I thought today, what with the wind-whipped fires racing towards the beach, would be a good day to have a picnic at Zuma. Here’s what it looked like. I didn’t use a real camera, just a cell cam. The wind and sand were crazy and would have ruined my Nikon.

I’m taking today off to get props with Kathi. So much to do, so little time… but it’s all great fun and the work looks and sounds way better than anything I’ve ever been involved with before.

This weekend we’re shooting 3 scenes, one of which will be my first ever with kids. We had a lot of fun casting the kids, so it should be a lot of fun on set. I don’t have kids of my own and my family lives far away, so it’s a blast to get to work with little ones. After we shoot the goldfish scene we’re back to my place for two more scenes between Amy and Heather.

Production is going really well, although it is a bit hard schedule-wise. Next weekend we have several scenes to get and only about 6 hours total of daylight to get them in, thanks to the whole “seasons” thing. You know that story in the Bible about the guy who held up his hands and kept the sun from setting? I could use him right about now.

I also have a new lens on order- I love the images I’m getting, but the wide lens I’ve been using isn’t of the same quality as the Nikon and Zeiss lenses. So I’m getting a really high end Nikon wide angle zoom. It’ll be here in time for next weekend’s big shoot- where Dr. Amy and Nathan start to connect. I know I’ll be using it a lot for that. And of course, it’ll be used with Amy and Heather at the Fortune Teller’s.

On a technical note, I’ve been playing with images from a Red One lately. This is the camera that’ll probably be used on our next season of episodes, and it’s amazing. After playing with RAW, I can’t imagine using normal video or even film. The keys one can pull are absolutely stunning, and that’ll help me a lot with my dayjob.

Here’s a bunch of raw frame grabs from the camera. Again, these are all straight off the camera and we’ll do a lot of post processing before we get to the final edits. But from a DP’s perspective, I’m pretty happy with the images this little system is making. It’s not like 35mm. It’s much more like super16, on a good day I think.

More importantly, from a director’s standpoint I’m really VERY happy with the performances too.

Tech is, again: HVX200 with Brevis 35mm adapter, lenses by Nikon and Zeiss. And one cheapie lens. Which shall go un-named.

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