Award Winning Film, “The Forest” Debuts Shot With BMPCC

Many of the locations, including mountains, deep jungle, and waterfalls could not be reached by car. This would necessitate a compact camera package and a minimal crew.

Spurrier investigated a camera that would provide a picture quality sufficient for big-screen presentation, but small enough to be carried on 15-mile treks.

The obvious choice was a DSLR. But there were clear limitations: Firstly, there were few DSLRs on the market that could record in RAW, meaning that the images would be compressed by the cameras’ internal codecs. The inability to record in RAW and the limited dynamic range would make it hard to capture the highlights in the bright skies of Thailand.

Also, while the shallow-focus look is somewhat fashionable, Spurrier wanted more depth of field.

Firstly, he didn’t want backgrounds to blur into total softness.  But there was a practical element too. There was no room on the crew for a focus-puller. The shallow-focus look would risk shots being out of focus. Spurrier’s first film ‘Underground’ was shot on Super 16, and he liked the look. It would provide a depth-of-field shallow enough to not look like ‘video,’ but deep enough to

hold the actors’ natural movements.

Spurrier also wanted to be able to use his own treasured Arri Zeiss Prime lenses, which would help give an overall slightly softer, more filmic look.

The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera has a Super 16 size sensor, and recorded RAW, so was an obvious candidate.Its tiny form would also make it an ideal camera for carrying up mountains.

But Spurrier was initially worried about making an entire film on a camera the size of a cigarette pack. Could it give the quality that he wanted? So he set about testing it.

I was amazed by the tests. I soon realized that not only did it produce extremely high-quality images, but that it had a quality that I really liked. I did not want the desaturated look that is still somewhat fashionable. Nor did I want to crush the blacks. I wanted to capture the vibrant colors of the jungle, the skies, and the sunsets. I wanted a ‘Kodak’ look, and the BMPCC gave that.”

What about the fact that it captures in HD resolution, when 4k seems to be all the rage? “Well, the first thing I did was seek advice from colleagues in post-production, and I found to my

surprise that 100% of DCPs screened in Thailand are 2k (apart perhaps from IMAX). I could not think of any real advantage in shooting in 4k only to have to render in post to 2k. Of course, people

ability to zoom into the pixels to check focus was incredibly useful. The light in Thailand can be incredibly bright, and a set of Formatt ND filters was absolutely vital.

It’s not often in the UK that you have to use a 1.8 ND, but on this film we used it a lot. A hot mirror filter was used to cut out the IR contamination, and polarisers and ND grads also helped.

A second BMPCC was permanently on a Nebula 4000 gimbal. This is a strange piece of equipment, with a mind of its own that would occasionally pan away unexpectedly. But when it behaved, it

created some wonderful shots. I was able to run as fast as I could with it, and it held the shots amazingly steady.”

“To be honest, no. Again, coming from a film background meant that we didn’t roll camera until we had rehearsed and were ready to shoot. It may sound a bit silly, but I started to think of a memory card as being the equivalent of a roll of 16mm film, and it instilled the same sense of discipline.”

Any tips on using the BMPCC? ‘I had heard that the sensor had a native ISO of 800 and that it would perform best at that setting. Yet, I very rarely shot at 800 ISO. I found that while shooting at 400 or 200 might slightly reduce the dynamic range, it produced remarkably clean blacks, and after seeing the results, was very happy to shoot daylight exteriors at 200 ISO. I must say it is still a little strange to me to expose for the highlights in a scene rather than to expose for the skin tones of the actors. I worried initially when shooting scenes where the actors were against a bright sky. I could not believe that underexposing their faces (ultimately the most important’ thing in the frame was a wise idea. But the results proved to me that this was indeed the right approach and that only a little bounced or fill light was enough to bring the actors’ faces into a range where the colorist could have enough exposure to work with.

While the sensor worked very happily with my 16mm prime lenses, the sensor is larger than standard 16mm, and we had to be a little careful to avoid vignetting on my 10-100 Zeiss zoom. But

it wasn’t really an issue since we only ever used the zoom at the telephoto end. Another wonderful aspect of the camera is its simplicity. It feels like you’re just reading the image off the sensor and storing it to RAW in the simplest possible way. We were using an old firmware version that didn’t allow formatting of cards in camera. I can understand why the later firmware added that function, but in fact, I felt rather reassured that nothing I could do in camera would erase the precious shots. It proved 100% reliable, and we never lost a single shot. Some have criticized the camera’s internal sound recording quality. I can’t say. Again, we recorded sound separately on a sound recorder, and used a clapperboard to sync, though the camera sound assisted enormously in the syncing process.”

“We used Blackmagic Davinci Resolve for grading. One of the things I particularly liked is that I was able to tweak the RAW settings myself to get a neutral grade before the footage got to our