C300 Demo: XXIT by Sam Nicholson

[Chris Hurd]

Most of these shots were composited against a green screen:

XXIT on Vimeo

Behind The Scenes:

XXIT Behind The Scenes on Vimeo

[Chris Hurd]

Recently made available for embedding here... thus the bump.

[Alister Chapman]

Excellent way to show off the C300. Just shows that these new cameras can in the right hands produce excellent results, especially under controlled lighting. It struggles a bit more on the exteriors, the dog at 081.5 is well clipped. So now we can see that there is no reason why anyone with cheap camera can't make a movie other than perhaps budget.

Would love to know what the savings on the overall budget was compared to using either a film camera or say Arri Alexa. That's not a criticism of the C300, great tool, but I'd really like to see some real figures. Of course as well as saving on the camera body, lighter and smaller grip equipment can be used, possibly resulting in a smaller crew. There is possibly a reduction in post cost as well. It would be nice to see some honest cost comparisons. I'm quoting for a project next year and looking at cameras, including Alexa, F3 and F65. Overall the camera makes a difference to the budget, but crew, travel, locations, post etc are a much bigger share of the costs than the camera alone.

Anyone know what the budget was?

[Brian Drysdale]

In this particular case it may be difficult to do since shorts can have a tendency not to have real world commercial figures. There are often favours involved, with facility and rental companies coming on board for all kinds of reasons and offering extremely cut price deals.

Dramas tend to heavier duty gear anyway, so I'm not sure if the Pee Wee dolly is going to left behind unless the budget prevents it being there in the first place. How big a percentage the camera becomes on the production budget will depend on the other costs, the leading actors' fees (and associated expenses), for example, can have a much bigger impact than the camera.

[Kawika Ohumukini]

Nice behind the scenes info. Still takes quite a crew to get it done but it seems smaller than I would have thought.

[Brian Drysdale]

Many of the crew on a production have nothing to do with the camera. many will probably never even touch the camera. In this case there are multi camera shots, so each camera is going to have an operator and quite possibly a 1st assist camera or a 2nd AC acting up to that position. You can reduce crew sizes, but then it can take longer to shoot the same amount of material. The whole thing is a balancing of your resources and budget.

[Alister Chapman]

But even on a smaller production with a smaller crew the camera cost may be only a very small percentage of the Budget. For the project I am working on, which has a very small crew of DoP, Camera op, focus puller, MoCo Operator, Producer and Runner, upscaling from PMW-F3 to F65 only means a 5 to 10% shooting budget increase. The project does involve a lot of location shots with international travel and hotels and these account for about 35% of the shoot budget. The impact on the post budget is similar. 5 to 10% on this project is quite affordable, so there is a strong argument to go with the high end camera.

However we are also considering the "ease" factor that a smaller camera will bring, so some thing may take less time and if that saves us a night on location that can be significant, so it's not a simple decision.

[Dean Harrington]

The C300 is going to appeal to documentary film makers who are on the go and do quite a bit of gun&run shooting. I'm impressed but the 8 bit HD/SDI is a bummer on this camera even though it's 12 bit pixel extraction is going to make that 8 bit shine. I would still prefer the F3 over this camera but my guess is that the C300 will be better for back-pack travel in rough locations.