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Exxon

Has there been many documentaries made with the RED One camera? We hear mostly about promos, commercials and a few movies but have people trusted running the camera for long periods as is usual with docos? Not only did Director Jon Akomfrah and DP Dewald Aukema want to use the RED for their documentary Ghosts of the Exxon Valdez they also wanted to take it in to possible -30˚C temperatures in Alaska. Mix that with high temperatures for some footage to be shot in Dallas and you have some question marks, especially after rumours of over heating cameras posted through the reduser forum – maybe a case of too much information if there ever was one.

The documentary wanted to revisit the scene of one of the world’s worst oil spillages, which happened in 1989, the doc was to be transmitted exactly 20 years after the incident. Jon Akomfrah wanted to bring a cinematic quality to it, as an aesthetic for sure but also to give us some idea of how beautiful the place was before it was devastated by the oil. Cinematic usually means film but the next best thing for Jon was the RED.

If you know Dewald then you already know that this is an individual who follows no fashion or custom, which helps him working in the UK, where his South African spirit delights in not conforming. But he has been pushing the HD boundaries in this country a while and shot a very early HD drama for the BBC back in 2004 called Every Time You Look At Me about a relationship between a physically handicapped couple (High Definition Magazine Issue Six, March 2004). Now he has embraced the RED revolution but not before he asked some very knowledgeable part time RED employees if his money was safe with this new camera system. Once he heard that this was the ‘real deal’ and perhaps more importantly the cash backing was there, Dewald bought his RED and one of the first jobs he was to used it on was on the Exxon Valdez doc.

But there is some history here. Director Jon Akomfrah has been shooting with Dewald for about 14 years and it seems they’ve always done things differently, Jon: “We started working with the Digibeta 700 and 790 in the late eighties so we were part of that first group who couldn’t afford to shoot 16mm or Super 16mm for documentaries. We started using them out of necessity but then really got to like the peculiar quality that it had. They way you could get in to the menu and start playing with the luminance and curves etc.. So when we heard about the RED three years ago we both registered for one independently of one another because it seemed to offer some answers to questions we were beginning to raise with Digibeta.

We needed more resolution because we were playing with the image so much with grads and filters and all of that and basically de-saturating it in-camera so much that the images were starting to look slightly inferior. I was getting less than 1K on Digibeta and here is this camera that could give me four times that! Also the actually size of the files were interesting and all at that price!”

Jon calls the move from his Digibeta to RED as a ‘species jump’ but with a steep learning curve as part of the deal. “The workflow seems unconventional to say to least. The standard lament that we heard when we went to a post production house with our shooting plan was ‘….could you shoot it on something else’. Also I realised that we had to work on Final Cut Pro, before that we were wholly and absolutely Avid.

“To be honest I think one of the things that RED did for people like me was force me to see Final Cut in a new way. We did try everything we could to hang on to our Avid way of working but we finally embraced FCP and I’m glad we did it in the end.”

The decision to use a RED camera was tempered with the knowledge that they would be working in Alaska with temperatures dropping to -30˚C, Jon was worried: “We were also going across terrain that required the camera to be working whilst moving. So we spoke quite a lot to RED about this and they assured us that the camera could cope with the extreme temperatures that we were talking about. But it didn’t like the heat, they said. As it turned out we didn’t have any problems with the cold but we did have hiccups with some vibrations on some transport. It would drop and frames and then just give up. But we managed to solve it in the second week as there was a new mount that could absorb those shocks.”

On the face of it Jon saw this coming together of documentary and RED as a perfect marriage especially as they were looking to shoot in Alaska between March and August last year. The weather then would have been pretty much perfect. Blue skies and a little bit of snow. But as the commissioning processed dragged, winter came in to view: “That meant that everything was essentially going to be white. The one thing I knew that digital cameras couldn’t cope with was white. That has been our experience over the years.”

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