Day 2 and we started filming the TIP TVC in what can only be described as Motion Control Heaven.

Due to light (and various explosions), we decided to shoot the body of the spot outside in the carpark – which meant a night shoot starting around 5pm and running until 1am.

The remarkable thing I found with the Stiller crew is how quickly they can move from setup to setup. Traditionally, motion control slowed down any shoot but a combination of experienced crew and new digital tools mean that the complex two high speed camera and two Bolt motion control shoot, we were averaging a set up an hour which is more than respectable, even for many normal crews, and vastly better than has been many productions have experienced in years gone by with other crews.

It was also not as if our subject was say a controlled table top pouring shot, – we were trying to jump and rail skateboards while firing explosions and filming not only with the primary and secondary rigs but also with a detailed behind the scenes unit and even a drone chopper. With the temp dropping to nearly freezing, the Swedish crew hardly noticed the conditions and remained incredibly enthusiastic and jovial until the end.

Just to focus on the cameras today (and we’ll cover other areas here tomorrow and the next day), – we are shooting with the Love High Speed Phantom Flex 4K with a special RAM upgrade to 128 Gig (the only one’s in London). The Love High Speed team got these latest Phantom’s first in Europe with serial numbers 3 and 4. These were the cameras they used on Avergers: Age of Ultron for much of the Slow Motion that was shot in both England and Italy by first unit. The company started in 2009 and they work in features and commercials mainly in Europe and of course at home in England. With films like Guardians of the Galaxy, the Kingsman and the new Macbeth due out soon, it is safe to say they are world experts in high speed photography.

One full shot on the 128GB Phanton is approximately 9466 frames. On playback at 24fps that is around 6 1/2 minutes. The real time capture at 4096×2304 at 912fps is 10 seconds or 20 seconds at 480fps, which are the two primary speeds we shot at last night (since those speed are nice multiples of our standard base 24fps film). At full capture 4K (without sensor cropping) the playback is 40 times slower (1sec live is 40 seconds of slow motion heaven).

The guys were trimming the shots down to the action thus not wasting storage and hence not needing to save the whole RAM each time, so we ended up shooting around 1.8TB yesterday for both cameras. If you are doing the maths, that is about an hour and forty minutes of rushes.

The cameras are natively rated at 250 ISO but the guys run them at 800 ISO so we have a couple of stops up beyond what we see with our eye on the monitor, and naturally daylight balanced. We ran without matte boxes or barn doors on the lights to encourage flares. The lens were Zeiss Standard T2.1 and we mainly stayed wide on 20mm, 24mm and 32mm, with one test shot on 16mm.

As each camera had a two Terabyte magazine, so we never had to change magazines, in fact by Love high Speed’s standards it was a data lite night of shooting. (On a TVC once the team shot 13 Terabytes in a day).

It was such a joy to film on day one, we still have more too shoot but that will be on the Cyclop in the studio on day four. For now it is a ten hour turnaround and we are back to have more fun tomorrow.

Special thanks to Jonas Hummelstrand of SuperFly.tv who shot BTS 4K drone footage , some stills of which are included here. Jonas is a long time friend of fxphd and jumped in without warning when our drone operator had to drop out.

More tomorrow and in our courses here at fxphd.com