There’s a new trailer out for Mirza 2012: The Untold Story. The film is causing a huge stir in India.

We worked with our good friend, and Vancouver’s best kept cinematographer secret: TOBY GORMAN, to create an action-packed big-budget movie look with a skeleton crew of only 4 guys (which includes a dual gaffer/key grip, a best boy, and two swing technicians). We added a tow-generator, and a 6k Par to supplement the TALCO LIGHTING & GRIP PACKAGE, and that was it.

This is proof that a new era of image-making is upon us. Sensitive digital cameras — tightly knit crew of skilled independent filmmakers — making the most of limited tools — we can create huge budget-like features! We’ve proven this. Watch the trailer above (!).

MIRZA 2012: The Untold Story Theatrical Film Release

Stephano used an actual projector on sheets to get the nostalgic effect of home movies and wanderlust.

Mirza - The Untold Story

Here’s a trailer to Mirza – The Untold Story, a punjabi film we worked on last year over a two month period.

Release Date: April 6, 2012

Starring Gippy Grewal & Mandy Takhar with Rahul Dev and Bunnu Dhillion. Music by Honey Singh.

The director, Baljit Singh Deo, wanted to create a Punjubi film with a distinctly North American large scale production value feeling. He wanted to set new standards for Indian films overseas. Principal photography was in Vancouver, BC.

We had a challenging time creating that big budget movie lighting with a minimal crew and no budget for pre-rigging. We worked closely with our good friend and cinematographer Toby Gorman to use large sources, carefully shaped single sources, and strategically placed background lights. We used condor lighting where possible for our night exteriors to save time and manpower because we had minimal time for setup and turnarounds to rig smaller lights. Throughout the show we carried a pair of 6k PAR’s in addition to our base lighting package, slush truck, and a tow generator.

Filmed on Red Epic. Produced by Inda Raikoti & Aman Khatkar. The movie has been getting a lot of attention overseas because of its cast special appearances, and non-conventional Bollywood production ways.

Vancouver Film School’s equipment was booked by multiple graduation projects from the cinematography program. Michael was leading an inter-department collaboration between the school of business and post production code named Project Space Squid, which involved students, faculty, and alumni. The project was based on the sci-fi cosmic horror writing of HP Lovecraft, an american writer from the turn of the century.

Michael needed professional lighting to bring Lovecraft’s surreal Cthulhu Mythos to life.

VFS Entertainment turned to our grip truck to convert an unused space which had no lighting grid into a functioning green screen studio with lights and equipment. We performed lighting services while business management students oversaw the shooting of 5 short films. They were titled: C’Thulhu, Dagon, Dunwich, Erich Zahn, and Rats.

The students are maintaining a comprehensive blog of their progress in post production.

The project was overseen by VFS head of the Entertainment Business Management department, Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin, who also produced a 7-minute behinds the scenes documentary of the production titled, The Interactive Lovecraft.

Further there are some photos taken by a student here.

The VFS press department seems to be on a roll with this project…more will follow.

This music video for Arkadia Picture was shot on 35mm Film on a houseboat in beautiful Sycamouse, BC. Produced by Alex Galanis and Directed by award winning Stephano Barberis with cinematographer Ron Williams C.S.C. The video echos the sentiment, “When life is rough go sit on the lake and put some alcohol on it”.  You heard it from Gord Bamford and his band. Happy summer.

The feature film, BELOW ZERO — starring Terminator 2′s Edward Furlong, horror legend Michael Berryman, and supporting actress Kristin Booth – takes place in a butcher shop where a captive writer (Furlong) gets twisted into dementia when confronted with a deadline he cannot face by his agent (Kristin). Blurring the lines between a depressing reality and a beautiful macabre, the writer’s angst manifests in a gruesome character of his own creation (Berryman) while the writer himself explores a sick fascination with the butcher’s son, a pecular little boy named Golem.

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We filmed in a small highway town far from infrastructure which challenged us to improvise. We originally built extended hood rigs on our vintage picture trucks using scaffold pipe and sliding cheese plates, but the gravel roads proved to be too shaky with the old truck suspensions. We had no stabalizers so we ended up building our own process trailer from a flatdeck base, ground up. The night exteriors ended up being a simple task done in a minimalist way using cinematographer Norm Li’s 4k Airstar Helium Balloon Light. A photo of which from us even ended up on Norm Li’s website.

We filmed this at the Scotia Bank Dance Center with a combination of movie lights and hanging theatre lights. The band was keyed through a 6×6 frame with two Mini 9-Lights. We used a block and tackle to rig a flybar of Source Four Pars in the background so we could adjust the height quickly and easily based on the camera angle to spike the lense (accentuated by Randy’s streak filter on the camera). The coloured wash was programmed into the house lighting board using convenient motorized color scrollers.

Official music video for “Free Like Love” by The Higgin.
Directed by multiple award-winner Stephano Barberis and produced by Arkadia Pictures Inc.

Scroll down for a technical lighting summary of the setup.

The Higgins are John, Eileen, and Kathleen Higgins, brother and sisters, from Delta, BC, Canada.

Lighting Summary:

We rigged the stage for cinematographer Ron Williams C.S.C with a 4×8′ softbox above the band.

The rig consisted of 3 blondes and a frame of 216 diffusion. It was built with pipe and burtons from a goalpost allowing it to “pendulum” down so the angle of light would be less overhead and more in the eyes of our talent. Due to the weight of the rig our goalpost consisted of three 20′ schedule 40 pipes (1 1/2″ Aluminum) joined together into a triangle formation using Modern Studio Equipment mini-truss brackets. We cranked the rig up in super-crank roller stands (12.6′ max height). The wheels on the stand allowed us to roll the entire rig closer to the camera to make the lighting more frontal for the closeups.

Of primary concern to Ron was beauty lighting for the band’s two female musicians.

In addition tot he softbox over the stage we filled from over the heads of the crowd using a 10k fresnel through a 6×6 frame of half grid cloth. We used solid blades and flops to cut most of the spill off the crowd so it would project over their heads into the eyes of our band. There was also two tungsten units on the ground through diffusion frames to fill from below the stage in front of the band because that was the direction they would look down at the crowd. These units were hidden from camera between the crowd and the stage on the ground.

TALCO built a 4x8' softbox with pipe & burtons and suspended it over the band with a makeshift 20' truss on super cranks. A 10k key through a 6x6 frame cut off the crowd provided fill.

Technical Notes:

If doing a similar rig consider using a specialized truss lifting support from the theatre/live event industry in place of super-crank stands. They are usually load rated much higher then super-cranks and some of them can go upwards of 20′ in height which would be a huge asset if the stage was any higher (compared to 12.6′ for a super-crank stand).

Also consider using real truss for less sag across the span. We used ropes and pulleys from the truss of the studio to safety our rig but if you didn’t have access to a lift to get up there you’d certainly want to make your truss more rigid.

We provided additional fill from tungsten units on the ground through 24'x36' Diffusion Frames hidden from camera between the crowd and the stage.

Scatterheart’s love letter to Vancouver: Filmed in front of Vancouver’s landmarks: Science World, Sunset Beach and the SeaWall in the summer of 2009. From the album, ‘The Masterplan’ AVAILABLE ON ITUNES and at WWW.SCATTERHEART.CA

Credits:

Produced and directed by Scatterheart • Edited by Mike Southworth • Filmed by Randy Che • 1st AD Masayo Takada
Lighting and Grip Josh Alkoff • Colour Timing Miles Forster • Assistant Brian M Calvert

During the show we picked up a few tricks from Stargate veteran key grip , John Zulisnki, while sharing our TALCO package truck with his team of grips. Many of the cast, crew, and stunt people were also from the Stargate universe making this an enjoyable feature to work on with a tightly integrated crew all around.

We will have more on this film as Qube Films publishes more information in the upcoming months.

Set in 1961 in the Chilcotin Territory of Western Canada, The Cave recounts the story of a bear hunter who discovers a secret portal to the spirit world. This beautifully crafted film provides a powerful cinematic rendering of an authentic Tsilhqot’in oral story.

Helen Haig-Brown is an award-winning Tsilhqot’in director, director of photography and teacher who is in love with experimental documentary filmmaking. The Cave is her first dramatic film. She resides in her traditional lands in the interior of British Columbia.

Click the teaser images above to view them. Safari Man Dan | Dinosaurs Unearthed

This first is a childrens promo spot funded by the BC Chicken Marketing Board which us on a week long tour of the British Columbia chicken industry. We wore bio suits and hosed down our lighting equipment in chemicals to pass bio security checkpoints in order  bring cameras and lights into places nobody but chickens go. The spot was narrated by Adam Groves who coincidently plays Amir in Under the Apple Box the feature we recently completed earlier this year.

In the second we did the camera mounts for Dinosaurs Unearthed a promotional video showcasing the traveling animatronic dinosaur event which was installed at Metropolis at Metrotown.

As with all of Arkadia Picture’s beautiful country videos, much of the magic in the cinema is brought out by senior Technicolor Creative Services colorist Gary Shaw in a 2K film to digital transfer session. The details are extracted from the 35mm work print. The end result is delivered digitally to the TV networks. The film latitude and the extensive digital timing allows us to get by during the shoot with more available light and less time consuming setups then typically on a feature film shoot. This helps offset the huge time constraints of trying to cram an entire narrative story and live performances into a single days shoot.

Above: The charming (dare I say sweet) “If I Fall” by Doc Walker – cinematographer Ron “Rocket” Williams presiding.
Below: Another timeless combination…girl’s and power tools!  Greg Hanna – “It’s a Man’s Job”:

The first was filmed with an Arri 435 by Rocket and lit with a 6k HMI Par and some custom string lights. The background was a 20×20 painted backdrop suspended on location in a barn. The second video was filmed by producer Alex Galanis himself using an antique Arriflex 35 film camera with a rotating turret of prime lenses. We shaped available light with grip gear and did not require a movie generator or HMI for our interiors to produce a quality video on a tight budget

We filmed extensively in the forest out on Pipeline Road with a few scenes around downtown Vancouver.

Shot on RED Camera by DOP Randy Che we had to maximize our production value with minimal equipment for what was predominantly a night exteriors shoot.

The production was self-funded by the director. We couldn’t afford condors or use any of the typical large area lighting we would have wanted. Instead, we pulled it off with a 12k honda diesel “hog” generator, a couple of 2.5k HMI PAR, 1k JEM BALLS, and some 750 watt SOURCE FOUR PARS.

The heavy fog was accentuated by backlight/crosslight from our HMI. The campfire fill was a poor-man’s helium balloon light. It was created by suspending the Jem Balls above our campsite location on a giant 30′ menace arm/mambo combo built from schedule 40 aluminum pipe joined together with a Modern Studio Equipment boom kit. We could have flown the Jem Balls with rope and pulleys from the trees,  but the menace arm allowed us to easily reposition the light close to our frame for coverage and was quicker then climbing up in the trees to set ropes (we had to wrap and return to the same location over several weekends). The lanterns radiated outward from the centre of the campsite creating a warm glow from the set and leaving lots of shadows on the outside.

We struggled for exposure on our background from our 2.5k HMI (we needed at least a 6k for the area we were trying to light) so we had to fill in the near background in places with the Source Four Pars. They were punchy enough but had to chase the camera around depending on which direction we looked.

For scenes that took place without a campfire we raised a 6′x6′ Bounces into the air and filled it with an HMI so the fill would be more directionless (emanating from above the camera, rather then glow outward from the center as it did with the lanterns.

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These sweet photos were taken by stills photographer, Mike Mander of sublimephoto.

Stephano intercut the video performance with a second day of b-roll footage using the band on location around town with available light. This allowed us to concentrate on lighting the performances at the farm location and for pyrotechnics expert Darcy Davis to blow up a van for the finale.