Saluting the military Director Brandon Jameson tells the storyPSAs from LINK Technologies offer “things you don’t know, but should.”

LINK Technologies (linktechllc.com) director Brandon Jameson’s recent projects have received accolades and best in show nods from the governing bodies of Cine’, Clio, Telly, Communitas and the AVA Awards.

By Glenn Estersohn

Behind the scenes photography by Allyna Roman

Community Matters is an award-winning series of public service announcements created by LINK Technologies. The 45-second spots appear on Public Television and feature out-of-the-way community affairs stories, often with a connection to the client. LINK Technologies has just completed the fourth season of Community Matters announcements, shot in RAW Lite on the Sony F65. We spoke with the cinematographer, DIT, editor and colorist—after checking in with the director, Brandon Jameson.

“Tomb Guard” takes us to the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery.

Q: So how did Community Matters come about?

Jameson: The client saw some work we had done for another client and contacted us directly. They pride themselves on who they are for the communities that they serve. It was just a perfect match. Their message was a clear one and from that we developed the Community Matters concept which has won just about every award you can for public service spots. In previous seasons, we were dealing with different forms of diversity in the community. We were asked to research stories that would make you say, “I didn’t know that but I should.” Diversity in the community can be LGBT, women, people of color. We created stories that really had integrity and reflected sources of pride. That was a mandate from our clients.

Q: How did you approach the new season?

Jameson: The client said that this year we want to honor the military, portraying unknown facets. The award-winning screenwriter for the series, Shell Danielson, helped us come up with three very solid stories. “Panama Canal” describes how Army Major Walter Reed demonstrated that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitos, helping to save lives as the United States completed the Canal. “Tomb Guard” tells the story of the elite detail from the 3rd Army Infantry that guards the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery. And “Operation Christmas Drop” describes an annual Air Force humanitarian mission in the western Pacific. I’m delighted that the client will be contributing to Operation Christmas Drop.

Q: What else is new this year?

Jameson: We made a decision early on to always keep the camera moving. They were one-day shoots each. Although it would have been nice to go from Steadicam to Movi to dolly to sticks, our great cinematographer, Flor Collins and I decided very early on that it would probably be in our best interest to just keep it on a dolly and keep it moving. Between that and the extraordinary work of Flor’s gaffer, we were able to pre-light and just roll into different locations with absolutely no wait time. It was amazing. We just went from scene to scene to scene.

“When we drop the S-Log 3 onto the RAW footage now, it needs little to no color correction. This is a huge advance.”

— Brandon Jameson

According to Brandon Jameson, “These stories have a great deal to do with diversity, and therefore a great deal to do with different skin tones.”

Saluting the military

Q: Where did you shoot?

Jameson: Tucked in an industrial park in Anaheim is an amazing place, Silver Dream Factory. They provided us with this little backlot and also the hospital set and the flower shop. So we were able to move directly from the spokesperson’s walk & talk, which opens every spot, right into the hospital and the flower shop!

Q: “Operation Christmas Drop” includes some compelling shots of Air Force cargo planes. Did you shoot that?

Jameson: No! In order to stop the constant requests for footage, each branch of the armed services has their own producers and their own cinematographers. And that footage is available free of charge. You say, “We need this.” And they say, “Well, you can’t come here but we can show you on the web what you can get free.” It’s unbelievably cool. It works. It’s amazing.

Q: I heard that you shot this with your own Sony F65, nicknamed “Birtha.” Why would an agency own a high-end camera?

Jameson: Link Technologies is different from 99.9% of classic agencies or production companies in that

we’re both. Because of that, we have a modicum of pride and integrity in knowing that what we own is the best we can do for our clients. We differ from a classic creative agency that always hires a production company. We keep it all in house, which makes it a lot easier. And while we have sets of lenses that we like, we do not impose our camera or lenses on the directors of photography we hire. It’s something we can offer them that works very cost-effectively in the way that we budget a full job.

Q: How did you choose the F65?

Jameson: We have a history of adopting technology fast. We tested the DALSA camera. We had two Vipers before anyone else did and were fortunate enough to lend them out on Benjamin Button. It behooved us to determine the absolute best camera for us and we jumped on the F65. We were lucky enough to be working with some really stellar support people at both Abel Cine in New York and Band Pro in LA. At Sony, we had experts on both coasts, as well. In New York we worked with Ian Cook, and in LA Simon Marsh.

“The rendition of skin of all different shades and textures, all different age of actors is really quite beautiful and complimentary.”

—Brandon Jameson

The Production Crew on set.

Q: You must have seen the F65 evolve over time. What were the biggest changes?

Jameson: S-Log-3 is one breakthrough. If I were Sony, I’d be shouting from the rooftops about this. When we take the RAW footage in, colorists will commonly drop a LUT on. And when we drop the S-Log 3 onto the RAW footage now, it needs little to no color correction. This is a huge advance, especially for the Community Matters campaign. These stories have a great deal to do with diversity, and therefore a great deal to do with different skin tones. We love the F65 because you can see that the rendition of skin of all different shades and textures, all different age of actors is really quite beautiful and complimentary.

Q: What else?

Jameson: RAW Lite. When we needed something to go to broadcast very quickly, we used to shoot 1080 HD. Now we find we can use RAW Lite pretty much the same way but utilize the full resolution of F65 capture. That is lovely! And we can also offer our clients stills. It becomes not only a cinema camera but also a useful way to capture frames that can be blown up for print and even billboards. We’ve been really, really happy with that.

Q: You mentioned lenses. What do you own?

Jameson: We have two sets of lenses, modified to PL mounts. The first is a set of Cooke Speed Panchros which we love because it gives us a more painterly feel. The other is a set of Zeiss Contax lenses that have the T coating instead of the MC coating. That tends to give us a sharper image. But these modified lenses can be a challenge for focus pullers and ACs. So on jobs like this, we encourage DPs to rent lenses of their choosing. In fact, DPs are using lenses the way they used to think of emulsion. You would pick a film stock for what it could offer you in terms of grain and ASA and color rendition. I’m finding DPs less concerned about the camera and more concerned about the glass they want to use. It’s the digital form of emulsion, of expression. On this job, Flor chose a set of Zeiss Super Speeds.

Saluting the military

“Operation Christmas Drop” included a warehouse set, plus stock footage of Air Force cargo planes.

“We can also offer our clients stills. It becomes not only a cinema camera but also a useful way to capture frames that can be blown up for print and even billboards.”

—Brandon Jameson

DP Flor Collins: Keeping it movingBorn in Ireland, director of photography Flor Collins (florcollins.com) now finds himself in Southern California. His credits include commercials for Nike, T-Mobile, BMW and Toyota.

Q: How did you prep?

Collins: I had a meeting with Brandon, who showed me his storyboards. He had some reference stills for the kind of look he was going for. Style-wise, he wanted everything to be on the move slightly. So we talked about that and composition and shot design. We had one scout day and we were off and running.

Q: What was different for this season?

Collins: I had seen the earlier seasons and each had a slightly different look. Brandon wanted to keep it fresh. Part of that was the camera movement: subtle but interesting camera moves on each shot. Not distracting but the person walking, the camera moving, slight drift left-to-right, in or out. It was a tight shooting schedule. You try to maximize to make each set as interesting as possible. But again, there’s only so much time for art direction, lighting and everything.

Q: Why did you choose Zeiss Super Speeds?

Collins: Because the digital cameras are just so high-resolution these days, sometimes you can get a little too cold and clinical. The old Zeiss Super Speeds give a nice balance with high-end cameras, kind of softening the image. Ultra-modern with somewhat old-school lenses.

Q: What kind of crew did you have?

Collins: Since they were PSAs, it wasn’t a normalcommercial crew size. I had a gaffer, grip and two extra guys. Four guys altogether. But we didn’t have a lot of time or crew or money, considering how much we had to do. There were things I had only limited control over. So I was very pleased with the way it came out.

Q: How do you mean?

Collins: For example, the intro to each spot is the spokesperson walking towards camera. That was the shot I was most worried about. Normally for that shot, you’d pick the best time of day and be out of there within an hour. But there were wardrobe changes, there was dialog. So it took over half a day. And because it was a very small back-lot set, I could only shoot one direction. I couldn’t shoot in the ideal direction for sunlight. For a big-budget commercial, I would have put a silk overhead and covered the whole backlot for diffuse sunlight all day long. In this case, I had some diffusion overhead for the spokesperson. But it was getting hotter in

“It was getting hotter in the background and there was nothing I could do. Fortunately, the F65 handled it very well.”

— Flor Collins

the background and there was nothing I could do. I had to live with it. Fortunately, the F65 handled the hot background very well. The highlights rolled off really nicely. That was very confidence-inspiring.

Q: Was that a surprise?

Collins: Yes. It was my first proper job with the F65 and I was really pleased with the natural look that rolled off. With some cameras these days you have to do a lot of work to get them roughly where you want. But the F65 had a very pleasing image from the get-go. And then actually in the coloring session it needed so little tweaking. It went really fast because we didn’t have to do an awful lot of work.

Q: How did you find the color?

Collins: Really pleasant again. With some modern cameras, I spend more time with the DIT, tweaking the skin tones than I would like. This one was effortless. Tony Salgado, our DIT was doing subtle tweaks on-set. But again it was nothing that slowed me down. So the image I was working with was very pleasing from the get-to.

Q: What did you think of the camera’s 20 Megapixel sensor?

Collins: Actually, I’m baffled by the whole resolution thing. You can get nice-looking images without going 4K, 6K. It’s not important to me, unless there’s a specific demand. Post sometimes requires maximum resolution because they want to move the frame around or punch in. In that case, I would listen to post. But for an average job where you’re not doing a lot of punching in afterwards, the resolution is not important to me. I’m more interested in how the colors roll off and how the dynamic range is. I would prioritize that more than resolution on any camera.

DP Flor Collins and crew in the backlot at Silver Dream Factory.

Saluting the military

“With some modern cameras, I spend more time with the DIT, tweaking the skin tones than I would like. This one was effortless.”

— Flor Collins

Q: How did you record?

Collins: We shot the RAW Lite. I liked itbecause it didn’t slow us down at all. Sometimes when you shoot the higher resolution stuff, you get bogged down with the workflow. I didn’t even notice it. It was invisible to me, which is all I care about. You’re so busy on-set, shooting. So I got the best quality and there was no penalty in terms of my shooting style.

Q: Were there any surprises?

Collins: The electronic viewfinder. For some strange reason, the eyepiece on some cameras tends to cook your eye. Because your eye is jammed in there, your eye tends to get hot and dry out. Whether subconsciously or not, I found the F65 was very easy on my eye. I wasn’t baked by the end of the day.

Q: How would you summarize the F65?

Collins: In the old film days, you never thought about the camera. Just the film stock. Today, you sometimes shoot and you’re more aware of the camera than you’d like to be. The F65 is not one of those cameras. It was invisible. I wasn’t tweaking the camera. I wasn’t hunting for menu things. So I could concentrate on my job: lighting, and operating and composition. The camera is part of what makes the image on the screen, but for me, the lighting and the composition are the main things.

“The eyepiece on some cameras tends to cook your eye,” says DP Flor Collins. “The F65 was very easy on my

eye. I wasn’t baked by the end of the day.”

Saluting the military

“The F65 had a very pleasing image from the get-go.”

— Flor Collins

Making the work flow: DIT Tony SalgadoTony Salgado, Digital Imaging Technician, IA 600, has previously worked as an online editor, video controller, engineer in charge and still photographer.

Q: What does a DIT do on a project like this?

Salgado: I was responsible for interfacing between the DP, production company and editorial to insure a solid transition of the technical logistics and media deliverables as well as maintaining the creative intent of the DP and director.

Q: And what was your setup?

Salgado: The spots were recorded in F65 RAW Lite onto the SR-R4 and Sony 512 GB cards. The video village was simple on this shoot: one monitor for the director, another monitor for the DP and 1st AC and finally I had the color critical monitor at my DIT cart. I used a 24" monitor and a small overhead tent for on-set color grading which incorporated the S-Log 3 LUT.

Q: You did on-set grading?

Salgado: Yes. We used DaVinci Resolve on set and in post production. I chose Resolve based on ease of use, especially the seamless incorporation of the S-Log 3 LUTs for the F65. And DaVinci Resolve is my primary choice for onset transcoding as it handles many different camera models, resolution and output codecs.

Q: How did you communicate your on-setcorrections to post?

Salgado: I used Pomfort Livegrade for creating Color Decision Lists (CDLs), which I then imported into Resolve for final onset grading and transcoding. I did apply secondary color correction to fine-tune certain shots. I delivered all transcodes with the onset color grading burned in. I delivered ProRes LT media transcodes to Lance, the offline editor.

Q: Was there anything that particularly surprised you about the F65?

Salgado: I’ve worked with practically all the Sony cameras and I’m very familiar with the F65. But I did appreciate the iPad app which provides remote access to the F65 menus.

Q: How did you back up the memory card?

Salgado: I downloaded the camera original footage a total of three times. This included two hard drives (one for editorial, the second for the production company archive) and the third copy onto my workstation RAID for transcoding.

Q: Did you follow the job into post?

Salgado: As a former online editor, I always consult with post production to insure we’re all on the same page. It’s essential to discuss deliverable codec and resolution preferences to avoid any issues.

Q: How did the F65 RAW Lite transfer times compare to your experiences with other top-end digital cinema cameras?

Salgado: Shooting RAW Lite did increase the transfer time slightly compared to shooting Apple ProRes with an Alexa camera. But I maintained an onset protocol not to fill up memory cards more than 50% maximum to allow a constant stream of ingesting and simultaneous transcoding. In addition, my GPU and MacPro are well set up to deal with F65 Raw Lite. So it was all very fast. I also opted to record an audio scratch track directly to camera to speed up the transcode times. This was a common workflow I have done in the past for documentaries with ENG-style camcorders.

Q: How did the camera do?

Salgado: I believe the F65 outperforms other RAW recording cameras. I was so happy to work with a camera in which the color reproduction is accurate to the eye. Some other cameras cannot faithfully record the color palette on set. The camera’s S Gamut will always be my choice for color space.

“I appreciated the iPad app which provides remote access to the F65 menus.”

— Tony Salgado

Saluting the military

Saluting the military

Quick and easy for editor Lance TracyEditor and director Lance Tracy (lancetracy.net) has done powerful, engaging work for the NBC Olympics, Fox Sports and Ace Hardware, in addition to documentaries and narrative films.

Q: The F65 is a top-end camera. How did that affect the edit?

Tracy: Not at all. It was just like any other job. We used DropBox to bring the material in. Tony Salgado gave me the proxies in Apple ProRes, exactly as I wanted and I cut in Final Cut Pro 7. We delivered XML files. Pretty standard.

Q: The “Panama Canal” spot featured some Ken Burns-like slow pans across sepia-tone archival photos from 100 years ago.

Tracy: Yes. I did that on my system. Again, very easy.

Q: Wasn’t anything on this job a challenge for you?

Tracy: Not really. Maybe syncing the sound.

Hitting the highlights with colorist Jake BlackstoneEditor and colorist Jake Blackstone (jake-blackstone.com) of MOD Color has done ground-breaking work in remote grading. His credits include music videos and commercials for Yves Saint Laurent, Snickers and Gulf Oil.

Q: Could you describe your workflow?

Blackstone: All the materials came in on a hard drive. I was given XML so I imported everything in Resolve, conformed in Resolve and after that I was able to trim only the pieces used to my hard drive. Even though F65 RAW Lite is compressed, it’s still quite a bit for the regular hard drive to play back in real time. So I trimmed it down, I laid it down to my fast drives and then I just replaced the trimmed pieces with the original pieces. So I was able work off the RAW material but just the trimmed pieces in Resolve.

Q: Who attended the session?

Blackstone: It was a supervised session, a normal grading session with both Brandon (the director) and Flor (the DP). Mostly the director of photography was running the session saying, “Let’s do this, let’s do that.”

Q: How was working with F65 RAW Lite?

Blackstone: It’s a wonderful combination of RAW and compressed because the files are still a manageable size. It just amazes me that this camera makes such beautiful images. Really amazing. I would love to work more with the F65. Going in, I was worried about performance. F65 RAW needs to be decompressed and de-Bayered. Decompression is really only done in CPU. With other RAW formats, if you don’t have many cores of CPU you can’t decompress real time. De-Bayering is done in GPUs and I have a mid-level system with a couple of 680s. With other RAW formats, if you want top end performance, you need two Titan GPUs. Which means that if I want to work in real time, I’m forced to work in half- or even quarter-resolution. But F65 RAW Lite was so easy it was amazing. The moment

I started using it, it was literally like I was using ALEXA ProRes. Everything was real time. There was absolutely no need for caching anything.

Q: Doesn’t the RED Rocket card overcome these issues?

Blackstone: Sure. But it’s $7,500, something I don’t have to spend on other cameras. It’s a problem for me when you have to buy hardware that’s specifically tied to a camera and that takes slots. And frankly, I’m out of slots on my computer. Even if I had $7,500 I have no place to stick it in.

“I was worried about performance, but F65 RAW Lite was so easy it was amazing. Everything was real time. There was absolutely no need for caching anything.”

— Jake Blackstone

Saluting the military

Q: How did you find grading the material?

Blackstone: It literally surprised me. Dynamic range and highlight protection are always an issue with electronic cameras. There were a lot of shots outside and there is always concern with the highlights. I was very pleasantly surprised how well the F65 image held up. I could have done more but sometimes the DP said, let the highlights fall where they are without bringing them back in. It was just really beautiful. The highlight protection had so much latitude. There was absolutely no issue with highlights blowing out. It was just wonderful. The way it retains the highlights reminds me of film. In the old days of film you could pretty much never blow the highlights out. You just dug in and there they were! The F65 was like that, almost film-like.

Q: Some of the shots were stock. How did you get it to match?

Blackstone: The stock was video gamma versus Sony’s S-Log. Normally, if everything was just S-Log, I would just apply S-Log to the whole timeline. But this way, because it was mixed gamma material, I had to apply gamma to each Sony shot. I just had to do it individually versus global. It didn’t take that long. It’s not that big a deal.

Q: What was your biggest challenge?

Blackstone: Maybe some metadata issues with Resolve. To be honest, it was a really easy job. It was beautifully photographed. It’s always interesting. In the higher-end jobs, you get material that is so beautifully shot that it’s 90% there. Sometimes I just adjust a little bit of white balance and contrast. It’s like, “Wow, I get paid for something that doesn’t need that much work.” This was definitely one of those jobs.

“In the old days of film you could pretty much never blow the highlights out. You just dug in and there they were! The F65 was like that, almost film-like.”

— Jake Blackstone

The crew went on location to the USS Iowa in Long Beach.