Björn Benckert
Well-known member
A project we shot last winter during a week in Zermatt.
It was a bit nuts, as I went down there on a reece trip a week in advance and then the slopes where literary green gras fields. So it felt more than a bit difficult to figure out how it could all be done. The client was talking about powder skiing and well, that felt quite far fetched. So it was all about to be canceled, but then we got calls about some snow comming, so we flew down again. And yes, things had really changed, This time it was difficult to get into zermatt as the road was closed due to avalanche risk and it was dumping down more snow than we could ever have hoped for. We where ofcourse stoked about the fact, but then the days passed by and even though we got to go snowboarding every day we could not shoot anything as there where simply not enough visibility in all that snowfall... A bit frsustrated to say the least.
Then after almost a week of powder runs and waiting, the sky suddenly breaks up on the last day budgeted. And we got a full day of blistering sun and perfect conditions. Then we just needed to make our 5 day shoot in one which was quite a race.
This was DP'd by Jocke Thörnquist on our weapon helium and a epic dragon with Kowa anamophics and then Janne Jansson (fellow reduser) did Bcam and all drone shots with his inspire2 and zenmuse x5.
What I find cool is how well the helium and dragon holds up in the blistering brightness and harsh sunlight. As the high altitude and all that white put us in ND 22 territory and still we needed to close down quite a bit. Monitor screens and such where simply showing nothing but a pitch black image if we did not wrap a black cloth around our heads and screens. But somehow we managed too get full coverage both in the white snowfields and the dark trees in every shot even though we hardly saw what we where doing under that high altitude light. Have to say, HDRx is a beautiful thing in such stressed uncontrolled light conditions.
As this was in march 2017 , IPP2 was still in beta but we got some early luts from Graeme to use and it was super nice to see how well we could balance the two cameras against each other even though we where swinging a 18mm zeiss when we felt the kowas where not wide enough. Even the Zenmuse with it´s slightly tighter DR worked well above my expectation.
Also nice to see how elastic the material is, we where posting it all in 4k set as common width then we did zoom to extract a 16:9 version out of that, which still looked super slick and crisp, simply video noise was not a thing, all visible noise we added after compositing and scaling for different formats.
So possibly you can have a guessing game here what was shot was helium, epic or X5.
More info here:
http://www.syndicate.se/swissmilk-ski/
