Just finished up with our promotional video for the Japan Association for Refugees. It was a pleasure to work with them and hopefully the delivery of the video lines up just in time with the fundraising period for the Tokyo Marathon. There were definitely some difficulties, but overall we were able to come up with solutions for all of them. 

For example, the subject had to remain anonymous, so we decided to film his silhouette against a black background. When we set up though, we realized that we lacked the space to shoot on a black background and still set up decent lighting. With a bit of maneuvering we managed to get a usable set up, although you could see equipment poking in from both sides of the frame. The power of Davinci though… I haven’t had to use the patch replacer FX yet, so I found it pretty impressive that a tool like that could achieve a relatively seamless look without a lot of digital tugging back-and-forth.  

One issue that I’m a little hung up on is the outdoor gimbal shots. I had the A7sII in Cine2 (this was prior to the tests I ran on the Cine profiles) and left the knee setting on auto. I exposed for our subject and ended up totally blowing out the sky. To make it worse the buildings in the background were all mostly white (hence also blown out) and making it impossible to take that area of the image and just change the color. I didn’t realize that Cine2 was more geared for broadcast and produced those awful blown video highlights.