That was the easies part of the project. I only have 1 camera which is a 10+ year old Blackmagic Pocket Cinema. It is very small and I take it almost everywhere. The colors it produces are loved, not only by me but many people think it’s quite unique in that regard. For a project that is about capturing this fleeting beauty of fall, it seemed appropriate. For all the other aspects of this project — running around, filming long stretches of time — it is quite unappropriate.
The battery only lasts 16-20min and it is definetely not an action camera, with any kind of stabilization. Plus it only likes a few special and old and not available anymore SD cards and I only had 1 that it would accept with 64 GB, which meant exactly 46 minutes recording time in ProRes 422, which…was just enough time.
I played with the thought of 1. using my iPhone for the project or 2. buying a GoPro for this. But..I don’t like GoPros — they are tooo good and too fish-eyey and I don’t need it really afterwards, so that would be a waste. And the iPhone would have been probably the stealthiest option but it just produces ugly video files — at least my old XR — and I wanted this project to be beautiful. It seemed foolish, everyone that I told about it said: why don’t you just use a GoPro…it needed to happen with this unpractical fellow and would have just to work around the limitations, battery and stabilization.
Ahh, and the screen was broken on the top. Which gave me a few headaches:
My first choice of lens was a super compact prime with 20mm. After some tests, I realized that the stabilzation even on a gimbal was not enough. I have another pancake lens with some stabilzation which is a 17mm-42mm lens. But 17mm were still to narrow for me, plus the videos were still jittery. So I decided to use my biggest, heaviest lens for this. I was not happy about it, I didn’t really want to run around with a long bulky lens but something more stealthy. Moreover, the gimbal really struggled to keep this beast in balance.
The little fellow with the broken screen. It has been travelling quite a lot this year and takes a hit now and then.
18mm was my first choice of focal lenght, and I taped it down on my lens. After a few tests I decided to go as wide as possible, which is 12mm to have a bigger field of view, so as a viewer you can choose where to look at. I chose this very big and heavy lens, which was a struggle for the gimbal, because it has image stabilization.
I couldn’t use the mic on top of the camera because of the gimbal, so I decided to just carry around another recorder. My flatmate Stephan gave me this wonderful device, a Zoom H5. After I lost the wind protection two times in 1 run I fixed that with some rubber band, worked perfectly. It recorded stereo and I just put in my jackets pocket, since it fitted snuggly in there. You can often hear my keys that I wear around my neck and my mumbling or whistling to calm myself down. I was really pleased with the sound quality.
Ready to go, selfie time
Later on I also recorded myself jogging, in order to have a soundtrack for the steps and the breathing sounds. I did that with simple Rode Lavalier mic with a paper clip and some tape attached to my shirt and my old iPhone with another broken screen recording a voice memo in lossless quality.
Of course it would have been great to run all these tours, but that was not realistic, since I only had a few days of nice weather left. My bike has a basket which comes in very handy. First I tried to attach the gimbal with zip ties and sponges as shock absorbers but the video material was unusable.