SHOP TALK Episode 1 - Panasonic S1H

We’ve been wanting to do a little web series for a while now where we talk about gear and put it through its paces on and off set. Well we finally did it. We’ve got 8 episodes coming at ya soon and here is the pilot where we talk about the Panasonic S1h. Thanks to all the cast and crew (you can find them all in the video description).

Here’s a little rundown of what we did and how we lit stuff. With the first alley way scene, we tried to showcase the pavo tubes by just placing them inside the glass doors and set to a few random preset settings for flashing color. Above the bouncer we used a Hive 200-c with an aputure lantern. Lining the alley we used a Rayzr7 300w daylight LED to scrape the building wall, then just had some battery powered Rayzr MC 200 panels lining the alley way. we only have 90 mins to shoot this scene, so we kept everything really small footprint. In terms of our camera, we had the S1h set at the second dual native iso of around 4000 to test it out. We chose to do just 4k 10 bit for the whole short so we could stay consistent across the board switching from reg speed to slow mo and back. We were running the 50mm Zeiss CP3 shooting around 2.1 and we mostly stayed on that for the whole scene. We put the camera package on a ronin S and pretty much just pulled by hand as we didn’t have a ton of time to really set anything up for focus.

For the 2nd Scene we stayed on the ronin but switched to a 35mm and shot basically wide open. We only used the hive 200-c again with 2 Rayzr MC-200’s in the background.

For the car montage we moved to 60fps and we added the letus 1.33x anamorphic adapter to change the look of the film moving forward. We switched off between a lot of the focal lengths for coverage. We used the PavoTubes exclusively to light the car using some simple grip and suction cups with tie downs to keep everything secured. It was fun playing with some of the effect settings to create some light movement.

Once we get to the morning park scene, we basically just shot the Rayzr7 300w through a 4x4 frame with some diff and used a reflector to guide light around inside the car. And just played with whatever natural light we had. We again kept using the Letus anamorphic adapter to keep things in a realm that felt different than where they started as a group. We shot the CP3’s around 2.8 to keep things sharper with the adapter and we also had some more higher contrast areas so we tossed a 1/2 digicon filter in the mattebox to knock the contrast down even more.

Once we got to the beach, we only had maybe 5 mins to shoot that stuff so it was all natural light with no modifiers or anything.

All in all the shoot was about 8 hours and had to get through the shoot while also talking about 4 different products for bts, so a small footprint and being able to move fast was crucial. Overall with the entire sound, lighting and camera package all fitting in a small Ford Transit Connect, Id say you can get a pretty solid overall result with very little equipment if you’ve got a talented team.