As of this year, our church announced that they were having an annual Easter Film festival which to me is somewhat of a dream come true ( I honestly have been waiting for ages to get a reason to make a film for church!). Sufficed to say I was pretty excited.
And I must admit from the first moment I had heard about it I was writing down every conceivable idea that would portray the cross and Easter in an entertaining yet meaningful way. Ideas ranged from the obvious sacrifice style dramas to the completely unique Anime style Jesus battles the demons stories to even a romantic comedy with kids.
I came up with 15 ideas in total (not all of them neccessarily good 
Eventually I finally settled on a simple story with a fairly profound message (well for me anyways) which I remember getting when I was still powerhouse. I just hope it translates well onto screen.
I’m actually on my fifth draft of my script and thanks to my little sister Michelle helping me tighten it up and some great feedback from several of my friends, I feel like the screenplay is actually reasonably strong.
So the next question to ask was what equipment I wanted to use.
[NB: this section is a lot of techno babel, so if I apologise if I lose you along the way]
The options on the table were
An HD camera with a lens adapter at the front (ala the JVC with a letus adapter for canon lens) which I know would achieve the results I need. But it is a heavy heavy camera and definitely has drawbacks in low light conditions (due to the adapter dropping f stops by at least 1 
You can watch the vision sunday video to get and idea of the look we can get from this setup:
www.hillsong.com
or the slighly more experimental Canon 5d MkII.
Some test footage from a highly professional pulitzer photographer can be found here:
http://blog.vincentlaforet.com/
Now I had seen some of this footage before and there are some definite draws straight up that I could see. The camera has a rolling shutter effect (essentially it makes the pictures all wobbly) which is not cool to say the least. But this only happens when the camera is in a place of high movement. eg. high wind conditions and possible just film stuff that moves fast.
The second thing is that records at 30p which is a bummer since everyone in Australia records at 25. So this could be a problem, but I have to get my hands on some test footage to really find out.
The compression as I have read is apples H264 codec and is fixed at 35Mbps (which I think it is a good thing seeing as the compression for HDV is a variable 25Mbps) so it should be better to grade with (in theory).
Frame size is full 1920 by 1080 at 30p which should be more than enough for me since my finally product is going to SD. so I am pretty pumped.
Anyways I’ll grab some test footage pretty soon and hopefully I can give you the lowdown how it works out.
stay tuned!
Small shout out to Ben Krebs for inspiring me with his homemade lens adapter, you can see some of it here:
http://vimeo.com/2166760
And Anders who is allowing me to try out he 5d! looking forward to it!
Tags: 5d, Art from the heart, Canon, Christian, diary, film festival, mark 2, Orchestration, production, video
Hola everybody, Happy Easter!