DJI Ronin – Music Video Shoot
This weekend, I helped out my good friend, Tage Plantell, on a music video he’s creating for EDM artist, Brittany Egbert.
The production called for a series of car-shots, following the video’s lead characters on a late-night drive through downtown Denver, so I was brought on to shoot from a chase car with my Canon C100 and my new DJI Ronin 3-axis gimbal.
I had recently sent my C100 to Canon’s service department to receive the dual-pixel auto-focus upgrade, and wanted to test it out in a practical setting, and I have to say, I was enormously pleased with its performance. Considering how dim most of the lighting was, I was actually kind of astonished how well it managed to hang on to focus in a lot of these situations.
Typically, I don’t like auto-focus on video cameras– it often behaves erratically, and almost never responds how you want it to — so I shoot manually, 99% of the time, and will continue to do so, as I like having control over the image. But given how well the AF did on this shoot, I think it’s going to end up being a really valuable tool. On projects where I’m shooting as a one-man-band, or in high-pressure run-and-gun situations where I don’t have time for set-ups, or a budget to hire a First AC to pull focus, I think it’s going to be a real life-saver.
I didn’t want to release too much of this footage prior to Tage’s final edit, but I thought it would be fun to put together a *really* short little demo, as I was pretty psyched about a lot of the shots. I’m really hoping the work I did will contribute something cool to the final piece, and am looking forward to seeing how it cuts together with all of Tage’s stellar camera work.