During our filming, I was in charge of camera during Day 1, 2 and 4. We had a couple of issues with shooting in general, but they were all solved gladly, thanks to some tips Fergus had given me in previous opportunities.
The first tip is what I like to call the "Danny factor."Danny has a particular thing that maybe not everyone notices and it's that he always wearing a plain white t-shirt. This has come very in handy in our project and in different moments we had worked together, because it is very useful for white balancing. We never use a white piece of paper, because we can manage to balance the camera with his shirt and also helps us not having to carry with a paper everywhere just to white balance over and over.
The second tip, that was actually something I learned from talking to Fergus once, is the use of the ND filter in the camera. At first I just thought it helped giving more or less light to the camera, which is same feature as the aperture gain, but it wasn't. I learned that if there is a lot of light, you can put your ND filter in 1 or 2 (depending on how much light you have) to get a more sharpen image and also get a nice depth of field. It is basically a feature that gives you more quality by dropping light. In our case, the days we were outside during the morning or sunset, there was so much light, that this feature helped us get a lot of sharpen images from dogs.
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| Location of ND Filter (right) |
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| Shot with ND Filter 2 |
The third and last tip that I also learned from a talk with Fergus once, was how to set up the gain of mic in the camera. One feature that the camera has that I wasn't aware of before, was that you can control how much sound you want the mic to pick up. It helped a lot in the interviews with the clip mic, because the clip mic was so close to the person's mouth, that I could set it up in -36 so it only picked their voices and almost nothing of the environment.
Regarding the issues we had with the camera, the first one was that we got a dodgy battery the first time, we limited us a lot on battery life on the camera. We had to charge the battery every time that we were not using it, otherwise it would have been a shame to run out of battery in the middle of a session. Luckily we didn't at any point and we managed to admin the battery very well.
The second issue we had was during the second day filming the display team. Since it was at night and it was all outside, we had to set up the camera with quite some gain and in places where you could get some light from some big lamps they have, otherwise all our shot would have been very dark and we would have been unable to use them.
Another issue we had that was solved with a tip learned as well from Fergus, was trying to get a shot from a dog jumping through fire, but darkening the background a bit without making the dog go black. We wanted a shot focused on the dog and the fire. I remember Profile Picture was a good tool for that and I played with the black color in it and managed to set the background dark but not take make the entire shot black. Here the outcome of it
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| Original Shot |
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| Shot with Profile Picture |
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