production blog

behind the scenes and more

filming continuing

By John Montgomery

As we work hard to get the last of the classes out for the term – we are continuing to shoot for next term. This shot was from magic hour last night – directed by Dr Bill Collis of the Foundry who was visiting us for a special EPIC shoot (this footage will be on [...]


Work with people better than you

By John Montgomery

This magnificent image is from Stu – from New Zealand, and looking at this I am reminded of the old saying “work with people who are better than you”. Stu taught me a bunch on this trip about color grading, approaches to composition and all just in passing as we were processing clips, or driving [...]


A few more stills and thougths

By John Montgomery

As a lot of people liked yesterday’s still, here is another. And a few thoughts: If you are doing EPIC work you need – a lot of discs – a red rocket card – if not two – a minimum of eSATA for data transfer – LTO 5 for archives – time to test HDRx


Stills from motion

By John Montgomery

I made a remark on The RC podcast about how little I picked up my 5D in New Zealand. The reason I said that was many fold. First – the EPIC was nearly always in the best position – be that out the chopper, on the boat, on the car etc… I mean if there [...]


Day 3

By John Montgomery

We are pleasde to announce that Stu Maschwitz is joining fxphd again to film, teach and work in the April term. We don’t normally post these sorts of things so far in advance but as Stu is here filming with us in New Zealand, it is a bit hard to keep quiet. Stu and the [...]


Day 2 : flying

By John Montgomery

It is late at night but we wanted to just post a couple of images from today. The tree shot is an HDRx – just a quick grab from the original 5K Full Frame .r3d file. The second is Mike in the safety rig for flying through the trees on wires with the EPIC. It [...]


New Zealand

By John Montgomery

Day 2 We have touched down in New Zealand. We have the following small amount of kit 1 EPIC 3 5Ds 1 1D Mk IV Arri 8R PL 12mm Master prime f1.3 (!) PL 25mm PL 50mm PL 135mm PL 11-16mm PL 8mm Canon 17mm Canon S+T 50 mm Canon 1.2 50 mm Canon 1.4 [...]


Epic Day 01: camera testing fun

By John Montgomery

We thought a few of you might like to have us blog the first week of EPIC use. So here we go… Day 1: Today was the first day shooting and testing the EPIC. The goal here is to test and gear check for the Big New Zealand shoot next week, (- where we will [...]


Epic prep for the next shoot

By John Montgomery

We are busy preparing for a series of shoots with the new Red Epic. At the moment it is really just gear checks and technical checks. The fun starts tomorrow with a Red EPIC stereo shoot and then a major shoot for next term at fxphd. The new Epic has both higher dynamic range and [...]