A graded still, a part of a ongoing looktest from Dylan Hopkin

Its been almost a year since last update, and for good reasons. I have just completed shooting the second season of TV2 Norways “Det Tredje Øyet”. An episodic crime-drama about a policeman who has lost his daughter (last season) and is now trying to continue his life as a detective. Lots of great action this season, and also a great new set of characters. Ive been fortunate enough to do 7 episodes, 1-5 and 9 and 10 with Gunnar Vikene as director. We have continued our handheld/documentary-style approache, whith a few additions. Documentary in camera style and approach, but not necessarily with regards to lighting. We are trying to mix color temperatures, putting warm against cold backgrounds, or vice versa, inspired by the great series “Gomorrah”.

117 days of shooting…!

I decided to shoot on the C500 this season, for a few reasons. Firstly. we wanted to continue the look from first season, which was shot on c300. Secondly, we had some good experiences from shooting “Dag” season 4 on the system, and with a few changes, we buildt a quite comprehensive handheld package. We needed to be built for handheld, since the show was going to be almost 100% handheld. But I didnt want to be on an easyrig all the time, since I feel that it limits and degrades my options in a lot of scenarios. For instance, long walk/talk scenes, where the easyrig will add movement from my hips. So, a well balanced rig for handheld work was necessary. We got an EVF from B&H which isn’t a great brand, but had the specs we were looking for at an OK price. It actually held up every shooting day, whithout errors. Amazing. The Zacuto VCT Baseplate was the one that made the camera as low as possible from my shoulder and up. I am a quite tall operator, so the RedRock ultra cage added additional cm to the setup. Also, the VCT baseplate had onboard shoulder cushions, and is very quick from handheld mode to tripod.

A typical two camera setup. Myself on a twoshot, and Sindre (my b-camera operator) on a closeup

We changed the external recorder from PIX240 to Odyssey 7q+ for a couple of reasons. Firstly. we thought we had more recording options on the q7+. It was also abit lighter than the q7+, and could double as a directors monitor on small setups. Our boom operator was also quite happy with having a nice monitor to check our frame lines. We did have more slow-motion recording option on the q7+, but with regards to being able to record 4444 out of the camera in a format that was actually possible to do on such a long shoot (NOT DNX) we were disappointed at first. But we did our camera tests, and we could not actually justify the increased storage space with what we saw on screen. 4444 is technically better, but ProRes HQ 422 is quite good enough. In the end, this season has a final storage requirement at almost 50TB. We have shot so much material and that a 4444 season would easily double or triple that number.

Car-scenes with three projectors

I was finally able to do car-scenes in the way that Hollywood does them this year. Together with Bright, the biggest stage-equipemt rental company in Norway, we shot car-scenes in studio, with three projectors as the (almost) only light source. This took a lot of planning and preparations, which should get its own blog post I guess, but we manages to shoot 10+ pages a day in this setup. Imagine what that would have cost on a low-loader setup, where you can get much less done pr. day.

The season is currenly in editing, and I am being invited to see almost locked picture-edits weekly. Its looking great, really intense, and our visions for the season seems to hold true. Looking forward to be able to post more stuff soon, and hopefully a trailer