‘Caiman’: “found footage” in extreme conditions with Blackmagic

Joseph Davis Castleberry shoots the psychological thriller 'Caiman' with the URSA Mini Pro 12K and Pocket Cinema Camera 6K cameras Blackmagic, which enabled a versatile production within the framework of “extreme filming conditions.”

Caiman tells the story of a grieving widower who returns to the island of Vieques (Puerto Rico) to hunt the creature he believes killed his fiancee. Castleberry, owner of the production company Lumin8 Productions, based in Chicago, considered it a film that encouraged him to transcend your creative limits thanks to certain complexities innate to its conception: "As soon as I read Charles Borg's script, I was fascinated. Since it was a found footage film, I ended up playing various roles: from director and cinematographer, to camera operator and assistant, and even appeared on screen on a few occasions."

During the pre-production, one of the first important decisions Castleberry had to make was the movie shooting model. Since the camera would practically become “part of the character”, it was essential to choose the suitable equipment. "Every technical decision had to be consistent with both the story and realism, so we had long technical and creative conversations about lenses, lighting and camera choices. We also had to take into account the reality of filming with a small staff and limited resources in a more remote location like Puerto Rico, where the climate is hot and humid," he explains.

After seeing more of 50 feature films of found footage, and to investigate which elements were the ones that were attractive to spectators and those not, Castleberry chose the solutions Blackmagic, which allowed him to obtain images with cinematic appearance even with handheld filming techniques. For the fastest scenes, captured in demanding conditions of humidity and heat, the production team turned to the URSA Mini Pro 12K, a camera characterized by its RGBW sensor, its fast reading speed and an efficient cooling system that allowed recording in 4K with the entire sensor, using the lowest possible compression.

The second unit, marked by scenes captured practically in darkness and others in which the camera could suffer some knocks, had the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K: "I had used it before and had pushed it to the maximum in various environments, such as in the rain, in high and below zero temperatures, and even in the snow, and it never failed me. It was the most logical option for this project in which the camera had to be thrown into the sand from several meters high." Both chambers mounted anamorphic lenses few expensive: “It wasn't easy, particularly when filming in small spaces, like in cars and charter planes, but it was worth it.”

Combining low light and intense action

When reviewing the main challenges of filming, Castleberry highlights some particularly complex scenes due to lighting conditions: "One situation that stands out in particular is an intimate scene between two people sitting at a table in a dark room, illuminated only by candlelight and a 60-watt backlight that we placed in the corner, set to five percent to provide a soft backlight. I set the URSA's ISO sensitivity to 3200, but thanks to the sensor design, low compression settings, and a diffusion filter, the recorded images "They ended up being beautiful. It had a dense, textured grain and a soft, cinematic shine that was perfect for the scene."

According to Castleberry, the URSA Mini Pro 12K camera also “showed off” in another scene that recorded on a dock during a hot, humid day with a lot of light: "The two main actors are seen walking along a pier, passing through areas of sun and shade, with the sea and clear skies in the background. This is where the URSA Mini Pro 12K really showed its merits. Thanks to its good light retention capacity, it was able to process the lighting changes with ease, and the cooling system allowed it to continue running without any problems; this is something that could have been disastrous with the wrong camera, but was easy to achieve with the URSA. As a director and cinematographer, I am always on the lookout for what could go wrong, but in this case, the camera gave me no reason to worry.

The Pocket Cinema Camera 6K, however, was really put to the test in the movie highlight: "The final scene was shot well after sunset on a beach, almost unprepared, in an on-the-fly style of filming. I mounted the Pocket on a lightweight, easy-to-handle shoulder rig so I could capture the fast pace of the production. The scene presented several challenges: it started inside a car speeding down a gravel road, and then headed towards me, until we reached a completely dark beach. There were long, continuous shots running through the sand in very low lighting in which just “We used a small 60-watt cubic light attached to the camera with a clamping accessory to create a spot-focus effect. To make matters worse, I knew we were going to deliberately throw the camera into the ground and even into the sea. Needless to say, I used this camera roughly, but it gave us the images we were looking for.”

https://youtu.be/DwqfTA2a1KU