VISIBLE PROOF shooting next month

For the past month I have been in pre-production for a short I am extremely excited to be the cinematographer on. 


VISIBLE PROOF is based on one of the most infamous murder cases in history.  The film takes place in the coastal village of Necochea in turn-of-the-century Argentina.  Two small children are stabbed to death in their beds.  No one sees the crime and interrogations yield contradictory evidence. Amid the horrow was a single bloody fingerprint.  It would be the first fingerprint ever used to solve a crime.


Another of my good friends Gabil Sultanov is directing and we are both anxious to get into production.  Our producers have put together a great Kickstarter campaign to help raise funding to supplement the film grant Gabil won from the Sloan Foundation.


We are currently planning on building nine different interior sets on the sound stages we'll be shooting on.  Almost all of our sets have multiple scenes that take place in them so I'm going to have to find ways of lighting them differently each time we return.  Here's a diagram of our basic layout and camera blocking.  I'm hoping to be able to get in ahead of our start day and pre-light as many of these sets as possible, but that all depends on how quickly construction happens.  Either way, it's a lot of sets to light.

We were lucky enough to get the Panavision New Filmmakers Grant for this short film.  I've decided to shoot on Sony F3 (S-log) again, but this time we'll be recording to a Ki Pro Mini onto CF cards in 10-bit 422 DNxHD to ingest directly into the Avid with out any transcoding necessary for editorial.  


Because it's coming from Panavision, it'll be a completely Panavised F3 meaning we'll not only have access to proper camera accessories, but to Panavision's famous lenses from 30+ year ago.  I've decided to work primarily with a Cooke 20-60 T3.1 zoom lens (although we'll also carry a set of Panavision Ultra Speed primes as well).  Gabil and I both really wanted to use zooms on this film and to shoot handheld as well.  We both like the documentary feel: searching for new frames within the shoot, following the actors through a scene, and being able to slowly zoom into a CU mid-shot.  


Gabil and I are heading over to Panavision on friday to do a complete camera and lens test.  Fun fact: the Cooke 20-60 T3.1 zoom was introduced in 1981, making it only a little older than I am!