Anyway, hope u find it interesting.
Thought I would do a series of posts from the start of production through to the final finished product. Hope you guys find this interesting. I'm only 23 so a great learning curve it has been!!!!
Ok, first post – lets talk about the camera.
I wanted a cheap 16mm camera with a wide angle zoom lens and a budget video tap. They don't really exist - so I made my own.
I bought this k3 of eBay for £120 and fortunately it ran ok. I purchased the lens from some guy in Russia; it’s a 7.5mm – 75mm from a Kinor 16, which is based on a Zeiss model. This lens is amazing; forget your distorted 8mm peleng! I then sent the lens to Olex from http://www.geocities.com/russiancamera/index.htm who set the flange focal distance and modified to fit my bayonet k3. Olex is an extremely helpful, talented and honest man who did a fab job. I also sent the body to him as well. He continued to remove the loop formers, cleaned the ground glass, re set the flange focal distance and gave the whole thing a good polish. The matte box is made by Lee Filters. I modified the inside and also made up some custom-made lens support bars. All filters are placed at the rear of the lens. I also wanted a video tap to make tracking shots easier. A small security camera is connected to a small LCD monitor. Both items run off a special 12volt battery. The screen is only used for framing.
Check out the pics!
FIRST DAY OF SHOOTING
The first day started badly, I had a blow out on the motorway, front tyre at 70mph. I had to off-load all my kit onto the hard shoulder to get to the spare wheel. This delayed us by an hour.
The location was amazing. We were fiming in the cellars of this great house.
I used a 4ft 4 bank kino flo for my key. I have never used this light before, but I was amazed with how well it worked
You can see my handy video assist in action. It worked really well for tracking shots
The day ran out of time, I under-estimated the amount of time it took to cart all the gear through the house and back. I didn't film all that i wanted to which was a shame, but the day ran pretty smooth. No camera jams, no fuses blown etc
A couple of screen grabs from the day. They are dv compressed.
Day 2
The second day of shooting went ok. Exterior shots in London. I made some mistakes with not enough fill in places, and once again prob not enough cut aways. I also forgot my ND filters that day, so some shots came back over exposed.
We also did some traking shots from the back of the car which worked very well.
A small selection of grabs from the second day. They are dv compressed and then jpg compressed - hense the quality.
Last day of the shoot - night-time!!!!
I was a bit nervous because I was under-exposing by a full stop the whole time. I did think about push processing but was advised not to. Everything came out ok, the stills do look a little grainy - but when in motion look pretty good. It was regualr 16 cropped to 16:9. Stock was vision 2 500 asa. One thing I do love is the mixture of different colour temps!
It was deffinitely fun, shooting out of a car window whilst driving around two birth in the center of brighton. Good times.
I do wish I could have done a better job, but for a first time on 16mm on a russian wind up camera, it's pretty good i guess
A few more grabs for u guys.
The set up
Cheers - bit long I know - sorry!
The 500T at night looks great! I need to try some of that out. ;)