College Comedy on Canon's C300: "Resident Advisor"

I've spent this March and April holed up with a tiny, tightknit crew burning its way across southern California to shoot “Resident Advisor”, a college comedy feature that lives somewhere between a feel-good Jack Black “School of Rock” and a rollicking “Animal House”. A band of impressionable freshman are left alone in the desert when their stick-in-the-mud resident advisor Chip is picked up by the Mexican Border Patrol, and find themselves under the care of Chip's older brother, Dean. It's a fateful pairing, as it turns out that Dean is a living legend of SCSU, now returned to coax these freshmen into becoming the ultimate college students. The film is a first feature for company Pensé Productuons, as well as a first feature for director Colin Sander. The company is built around a core philosophy of self-containment, and some unorthodox production methodology was set in stone long before I was brought on to the project: specifically, gaffer Jimmy Lu and I were restricted to lighting the film with six 1x1 Lite Panels, (four Bi-Colors, two 5600K Super-Spots) a single 5600K MiniPlus Lite Panel, and whatever practicals Production Designer Susanna Lowber and I could work into the scene. Needless to say there were some difficulties, but we always managed to work out way out of the jam.

1st Assistant Robyn Buchanan and I started early preparing the C300 for its first feature film. Canon didn't particularly impress me with the physical presentation of the camera; the fact that they're in good company for poor ergonomics these days (pick any of Red's offerings) is no excuse when a company looks to build a new brand in a targeted market. I don't want any more small cameras, plain and simple. Canon announced their newest flavor of 1D along with their C300; it's the perfect camera to cover that one or two shots a week that can't physically accomodate production's primary camera. Regardless, we get another camera where the key guideline for the design is clearly the tightest configuration of circuitry around the sensor mount. This generated a variety of complications building the kit, starting with the lack of real estate on the camera body to mount accessories; we generated a web of electronics on the rods between the camera and our IDX battery plate. No power adapter was available at the time to allow the camera to run on our IDX batteries, so we had two batteries on our rig at all times. Again, these issues aren't really unique these days, just disappointing when a design team might have had the time to provide a solution.


What was disappointing with the camera was the EF mount. Pensé ordered their C300 with an EF mount to fit their company plans beyond “Resident Advisor”, (I've also heard it wasn't much of a choice: the PL mount option has only recently started shipping) so that's what we had to work with for the show. EF is a perfectly fit mount for its primary still photography purposes, but from the first shot that required remote focus we knew we had a problem. Our CP2s would travel up and down in the mount with every pull, affecting both framing and flange calibration: 1st Asst Robyn Buchanan found her marks would drift with varying inaccuracies. We had the camera looked at by Canon and our lenses by Zeiss; everything was in working order, but we were taxing the EF mount beyond its design tolerances. Of course compromising such basics for the equipment's incapabilities wasn't an option, so Robyn jammed a couple camera wedges in the rig to keep the half-pound lens from traveling and remarked her focus. It wasn't the prettiest solution, but it kept things running.

The image itself is great; although the C300's recording format is immediately disadvantaged in its 8-bit color space and burnt-in image control settings, the Bayer pattern that Canon has designed for this camera yields notably filmic results. With a healthy exposure and healthy color balance, this camera gives handsome images: delicate rendering of detail and fine gradients across its dynamic range are some of the fineries this camera affords. We shot using Canon's Cinelog gamma setting, affording us the camera's full dynamic range and color sensitivity. Much like the Cinestyle picture style designed by Technicolor for Canon's DSLR line, produces images are flat and desaturated, intended for a full color correction workflow; unfortunately, much like with the DSLRs, there is no way to monitor anything but the Cinelog image. Perhaps I've been spoiled dialing in LUTs for my directors and producers to look at with the Red cameras I've come accustomed to, but keep in mind that a perfectly workable tweak toward this functionality was written by the Magic Lantern team for the 5D, T2i, and 60D: the Magic Lantern firmware allows the user to choose a viewing picture style (a refined out created in the picture style editor or a very rough picture style made on the fly in camera) which will automatically switch out for a shooting picture style (typically the Cinestyle). In an ideal world I'd have loved to see the C300 allow me to dial in a “viewing gamma” to send to the monitors and package along as metadata next to the clean Cinelog image recorded to the CF card; at the very least I'd have liked to see the hack-solution available in the $600 camera I had as a scouting viewfinder. (Note that the C300 does have a “View Assist” function, for the purpose of viewing a more palatable image whe shooting Cinelog. Even if this function sent its results out through any of the camera's monitoring ports rather than keeping it bottled between the EVF and C300 LCD, the slightly contrastier and slightly yellower image created by “View Assist” is unlikely to assist anyone)

On the lighting side, I'm as excited as everyone else is about the future of high-efficiency lighting. It took only a couple hours on the set of the commercial spot I shot early this week for Scott Sullivan to remind me that the Tungsten standard is for energy efficiency loses ~98% of input wattage to heat radiation. Of course, it took only a couple minutes to remind me that the tungsten halogen filament generates a spectrum broad and complete enough to render human skin very favorably. It was great being able to quickly place a fixture that weighed less than 5 pounds, toss on a battery, and see it on without anyone having to bother routing power. It was disheartening to see the sickly color tone that the bi-colors took on at 3200K. It was liberating to be able to stuff a fixture into a tight space and not have to worry about burning down our location. It was terribly restricting to know that there were long distance luminances and hard shadows that couldn't be accomplished with these fixtures. High efficiency lighting is changing the way we build our sets and plan our shoots; fixture design workarounds and supplements required from the art department for this show made it clear that LED isn't yet a complete solution. Moving forward I'm particularly excited about Hive's Light Emitting Plasma technology: high energy efficiency bulbs with a spectrum which matches natural daylight, designed with fixtures that fall right in line with the traditional array of lighting instruments (the fresnel, the par, the open face, the ellipsoidal).


Of course, this is all nerd words; the fact of the matter is that we accomplished a great deal with “Resident Advisor” and I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing a cut of the film soon.

Canon C300 EF

Zeiss CP2 Primes, Canon L Series Primes, Canon L Series Zooms

Co. Pensé Productions

Dir. Colin Sander

1st AC Robyn Buchanan

2nd AC Melissa Fisher

2nd AC Matt LaRoche

Gaffer Jimmy Lu