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Singapore night drive – another pre-production 1DmkIV low light shoot

1DmkIV – Singapore night drive from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

This is my second shoot using the pre-production 1DmkIV on loan to me from Canon Singapore. I chose to make this one a bit more like a conventional piece you might find on a news website’s feature pages. Setting myself a one evening time limit on getting the shoot done we filmed everything in about 4 hours. The star of the show is 28 year old Marvin who spends all his money on a Mercedes SLK to drive around Singapore in, mostly cruising with his friends at night.

Setting up the 1DmkIV and trying not to get run over.
Setting up the 1DmkIV and trying not to get run over.

I enlisted the help of a small group of friends to assist me in getting it done quickly. I was joined by Wee Han Yeo who I met at the Cathay Photo workshop earlier in the week, Russell Boyce of Reuters and his young son Lewis, as well as local Reuters photographer Vivek.

The equipment was kept simple, unlike Vincent Laforet I don’t really have the access to the best gear for car shooting (gotta love the Gyros and stabilizer rigs Vincent!), instead all I had was a tripod, the new Genus DSLR bars fitted with a Redrock Micro follow focus, along with a Redrockmico Event rig. All the car to car and interior stuff was handheld. Lens wise I had a 14mm f2.8L, 16-35mm f2.8L, 70-200 f2.8L and 300mm f2.8L lenses. I shot in 1080p/25 with the shutter speed at 1/50th to match the streetlights, aperture was wide open at f2.8 the whole time. The amazing thing is that from the video you can’t tell just how dark it really was, it was pretty damn dark!

A hybrid Genus/Redrockmicro rig and follow focus in action.
A hybrid Genus/Redrockmicro rig and follow focus in action.

Edited as usual in Final Cut Pro there is a very light grade on the footage and a few bits of smoothcam to make up for the lack of a Gyro or Steadicam.

This time it was in virtually no light, shooting mostly in the 2000-6400 ASA range using streetlight with a Litepanels Micropro LED light for fill in. For the driving shots we put the Micropro on the dashboard pointing at Marvin to give his face is little glow.

Marvin is lit by a Litepanels Micropro sat on the dashboard
Marvin is lit by a Litepanels Micropro sat on the dashboard

Russell’s son Lewis did a lot of the audio separately using a Zoom H4n audio recorder. For the section where Marvin is talking in the car the Zoom was left in the car and synced later in post.

I was really happy with the quality of the images I was getting is such low light but please decide for yourself, there is a downloadable link for a 1080p version on Vimeo.

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