted to be a film editor. In film school at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia other students asked him to shoot their projects for them, because of the quality of work he did on his own films. And he agreed, as long as he could also edit their films. He graduated with an editing reel and a cinematography reel, which helped him land a job as an editor for a documentary “about freight train-riding hobos” funded through Project Greenlight in the early 2000s.

But after wading through 250 hours of footage—delivering a rough cut six months later—he fell out of love with editing. “It was such a miserable experience for me,” Rubinstein says, “that I basically never took another editing job and switched to a focus on DP.” He worked as a director of photography for about five years and felt it was much more natural for him to be on set, and shooting mostly on 16mm film. By the mid-2000s, the prosumer HD camera revolution hit, with Panasonic’s HVX series camera and its proprietary P2 cards being released in December 2005. But rather than jumping on the affordable high-res HD bandwagon like many independent filmmakers, Rubinstein—similar to his experience with editing—“fell out of love with shooting.” He told me, “It was no longer fun for me” due to issues with “compression, and because of the extreme hurdles to technology that were set up.”

It was much easier to shoot on film, Rubinstein felt. With a film camera, he explains, “you have film stock, you have frame rate, and it becomes all about lighting and lenses and f-stops. And when we move to HD it became more about in-camera settings than it was about the stuff that I loved about shooting.”

Rubinstein got out of the film game, partnered with one of his college buddies, and attempted “about ten different business models” using the original Canon 5D (which came out in August 2005). He was inspired by the book Free: The Future of Radical Price by Chris Anderson, which Rubinstein explains is “about how to give your product away for free, but still make money.” He may have failed on his first ten tries, but after he and his business partner read that book, they shaped their business model around it, creating the company Polite in Public. (See Figure 1.3.)

The company used a photo booth with studio quality paper and raw images for event marketing—the photo contained an advertisement at the bottom. As Rubinstein says:

So you go to a party for Warner Brothers and there’s this really cool photo booth that has studio quality cameras, studio quality lighting, studio quality retouching, you get your picture in two minutes, and it looks like a magazine photo, and it says Warner Brothers across the bottom, for instance.

FIGURE 1.3
Rubinstein’s former advertising/photobooth company, Polite in Public, using raw photo technology, garnered him success and he started researching how he could take it to the next level with raw video, but no such camera existed at the time. (Courtesy of Polite in Public, Inc.)

By 2008, the company got popular, really popular. “Where most companies in 2008 sort of collapsed, we grew 800 percent,” Rubinstein says. He did the hardware design and he worked with software engineers to create custom software. And by a certain point, he wanted to change the model. He wanted a video booth with the same quality of raw coming out of the 5D stills camera. He asked himself the question: “Okay, well how do I make a video boo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• Foreword: Virgin Frames. Untouched by Michael Plescia
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What Camera to Choose? What Story To Tell?
• Part I Getting the Raw Deal
• Part II Raw Production Case Studies
• Part III Raw Postproduction
• Conclusion: The Importance of Color Depth and the Uniqueness of Cameras
• Afterword: The Organic Look of Digital Film by Joseph Rubinstein
• Appendix: Why You Must Have 4K and Raw and Why You Absolutely Don’t Need It by Philip Bloom
• Index