Thoughts wrap-up for Parkour Tour

Wow. Ok, that was a whirlwind. A total blur of driving and shooting and driving some more, with some amazing cities and amazing people thrown in. My previous post was really short because I was really busy when I got back, then straight-away flew off to Poland a few days later, then had two editing jobs (one shot on juicy 35mm Fuji Eterna 500T).

So here are more details. I was a DoP on an 18-day, multi-country shoot for Catsnake, Bethesda and Splash Damage's new game called Brink. It's like a really cool evolution of Enemy Territory (more on this a bit later).

The aim of the shoot was to produce a Parkour video in each city we visited, all of them featuring the very well-known freerunner, Daniel Ilabaca.

I was contacted by Stephen Follows, the inimitable producer from Catsnake because of a previous parkour film I'd previously made with the founder of Freerunning, Sebastien Foucan (who we met up with again while in Paris).

The idea behind getting me on board was to get films with a more obvious 'filmic' feel, as opposed to a lot of the freerunning videos out there, which, while certainly amazing, have a tendency to share similar filming styles (with a LOT of fish-eye usage). Hopefully I brought something different, but still dynamic to the table. The other camera guy on the shoot was Scott Bass, a capable freerunner himself, and insanely tall. At the start of the shoot we both had very different ideas on how things should be done, but after a few days we really started working well together. By the end of it, I think we both got some amazing footage. (A note well worth mentioning, a parkour video that Scott shot with two amazing freerunners has garnered over 1.5 MILLION views on youtube. That's impressive. It's a damn cool video.)

We (Scott and myself) were both shooting on 550Ds, while Dan Andrews manned an EX3 for the behind the scenes stuff (which will also be cut into weekly episodes, and perhaps eventually into a longer 30min piece, but I'm not too sure). Scott was using the 15-85mm f4.5-5.6 lens. What sharpness for the price! I was using a Canon 24mm 1.4L II (my favourite lens), a Canon 50mm 1.4, a Canon 100mm 2.8 Macro, and a Tokina 11-16mm.

I just got my Lightcraft Workshop FaderND (77mm for the 24mm and the Tokina) a few days before the shoot began, and it made a WORLD of difference. Our shoots were very ad-lib, impromptu and run-and-gun. I know I used three terms to describe the same thing there, but it really was running a lot of the time. I guess it's the nature of free-running... it's impulsive and depends on the environment. It makes for amazing film, but is also difficult to film (we had about 8 hours in each city to film, with little to no recce time - we thankfully had local guides (who were all awesome!).

The FaderND really let me get just the right exposure, while almost never changing my aperture. I'd decided along with Stephen Follows, for both artistic and technical reasons, that we should shoot most things wide open to lessen the moire you get when shooting the 550Ds at 720p. So most of the time, I shot at 1.4 or 2.0. It's really so easy. Also, so good to just get those perfect tiny little tweaks. Sometimes the camera's 1/3rd stop options are a little too clunky, and you want something just a little more fine.

Another bonus I noticed is, like any polariser, it increases the saturation of what you're shooting... so while you're shooting on a seriously flattened out picture style, you still get pretty natural looking colours, while getting that extra highlight detail for grading (contrast and in-camera sharpening turned to zero literally give you an extra stop of highlight detail, but also give you washed out colour that's difficult to grade to look natural). Hey, we can't all shoot on Alexas all the time, can we?

While in Cologne, the giant games convention Gamescom was on, and we got to meet the creators of Brink, and even play against them in a pre-production version. It was on x-box controllers, and I found myself constantly wishing for a mouse and keyboard (coming from a pc gaming habit formed in the mid-90s). It's a really fun multiplayer FPS with some interesting freedom of movement... parkour style climbing and vaulting over obstacles.

I wish I had time to write about each city... they were all cool, and like I mentioned earlier, the local Parkour guides we met were all amazing too. I have to run now, perhaps I'll bulk up this entry later into some epic essay on the tour.