If you've been having some trouble seeing what all the fuss is about with RED DRAGON footage on Vimeo or YouTube, and you've been itching to get your hands on the camera to see what it can do, we've now got the next best thing: RAW footage. Phil Holland, who shared with us some great photos on the set of a DRAGON shoot, had a few hours with the camera himself and has been kind enough to share RAW frames and actual footage for the first time. Check out the RAW samples and the video below from Phil.
RED DRAGON - It's Just Paint
Phil has done a tremendous job with all of the samples and information, and it is greatly appreciated. Download the original 1080p on Vimeo for better quality:
If you'd like to watch it in 4K (or at least greater than 1080p if you've got a capable screen), select 1440p or Original on YouTube:
Red Epic Dragon (Carbon Fiber)
Shoot Date: 10.03.2013
Format: 6K WS, 24-96 fps
Rated ISO: 800 – graded in post ISO 320-2000 (no noise reduction)
Edited in Adobe Premiere Pro CC
Quick Color Grade in Redcine-X Pro
Lenses: Schneider Cine-Xenar III Primes: 18mm-95mm @ T2-T8
Filters Used: Occasionally an ND .9
6K DRAGON REDLog Stills
Here are redlog grabs, 800 ISO (click for the larger 6K version):
Here's one at ISO 3200, everything is still there, and noise looks less chromatic in the blacks than it does on MX:
The first thing you'll “feel” when shooting Dragon is there's a lot more room between the ceiling and the floor if your midtones are rated in the sweet spot of the sensor. There's a big chunk of latitude to be found in the meat of the REDCODE RAW as well. Some of these shots I pushed down to ISO 320 and lifted up to ISO 2000 without any noise reduction, you could even go further.
The full Epic Dragon sensor is a multi-format system. I chose to shoot at 6K WS here, but I can crop into 5K or further just fine. Finishing your material is up to you, just like Mysterium-X. Some prefer the debayer/down organic look. Some will apply post sharpening, especially if they are exporting for print purposes.
I'm doing some finishing experiments at the moment and testing out different sharpening methods, but here's a taste of what you can do.
Thoughts on DRAGON
So while it's not quite the same as actually getting to shoot with the camera, RAW footage tells you exactly what's going on. Something many who've worked with DRAGON so far have mentioned is just how clean the sensor is and how thick your "negative" is. DRAGON seems to be tempting you to push it. Not only does it definitely have more latitude than MX, but it's so much cleaner that you might not believe your eyes. At times 800 ISO can be a little noisy on the old sensor depending on how much you underexpose. Not so with DRAGON. Plenty of shoots will be consistently working at 1250 and 1600 ISO indoors. Downscaling from 6K makes the little noise that's there even less noticeable.
I think most of the comments so far have spoken about not being impressed by the footage, but it's hard to not be impressed once you get this footage into REDCINE-X. It's all there and more. The outdoor scene above is a great example of that. The talent has no fill, and the darker balcony and brighter background are all held by the camera. The tiny bit of overexposure on the tent rolls off very gently.
Footage generally feels softer and more film-like when contrast is lower, and I've seen plenty of ALEXA footage that looks practically ungraded. If you want something like that look, it's pretty clear you can get it with the new sensor. It will be really interesting what this sensor will be capable of when new color science is released. I imagine there is probably a bit more dynamic range hidden in there somewhere, so we'll just have to reexamine the footage once more when the new color science made for DRAGON is released.
We're probably going to see many more music videos shot with the camera in the coming months, so there will soon be no shortage of examples with the new sensor in all sorts of lighting situations and skin tone variations.
After playing with the sample clips, what do you think about DRAGON?
I’ve always been drawn to movies that build worlds.
A unique setting can be a powerful storytelling tool and a memorable experience. Would The Thing feel as isolating set in a diner? That said, would creating such locations often seems out of reach for low-budget films. You’re usually stuck with sensible, easy-to-find locations. How many finales happen at a construction site?
There’s a reason for that.
But you don’t need a big budget to create compelling worlds. For Stalker’s Prey 3: A Predator Returns, our the villain lives in a lighthouse on a rocky island in the ocean.
Stalker’s Prey 3 is an ultra-low-budget, campy-fun, made-for-TV movie that aired on Lifetime. We didn’t have much time or money, but wanted to attempt something bigger and more conceptually unique than the traditional suburban stalker story.
The script was originally written for Falkner’s Island.
It's a real place with a lighthouse and a few buildings. When we couldn’t get permission to shoot there, we moved to plan B: creating the location ourselves. I identified the essential components for the story: a lighthouse, a dock, a shoreline, and an abandoned house—al isolated feels. Then, we set out to find their real-world counterparts.
Finding the lighthouse was the hardest part. Coastal lighthouses were accessible but surrounded by things we’d need to remove in post-production, which would be too expensive.
That's when we found the New London Ledge lighthouse, a stunning structure on a concrete block in the harbor.
The New London Ledge Lighthouse
It looked great but was a logistical nightmare with no water, electricity, or outlets for lighting and cameras. Luckily producer Andrew Gernhard found a lighthouse at the end of a long rock jetty, isolated and perfect for filming.
This was our lighthouse.
The exterior was great, but inside the lighthouse was too modernized. So I reimagined the story to place the keeper’s house and lighthouse on opposite ends of an island shaped like a barbell, connected by a rock jetty.
I revised the script to match this new shooting plan, re-working some action to account for the layout. There was no longer a grassy island around the lighthouse to hide on. The entire “island” could be captured in a single frame. The separation offered new opportunities: views from one spot to the other, a linear chase across the jetty, and the fun light from the lighthouse sweeping the keeper’s house once every revolution. Neat!
Next, we needed a keeper’s house. We couldn’t find a suitable one on an island, so we used a house in the city with an unobstructed view of the back across its yard. If we could place this house on our fake island, it would work.
With our anchoring elements set, we filled in the details. Swimming at the lighthouse wasn’t safe, so we needed a matching shoreline. I picked a rock jetty on the beach where we were already filming. Underwater shots would be done in a pool with black cloth backdrops. Boat scenes would be filmed at a marina that we were also using for other scenes, giving us easy access to boats. This is the sort of planning that lets a movie get more out of its budget, using locations for multiple purposes.
Planning angles was the next step. Whether using real or fake locations, the shooting plan needs to capture the action and also communicate geography to the audience. Think of it like taking pictures of the inside of a house intended to explain the layout. If you’ve chosen your angles right, after you show someone the pictures, they would be able to answer the question “how would you get from the upstairs bedroom to the kitchen closet?” Then, stage your story on top of those angles.
I thought about which angles would best explain our fictional setting and found the closest approximation of them that I could piece together from real-world spots. Of course, I found the version of that approximation that could also be achieved with our time and equipment.
Too often, even in big-budget films, we see big wide shots followed by tight, disorienting coverage that could have been shot anywhere. That’s not a good solution and it feels conceptually lazy. Story geography should be reinforced throughout the movie, especially if it’s important later. Story geography needs to be really clear because your audience is not actively trying to put it together. To reference my previous analogy, the person you’re showing the photos to doesn’t know that they will be asked a question after seeing them. The audience of your movie needs to understand the space as a side effect of watching the story unfold. In this movie, I wanted the space well understood so that when we get to the finale, we know what the hero’s options are she tries to escape, run, and hide.
Starting with the house, I decided the back porch would face the jetty and lighthouse. This minimized compositing. When the camera was on the porch looking toward the door, no compositing was needed at all. It was just a house.
When looking toward the lighthouse, we shot on the jetty, also without compositing.
With the camera on the porch looking at the lighthouse, we placed a green screen in the yard to comp the lighthouse beyond the porch, which itself obscured the seam where locations met below the frame.
We also needed to see the house from the lighthouse direction. For close shots, we filmed the house from the yard and cut it out, putting the real house on a virtual island.
For distant shots, we made a digital version of the house because there was no real-world way to get a sufficiently distant perspective on the house. I created a digital island and planned coverage at the lighthouse to show the house sparingly, avoiding a heavy VFX load.
We also needed aerial shots. This would help establish the big picture and also to match the style of the rest of the movie. To achieve them, I used the same digital house, shortening the jetty and placing the house at the new “end.” Drone shots from the lighthouse side kept the house away from the camera, making the island and seam between real and fake simple. I mostly used 2D pictures of rocks.
Next came the special stuff.
The movie opens with a 10-page shark attack sequence at night, where kids sneak onto the island, have a bonfire, swim, get attacked by a shark, and are rescued by the villain’s boat. This big set piece is both inciting incident and designed to establish the the geography of the location.
There’s a lot of detail about this sequence in my video, but the basic approach was the same. I broke down the things that needed to happen into places that we could shoot them. While we were allowed to swim at the lighthouse, it would have been dangerous and difficult for a whole host of reasons, so I opted to double the rocks of the jetty with another jetty on a beach we were using elsewhere in the movie.
For shots in the water, we used the ocean right off of the same beach next to the jetty, using the jetty for a light placement. We shot in a pool with black fabric backdrops to get some more controlled water shots, including underwater shots. And we shot at a dock to get the boat actions as well as climbing out of the water.
A dinghy was the target of the swimming contest. We hauled it to each location: the beach, pool, and the lighthouse. Lighting can help audiences understand geography. In this case, we put a spinning orange safety light in the dingy. The lighthouse had a spinning green signal light. These two colored lights were easy to spot, but also motivated extremely identifiable lighting. A character with green on one side and orange on the other would be identifiable as between those two objects in the story space.
Some minimal compositing linked it all up. I put the lighthouse into wide shots at the beach jetty and the dinghy into shots looking out to sea.
There are loads of other tricks too of course, like staging action to ensure your characters move actively between the key spaces to force the audience to link them. I really wish I had been able to do more of this in this project.
In it’s most basic for, for instance, you could show a host character walk from a kitchen to the front hallway to say goodbye to a guest. The guest picks up a coat on the way out the door, revealing the living room. And then the host walks to the bedroom, establishing that the windows face the driveway. Now the audience knows which direction the kitchen windows face, and that someone in the living room could see anyone coming or going.
The most important step is tracking your geography.
Na important note: you may have it all planned out, but the crew and cast won’t know the plan. Explain the artificial space to everyone ahead of time.
I drew a map and, at each location and in each new setup, explained where things were in the story space. I checked eye lines and light positions to ensure everything is properly situated. This one scene was shot across five locations, five days, and 13 physical configurations with different geographical cheats.
It’s important that everyone trust that you have a plan, so do your homework.
At its core, this is about simple filmmaking tricks adding up to build a coherent space. I’m not saying that this illusion was perfect or that it looked photorealistic, but it was understandable to the audience and let us do bigger and cooler things on a movie that otherwise would have had none of it. These techniques aren't tricks only visual effects professionals use. It’s work I was able to do my myself with commonly available software in the same production period as any other Lifetime film.
In prep, decide to “assemble” the location.
Then determine which angles to show and identify how to create them from real-world elements. Use eyelines, motivated light, landmarks, and other cheats to build as many links between your real shots and the points in your scene’s story geography as possible. Complete the illusion with some simple compositing, hiding seams and weak spots. Be flexible and revise the plan as needed.
Try to find ways to use locations for more than one purpose to get more on-screen variation out of fewer physical moves. Low-budget filmmaking requires adaptability.
Know your tools and be ready to move your goalposts.
Falkner’s Island image credit Greg Thompson/USFWS (creative commons attribution 2.0 license
The New London Ledge Lighthouse
This was our lighthouse.
