Currently in production...

Live at the Wheel ©Standard 8 Film Making

In September my local bar held a cabaret night. It was so much fun I decided that for the next cabaret night I would take my camera along and try to film it. This is going to be a sort of online diary of how things go!

Despite this being a website dedicated to Standard 8 film this film is going to be shot on 16mm. Because it's a live cabaret I will not have the luxury of spending lots of time setting things up and getting things right. Because of the nature of this film, low light levels, documentary style live action, this film is going to require a lot more thought and planning than anything else I've ever done before and I realise I've probably made life difficult for myself by this choice of subject but it's going to be nothing if not a challenge!

I am going to use two cameras. Camera one - A Bolex H16 RX4 with three prime Switar lenses, 10mm,26mm and 75mm. This camera I am going to use as a lightweight mobile camera to do close ups and dart around the bar filming anything interesting between the acts. Camera two - Bolex SBM with Vario-Switar POE-4 and 400ft magazine. This camera will be on a tripod and will be fairly static and will be used to film the cabaret acts.

Because of the low light levels, I will not be able to use any additional lighting as this will interfere with the cabaret, I have decided to use Kodak Vision 3 500T (7219) as the filmstock. This being the newest and fastest film made by Kodak so hopefully it will be able to cope with the low light levels. I estimate I will need two 400ft spools and two 200ft spools giving me a total 1000ft and around 26mins of film. This I plan to edit down to about 2.5-3 minutes for the final film. Because this is a negative film it will need to be telecined for editing and viewing so it will be shot at 25fps the european standard.

25th October 2008: Spoke to the owner of the bar about the film and asked her permission which she readily gave - now I am committed!

30th October 2008: Placed a post on the Cinematography forum for some general advice as this forum is populated by some very knowledgable and helpful people.

31st October 2008: Tonight is halloween and the bar where the cabaret is being held is having a karaoke fancy dress night so I have bought a single 100ft roll of film so that I can use it as a kind of dress rehearsal to get an idea of what will work and what won't before I finally commit to purchasing lots of expensive film! Both cameras are being serviced by Bolex in Switzerland so I am going to use my fallback Krasnogorsk K3. I must admit to being very nervous. Not because of the technical side so much but from previous experience I know how much attention film cameras tend to draw! I have plotted a rough idea of the shots I want to have in the final film so I am going to film light tests in each of these areas to see what the results are.

31st October 2008: Have received some responses to my forum posting and have been advised to try the following. Bracket exposure where possible to see what works and what doesn't for the look I am trying to achieve. Use a grey card at the start of the test reel (and the final shooting reels) so that the lab that processes the film can judge the colour balance and exposure. And finally a small light above the camera to help bring out the faces of the audience against the dark surroundings.

5th November 2008: Film test shoot went very well but light levels where a lot lower than expected. Have sent reel off for processing and now await it's return so that it can be transferred.

11th November 2008: Film came back from the lab. Was pleasantly surprised by the results although there is a fair bit of grain and it was shot on a poor camera it was enough to show me that I will be able to go ahead with the project. Both Bolex cameras have also arrived so things are looking good! I Have decided to use a monopod instead of a tripod for the SBM camera as this will allow me some movement and will not take up as much space as a tripod would.

12th November 2008: Today ordered the film stock from Kodak who gave me a 40% discount which is tremendous! Have also ordered a monopod. However I am having problems finding a reasonable price film transfer to harddisk. I have had quotes ranging from £800 to £1500...ouch. There is a company in my local area but so far I have been unable to get hold of them and they don't reply to emails - typical of British companies!

20th November 2008: Test film has now been transferred to DVD to give me a better idea of results. First thing I noticed is that due to the low light levels it was very difficult to focus accurately so I will need to make doubly sure of this on the night and may have to focus using measurements rather than the reflex viewfinder of the camera. Second thing is that when the film is converted to video a lot of the shadow and dark areas are completely lost and just become black. I now think push processing of 1 stop is going to be required this will uprate the film to 1000ASA. I have posted the test film onto Vimeo see link below.

Live at the Wheel -Test from Mark Baldry on Vimeo.

5th Decmber 2008: I have decided to use only the SBM camera with magazine mount and monopod as I feel that trying to switch between two cameras is going to make things too complicated and there will not be time to do any "darting around" between the acts.

6th December 2008: Because of the live/documentary nature of this film the amount amount of pre-planning was very limited. Pretty much as soon as I arrived in the bar I could see there where going to be issues mainly due to the bar being quite small and crowded.

I had planned to have three basic elements to my film. The first was to film the cabaret artists getting ready. The second was to film the cabaret itself. The third was to film the audience and use this to intercut with the cabaret scenes to make the film more interesting.

Since I had made the first test film the upstairs area of the bar, which is where the artists where going to change, had been turned into a wine bar and the pool table moved to a small area at the rear. This area had been curtained off so the artists could change in private. So I found myself trying to film them change in a very cramped area with a pool table stuck in the middle! My decision to use only the Bolex SBM with zoom lens really backfired as the camera was just too big and bulky to move quickly around the small area. This meant I missed a lot of interesting shots and because of the limited focussing distance and limited wideangle meant that even the shots I did try where either too close up or I was unable to focus. I also found that people moved around too quickly for me to keep up with and this again meant I missed some interesting shots. One good thing however was that the lighting conditions where better than expected.

Again since the first test film things had been moved around downstairs so the area I had hoped to film the cabaret from now had seating around it so the only place I could film from was to the rear of the bar. Although I could film above the heads of the audience I found that I could only film the head and shoulders of the artists athough the zoom was good enough to get full frame facial shots. It was now that I started to have some problems with the camera. The magazine winding motor kept stopping and so the film was not taken up into the magazine after it had been though the camera. When I removed the the winding motor from the magazine it ran perfectly so I thought the problem was with the magazine, changing the magazine didn't cure the problem. I replaced the winding motor, the new motor again ran when off the magazine but not when connected. I then changed batteries, but still no luck! By now the cabaret was nearing and end so I decided to stop shooting. In all i'd managed to shoot 200ft of the first magazine and all 400ft of the second although there had been a breakdown about one third of the way through it.

7th December 2008: I decided to sacrifice the first 200ft of the first magazine and use the film to test the camera in an effort to discover the cause of the breakdown. After lots of test it turned out to be the cable connecting the magazine winding motor to the main motor. If touched or moved even a fraction the cable would earth and the motor would stop and would not start again until the cable was removed and reconnected. The cable was new so I hadn't thought to replace it last night!

All in all I wouldn't put the night down as a disaster as even without the breakdown I wasn't getting the shots I was hoping for. I have sent the remaining 400ft of film off to be developed and transferred to DVD. I will then be able to see what push processing will do to the image and how interesting the shots from the rear of the bar where. The manager of the bar informed me there would be another cabaret in January or February. If i do decide to try again, and it will depend on the results of the second test film, it is obvious that i will need to replan the whole thing. My Bolex RX4 would have been a better camera to use being smaller and lighter and with a Switar 10mm macro lens it can get into the most cramped places but has only 100ft of film capacity. I could mount the 10mm lens on the SBM but this will mean complicated and fiddly lens changes or shooting with only one focal length. The third option would be have to a magazine mount fitted to the RX4, although this would give me a choice of three lenses it would make the RX4, now technically a RX5, as heavy and bulky as the SBM! Ironically Bolex had offered me this option when i sent the RX4 off for servicing but I had turned it down as an uneccessary expense.

Positives from last night where that it gave me some confidence as even when things where going wrong I didn't panic. Also by the end of the night the bar manager was very enthusiastic about me shooting again next year, so if nothing else it was a very good PR exercise. I also discovered that I need to be a lot more assertive at asking people to do what I want them to do in order to get the shots I need. I was a little timid in doing this which is why I probably missed a lot of things in the changing area.

So I've now got some decisions to make. But all in all I really enjoyed last night and learned a lot. I think this is probably the most important thing about this film however it turns out.

12th December 2008: Test film has been returned and the results are a lot better than I had hoped for. There are still a couple of issues with poor focussing but the push processing really helped the light levels. The only other issue is that I really need to get a lot closer to the artists.

Live at the Wheel - Test 2 from Mark Baldry on Vimeo.

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