Cli

Watch the full clip here . Click on an image below to bring up a larger view.

"Trade Up" came about because I wanted to shoot something on Super16 before my friend Drew Buchanan from Point and Shoot Pro sold his beautiful Eclair and Zeiss Superspeeds.  I toyed with a couple of scripts, then heard about the Firefox contest (I'm a long-time Firefox user and advocate, for what it's worth).  I wrote a script which I considered monstrous clever and showed it to my friend Alex Wilson, who scoffed and immediately wrote two better ones in about an hour.  We decided to go with the more socially unacceptable one, as it made everyone we described it to snort milk out their nose.  I asked Drew if he would direct so I could do cinematography, and he cheerfully assented.  Megan and Justin got the joke and came on board, and we were off.

Because the contest deadline was only two weeks away, and because we could, we shot HDV and film simultaneously.  As I write this the film still hasn't come back from telecine, so the submitted version is HDV.  We shot over two days, and had a great time.

All the techie production stuff:

Our video camera was Freewater's Sony Z1U, with which I was shooting tests for another project.  We used a Redrock Micro M2 35mm adapter so we could shoot with Nikon 35mm lenses, specifically a Nikkor 1.8:50mm and a 1.4:85mm.  Our film camera was Drew's tricked-out Eclair S16 with Zeiss Superspeeds.  We shot one 400' roll of Kodak 500T which had been sitting around for a while, so we rated it at 320, which by coincidence was the same rating I got for the Z1U when I tested it.  We had a tiny Sony A1U on loan as well, but none of the footage from it was used.  We had a Sennheiser G2 wireless lav kit for sound.  We used an Arri 650 kit and a softbox for light in the bar, and a single Lowell 2k Softlight in the apartment--the M2 wants a lot of light. 

We shot 16:9 50i on the Z1U, which allows us to easily deliver in a variety of formats--letterboxed, full frame, NTSC or PAL, SD or HD, interlaced or progressive, 24p, 30p or 60i with pulldown, 25p, and 50i.  The biggest struggle was cutting out the extra 30 frames to go from 50i to 24p.  Can we please have a minute next time, if we're good?

The credits for the crew are a bit of a fiction, as everybody did everyone else's job.  Drew, who is a more experienced DP than me, would sometimes meter the lights and call out an exposure while I was still setting up the camera.  When we re-shot the apartment a couple of days later (for pacing--30 seconds is a very short time to get in all the words Alex had written), Drew had a conflict, so I had to direct.  Justin assisted camera for me on that shoot as well.  Thomas took turns with Drew and me operating each of the three cameras, pushing the dolly, pulling focus, hanging lights, and running sound.  It was all far too much fun, especially since we had the good sense to set half the ad in Reservoir, our favorite local bar.

Steve Milligan

Carrboro, NC

4/14/06