From May 25 to June 24 the employees of Red One Rental.net and BLARE Media were the camera department and equipment providers for the Full Length Feature "Finding Hope Now" This Digitally shot feature film was entirely recorded with the use of two RED One Cameras. Brothers Justin McAleece and Ian McAleece were the two camera operators and they had a lot of fun on the production. The movie starred Emmy Winning actor and all-around great guy Michael Badalucco and the Nickelodeon star and great up and coming actor Avan Jogia.

We shot the feature almost entirely at 250 ISO except in very specific situations where we had to turn up the sensitivity to 400 ISO which of course doesn't affect the actual sensitivity of the camera but only the metadata. We used Zeiss Super Speed lenses for the entire feature film except for a few situations when we needed fast zooming and movement and the RED 18-50 was a better choice. The 18mm Zeiss was used sparingly because of the characteristics of how it pans and tilts. The Director of Photography Shane Foster thought of it as more of a specialty lens and so he employed it sparingly. The 25mm, 35mm, 50mm and 85mm were used very often and we had a lot of times when Ian would shoot coverage with the 85 and I would shoot the master with the 25 or 35. We got a lot of extra shots this way that never would have happened if we had only one camera.

There was a decent amount of hand held shooting in the movie and we utilized our awesome custom shoulder mount made by local DIY extraordinaire Gary Sconce. As for filters we used a variety of different ND setups with and without matte boxes. There were times when we used the IR setups and this happened ANY time we were shooting with a neutral Density of .9 or more. With on-site testing and the wealth of knowledge that we had gained form Pre-Production we knew that the Infra Red contamination was definitely noticeable at anything over ND.6. We had our Graduated ND and Polarizer and 1/4 CTB that were not used that often but were very effective in key situations. I would use them whenever the lighting was uncontrollable or did not provide the RED with optimal color balance, reflections or brightness levels. One must remember that the more tools that are at a cameraman's or DP's disposal the more chance there is to give that perfect little boost to the image or fix a troublesome issue. I am also buying a CTO screw on filter and 4x5.65 for when the exteriors are very shade lit and the RED wants to balance to something very high on the kelvin scale like 7000 or so.

As for screw on filters we employed them a lot because between the two RED One cameras it was often a better situation to have no matte boxes on and only a screw on ND.6 on both. Sometimes depending on how many stages we had available in each matte box we would use 2 screw on ND's and an IR filter in one stage and a polarizer or graduated ND in the other stage. Sometimes it is quite a task to keep 2 cameras going with multiple lens, ND, Compact Flash Card, filters and the like all going on at once. Having screw on filters can definitely simplify things in certain situations and result in less weight and quicker setups. The best practice is always determined by the shot and the situation though and so there is not one way to always do everything.

Before the shoot I asked around about screw on filter threads on the Zeiss Super Speeds Mk 3 and got a lot of different answers. On the set we used there were threads on the 18mm the 50 and the 85. There were no threads on the 25 or 35. How weird is that? This made lens swaps annoying under certain situations but helped us to determine what approach we would take depending on the scene.