Thirdly, the RED camera is heavy. Add an Agenieux 25-250mm zoom on it and you’ve got something in the Olympic category. Even broken down to its minimal components, it still clocks in at over 10kgs (22lbs). My DoP Stu, is a big guy (6’4”) and in terrific shape, but even he struggled at times.
A subsequent consequence of the weight of the RED was its integration with the grip equipment. The camera setup was just too heavy for the jib and Digi-Dolly combined, meaning a lot of the great shots we had planned had to be canned and valuable time was wasted getting to that decision. In retrospect, this was a problem borne from lack of experience with the RED. I had asked about whether this set up would bear the weight and been told both yes and no. In the end, I made the call to go with it and so have to wear the decision.
Being a distance away from civilisation (read: electricity), the decision was made to record direct to the HDD’s rather than the CF cards, as we didn’t have the crew to be constantly driving back and forth to dump the footage at unit. However, the RED doesn’t like playback from the HDDs much so we couldn’t easily review takes on set. As a director who was also acting, this was annoying yet ultimately known and accepted before we started. I also have a great team around me and my trust was rewarded as we watched the rushes each night. The big advantage of HDD is we did a whole days shooting without having to change media, a significant positive in several ways including no need for data wrangling until the end of the day. However, if the HDD had gone down or wiped our footage, we would have been screwed. Nevertheless we trusted the microfilmmaking gods on this and they smiled kindly on our blind faith. We had a total of five batteries and their capacity was pretty good really. Generally three were on set and two on charge back at the house. There were a few tense moments at the end of the second day as we stretched our power limits having forgotten a battery charge changeover but we got there.
My final point about the RED in the production period is crew. You need to factor in a few extras to help smooth the shoot. We ended up being down a crewmember anyway, and I should have budgeted for two more again, so really we were three short. Again, debriefing with the DoP, Stu recommended a camera department of at least five: DoP, two cam assists and two grips. One of those camera assists must be a focus puller as well. If you are using lighting, throw in a gaffer and probably one more to make the shoot as easy as possible.
