Dear friends, readers and fellow RED enthusiasts.
It is wonderful to be back in Florida after a frigid start to our Missouri adventure.
The snow was so deep that we had to call the first shooting day.
To our dismay we were forced to spend the day holed-up in the hotel, doing some pre-planning, and re-arranging the shot list.
Oh the misery of whittling the hours away, in and out of the hot tub and pool, hanging out at local watering holes, and passing hours spinning yards with our old pals, and getting to know the local Missouri crew ... oh yes, and involved in pre-production.
The next day the sun poked out, the snow quickly melted and we set up the crane, built the RED and fired up the generator and HMIs.
Although the conditions were muddy and a bit cold, we got spectacular cobalt blue skies with puffy white cotton clouds ... thanks to mother nature and a 138mm polarizer.
The RED performed spectacularly as always.
We allowed the (occasionally overcast) sky to get hot but it never burned. The natural darkness of the bare trees was revealed with no loss of detail in the dark areas.
As always Kevin chose a set of Zeiss super-speeds as our primary lens set.
We seldom opened up all of the way (except for some dusk shots) and ended up using NDs quite often.
It is the excruciating sharpness of the super-speeds that always draws us back.
During the entire week the RED performed without a hitch.
Just for fun we had the sound man run single system sound into the RED (our primary sound source came from his deck of course).
In post production we discovered that the RED audio card did a spectacular job.
In a pinch I am confident that we could have used the audio recorded on the RED as our primary source.
Stay tuned next month for an update on our first shoot with the ... RED BUILD 30 !
See you later .... Simon (R) (love that camera more and more) Manses