Shooting in anger
ANGRY PHOTOGRAPHER is the first TV series to be captured with ALEXA in China, where most TV productions are shot with lower-end video and digital cameras. Hou Yong, the director of the show, is also a famous Chinese cinematographer who has worked on productions such as THE BLUE KITE and THE ROAD HOME. Recently, ARRI spoke with Hou and the director of photography for the series, Shi Luan, about their experiences.
ARRI: What was your approach to the visual style of the series?
Shi Luan: Our goal was for the images to look more like film. Due to the budget, we did have to consider other cameras, but after we negotiated with the producers they respected the reasons behind our choice of ALEXA. It also helped that we have a close relationship with our equipment supplier, Cinerent, who provided our entire camera package.
I decided to test if ALEXA could work in such cold weather without the accessories, and it turned out it could. It was -36ºC.
ARRI: What were the other factors behind your decision to use ALEXA?
Hou Yong: We chose ALEXA in part because of its capability to use cine lenses, which we are more familiar with. We actually didn’t fully appreciate the camera’s real image quality until we were grading. The fact that ALEXA records to in-camera SxS PRO cards was a big thing for us. Before we started I wanted to know what the difference was between recording on an SxS card and an external recorder such as the Codex. I asked Shi Luan about this issue, and he said he’d worked with ALEXA before and the SxS workflow would suit us better. Because this was a TV series we shot a lot of footage every day, plus we had three cameras, so we couldn’t record audio on a separate recorder — we needed to record audio in-camera. We found that the audio recording on ALEXA is good enough for making a TV series.
via ARRI Group: News.
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