To round out 2016, we had the exciting opportunity to work with Canon Canada to create a short film with their new flagship C700 camera. This film will be featured as part of the launch which will take place January 12th at Canon’s Mississauga HQ. The film is five and a half minutes. We shot the film over 2 days in Toronto in early December, using a cafe and a former soap factory as our primary locations.
My partner Francis Luta came up with a moody concept which we thought would allow us to use the camera in a variety of lighting conditions as well as with different motion platforms. We had seen the films created by Canon USA and Japan, which are beautiful and certainly show how lovely this camera’s sensor is and its ability to capture a huge dynamic range with grace. So as not to redo what had already been done with these films, we wanted to create a film that was darker and grittier, to explore these abilities of the camera’s sensor.
We shot part of the film with the camera in anamorphic mode – using the Vantage V-Lite lenses. The other half of the film was shot with Cooke S5/i lenses. In the final piece, the aspect ratio changes accordingly. Everything shown in this film is in-camera; there is no green screen or VFX work. We simply graded the film with Walt Biljan at RedLab Toronto. We shot ProRes HQ 422 (4K) internally. This allowed us a maximum frame rate of 29.97fps. The camera has gorgeous image quality, its fantastic that Canon has brought this level of cinema camera to the scene as another choice of capture.
Working with Michael Darby at William F. Whites Toronto, we incorporated the Technodolly so that we could shoot a scene where we see a transition from day to night in the same shot. We also used his new Dactylcam Pro cable cam system combined with the new ShotOver G1 stabilized head to achieve some remarkable large sweeping shots that would have been impossible to do otherwise with the time and resources we had for this small shoot.