New SNL intro shot on Dragon

[Brandon J.F.]

I had nothing to do with this, but loved the article...

https://vimeo.com/107482286

The 40th Anniversary SNL intro was shot on Dragon.

Our main camera for the cast portraits was the Red Epic Dragon. While we’ve leaned toward the Arri Alexa over the past couple of seasons, we tried out the Dragon on a handful of spots and found it to be a huge improvement over the (Non-Dragon) Epic.

They used vintage glass, in camera vfx, light-writing, custom bokehs, lens-whacking, gimbals, and more...

This article goes into detail about how they did it all: http://petapixel.com/2014/12/02/snl-title-sequence/

Here's a sample:

One of the tricks I was most excited to try was a custom bokeh technique. This one looks like a magic trick. As we all know intuitively, when a light source is thrown out of focus – be it a lamp, car headlight, traffic light, etc – it turns into a soft ball of light. The shape of the out-of-focus light is called the “bokeh” (Japanese term), and is actually a reflection of the shape of the iris of the lens itself. So here’s the trick: you can change the shape of that round ball into whatever shape you choose by creating a custom bokeh filter. If the shape of the filter is smaller than the diameter of the iris, the out-of-focus bokeh will magically take the shape of the filter in place of the iris.


Here’s how it works: we wanted the bokeh to be shaped like the SNL logo, such that when we racked focus, every light source in the shot would turn into the logo. Street traffic would turn into a river of SNL logos, with the logo changing from red to green in the traffic lights…

It's a great article.

 

[Neil Dearman]

thats sick man well done!!!!

 

[Jeremy Saville]

I was nearly on the show a few years back, didn't quite happen, but at least I have the same camera they're using so I got that going for me...which is nice.

 

[Mark Phelan]

"We started shooting the cast portraits at 6K resolution at 5:1 compression, thinking it would be very helpful to have a lot of room to re-frame shots, but after the first two cast-shoots (out of fifteen) racked up over 2TB of footage, we quickly dropped down to a more manageable 5K/7:1 resolution."

Oh how that made me laugh! I heard that! How often do we go chasing Ks thinking more is better? Been there, done that. While it is better, it also comes with a steep price and then comes the learning curve of what is actually "good enough".

6K 5:1 = 141MB/sec and 29 minutes of recording time on a 240GB SSD.

5K 5:1 = 87MB/sec and 47 minutes.

4K 5:1 = 56MB/sec and 73 minutes.

OR, going down to the generic 8:1 compression it gets even more dramatic:

6K 8:1 = 88MB/sec and 46 minutes.

5K 8:1 = 54MB/sec and 75 minutes.

4K 8:1 = 35MB/sec and 117 minutes of recording time on a 240GB SSD.

Reminds me of that old maxim about price, quality and service, choose any two. But in this case it's resolution, compression and recording time. Choose any two.

 

[Troy Bakewell]

I presume Low Light OLPF?

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Clever use of a waterhouse stop. I didn't realize there was a formula for calculating the dimensions of a waterhouse stop based on lens.

 

[Nick Morrison]

Awesome, awesome article!

 

[Marc Wielage]

They used vintage glass, in camera vfx, light-writing, custom bokehs, lens-whacking, gimbals, and more...

Good article and a dynamite open. The front filter trick was very cool -- an organic solution to a very high-tech effect.

 

[manoj paramahamsa]

Actually it's a very simple concept with
lensbaby
I tried creating heart shaped bokeh to create a dream seq.
if you want see the video It is used in one shot in the trailer
http://youtu.be/rcrWqN_5lv8