The Pocket Cinema Camera was used to film most of the stunts in 'Avengers: Age of Ultron'

The director of photography, Ben Davis, chose the Blackmagic camera for its great latitude, small size, and the possibility of working in RAW format with 12-bit quality.

For some of the most dangerous action scenes in the latest installment of the saga The Avengers, Marvel used the Pocket Cinema Camera from Blackmagic.

Avengers: Age of Ultron is directed by Joss Whedon, with Ben Davis (Guardians of the Galaxy) in charge of photography.

This time the script emphasizes each of the members of the group with more action scenes. This second installment differs quite a bit from the original film. “The first one was about joining forces, while this one shows a division that is reflected in the tone of the script,” explains Ben. “The narrative is much darker and more menacing, so the visual approach was more raw and prosaic,” he adds.

Latitude and size

The film required a large number of additional scenes and Davis was looking for a compact, high-quality digital film camera for the most dangerous scenes. “I really liked the shots that Anthony Dodd-Mantle managed to get in Rush using platforms for small cameras, especially when mounting them in unusual places," he revealed. "I decided to try a Pocket Cinema Camera after meeting a digital imaging technician friend of mine who had recently purchased one and could only praise its benefits. For me it was an obvious choice, as the most important factors were latitude and size. Suddenly I found myself with a camera that not only allows you to record images in RAW format in 12-bit quality, but also offers latitude that is on par with high-end digital cinema models,” he admits.

Ben David points out that "there are two major battle scenes during the film, one at the beginning and the other halfway through, and we really wanted to shoot them as if a war correspondent were covering a conflict zone. We needed a lightweight model that we could place in various places on the set and that would offer more than 12 frames of good quality HD material to intercut with the images taken with the main camera. To do this, we attached eight Pocket Cinema Cameras with pancake lenses. "For example, let's say that a truck explodes and flies through the air, and we want to capture the moment it falls on a car, filming everything with the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera in a metal casing. In another case, we mounted it on a tank, because we were able to attach it to an articulated arm that we could screw to any part of it."

"I always thought it would be nice to have a Pocket Cinema Camera, but to tell the truth I ended up using them a lot more than expected. The attractive thing about this camera is the relationship between its size and the quality it offers. We can intersperse the recorded material for a longer time between the main scenes and, therefore, this model is much more useful than other compact versions," concludes Ben.