Prime Time romantic comedy shot with F23

Berengar Pfahl Film (BPF) is a small production company from a little town near Düsseldorf in Western Germany. Nevertheless they produce films and TV movies at the most exotic places and know how to work digitally as they shot their latest effort Griechische Küsse (Greek Kisses) with Sony’s digital cinematography camera – the F23.

The romantic comedy is set on the Greek island Santorini, from where soon-to-be married groom Tim calls his fiancée Vanessa to cancel their wedding. However, for Vanessa this is not an option, and so she travels to sunny Greece to talk it over with her future husband. The 90-minute TV movie was produced in the record-breaking time of less than three months from the start of principal photography to its premiere in a prime time slot at private TV station SAT1 with nearly all of the post production taking place in BPF’s own facilities.

Moving up another level

After working for nearly a quarter of a century with film emulsions, director of photography, Erich Krenek, has had experience of shooting with HDCAM since 2007, when he did two features for BPF with a Sony HDW-F900R HDCAM camcorder, one of which was used on the movie Shanghai Baby starring Chinese-American actress Bai Ling. Having worked with both film and HD, Krenek says, “Nowadays HD and film have reached equal quality heights, so that film and HD cameras are on eye level and there really is no need to shoot in 16mm anymore.”

Krenek says that the Sony F23 undermines this thesis. “The F23 comes with improvements on a wide scale. Not only in terms of resolution and details in the shadows, but also in terms of cine-gamma and shutter-effect. Everything has gone up another level.”

Tests Volker Rodde

The F23 for the shoot on Santorini was provided by Cologne rental house Volker Rodde and after tests with the camera, Krenek and his assistant Jörg Jahn chose the presets of the gamma curves with only little adjustment in the master-black as a general line-up. “With the preset curves there is no difference to shooting on emulsions. In terms of lighting and contrast I worked in the same way as I would have done with film.” He was especially satisfied with the results when shooting at night. “The big advantage of shooting digitally is the sensitivity in the dark areas. You don’t have to set up a ground level of lighting like with emulsions. Instead you can work with provocative lights and create atmospheres.”

He mounted the F23 on his own specially designed jib-system. “I prefer to control the camera movements all by myself with a specially modified jib-arm on a location dolly. This allows me to react spontaneously and in a very flexible way to the actor’s movements without having to worry about setting up tracks and the communication with a dolly operator.”

Because TV station SAT1 wanted to go on air as soon as possible, the production schedule was very tight. But as BPF has worked over the last 30 years on all five continents and in locations like Indonesia and China, this didn’t daunt them. The tapes were sent via a courier service from the Greek island to Athen’s Airport and then picked up at Düsseldorf International, so post production of the material could start normally two days after the scenes were shot.

Editing on Final Cut Pro

The editing was done in parallel on three Mac Pros using Final Cut Pro. By working in HDCAM SR nearly all the post production, including visual effects, could be done in house at BPF’s studios and this helped to save valuable production time and money. Supervisor of post production, Martin Pfahl, is glad that he did not have to deal with material transfers to and from other locations, such as film laboratories or vfx-studios. “We already noticed when we did the other HD projects in 2007 that working with HDCAM SR makes for a leaner production chain and is a more cost efficient solution. But at the same time it provides us with higher picture quality as we aim to bring the best results for our clients.”

14 February 2009