The Visitor from Elsewhere

Over the last week or so I have been working on the production of The Visitor from Elsewhere on a variety of different fronts.

One of the first things that happened this week is that my Canon Vixia HV 30 arrived. This is the camera we are going to use to shoot most of the rest of “The Visitor from Elsewhere”.  It has many features that commend it to the independent filmmaker, the best of which of course is that if offers performance and features that are rivaled only by cameras that cost thousands more. The camera cost me just $799.

The camera we used for most of the year last year was the Panasonic GS320 (below).

The Panasonic GS320 was purchased at Best Buy for about $799, maybe $999, if you include the extended warranty.  Today, it’s sells for about $300 at Amazon.com.

The GS 320 is a great camera, it shoots fantastic saturated colors on bright sunny days but has limitations which ultimately made us put it out of service as the primary camera for “The Visitor from Elsewhere”.

In low light conditions, the camera gives everything you shoot an amber tone that can be color corrected but might still have a graininess, that may or may not be able to be corrected.

It shoots in standard def and today everything is in high definition.

Audio can only be acquired through (an albeit pretty good) on board condenser microphone. So you can forget trying to hook a shotgun or boom mic to it. Since we are shooting a feature with dialogue and actors, not being able to shoot with a boom mic proved to be a fatal flaw for this camera.

Late in the shooting season last year,  I purchased an Azden SGM1 shotgun microphone and paired it with a nine foot boom pole, like the one below.

We combined the Azden boom mic, with the Canon GL-2, a beautiful, elegant camera which is owned by our DP, Andrew Heller.

We were able to shoot a couple of scenes with the GL-2 and the boom before winter closed in and forced us to shutter up the production for the winter.

In January, 2008, Andrew decided to he wanted to check out the LA film scene so he left Chicago and our production for several months. We all wished Andrew nothing but the best. He is a very highly capable film professional and although I knew we were going to miss him, I for one, hoped he would enjoy all kinds of success on the west coast. What none of us knew was that back in Chicago we would be tormented by one of the coldest, snowiest and longest lasting winters in recent memory. The last time we shot in mid-december it was 19 degrees and all of us almost froze to death. We were forced to take frequent breaks in my Ford Taurus with the engine running and when I saw the footage, it was ok but you could tell Harold Dennis and JP Taub, our actors were freezing. Neither of them complained. Harold wasn’t even wearing a coat! You wouldn’t know it was winter from Harold’s demeanor. This is what led us to go on hiatus. Andrew leaving and possibly remaining in LA indefinitely not only meant a highly valued member of our crew was leaving the production, it also broke up the marriage of my boom mic and his GL 2. That’s when I decided I needed to outlay some cash for the high def camera.

Everything worked out perfectly in the end. By March, Andrew informed me that he had decided to return to Chicago and the production and I had already decided that the production had to have either Canon HV20 or HV30. Now we would have a high definition camera and a professional camera man to use it.

Anyway, the camera came this week and Andrew is going to pick it up and take it for a spin before we shoot the all important murder scene on May 23.