Canon EOS C300 Digital Cinema Cameras, EOS 5D Mark III Digital SLR Cameras, and an Array of EF Series Lenses Go Undercover to Tell the Story of Crocodile Gennadiy
Amid the civil unrest in eastern Ukraine, pastor Gennadiy Mokhnenko struggles to operate “Pilgrim,” his children’s rehabilitation center for drug-addicted orphans rescued from the streets of the city of Mariupal. Director Steve Hoover, producer Danny Yourd, and DP John Pope have documented his efforts in their forthcoming film Crocodile Gennadiy, relying on highly mobile cameras and versatile lenses to not only capture cinematic, creative images but also to maintain a low profile in dangerous areas. The team achieved their goals by using a combination of two EOS C300 Digital Cinema cameras, one EOS 5D Mark III Digital SLR camera, and multiple EF-series lenses from Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leader in digital imaging solutions.
“I’m pursuing this story because I find the subjects thoroughly compelling,” Hoover confided. “The characters are unforgettable and their lives hard to comprehend. I really want this film to be an experience, a tour through a dark, confusing world where there are no easy answers.”
Capturing that world was a challenge, Yourd explained. “We did a lot of shooting at night, in available light for the most part,” he said. “The low-light sensitivity of the Canon EOS C300 camera is great. We were even able to get some incredible shots using not much more than moonlight.”
“The EOS C300 is lightweight, it’s designed as a ‘cinematographic’ camera, and it makes shooting on the fly easy,” Pope added. “We needed to move fast, given some of the situations we were in, so it was the perfect tool for the job. The ergonomics of the EOS C300 camera allowed us to shoot Crocodile Gennadiy non-stop all day, every day, and into the evening for 21 days. The EOS C300 also provides many convenient audio features, which made our lives much easier.”
The Canon EOS C300 Cinema camera features two XLR inputs on its detachable LCD monitor unit/control panel for recording microphone or line audio independently to two linear PCM audio channels. The camera is also capable of recording via a mini stereo jack on the camera body.
“Small documentary crews don’t usually have the luxury of being able to concentrate on sound, but high-quality audio is something we take pride in,” Yourd explained. “The Canon EOS C300 camera was ideal for recording quality audio. We always had two tracks being fed into the camera’s two XLR inputs from two separate sources: a shotgun mic mounted on the camera and our recordist’s lightweight wireless transmitter. He was also capturing audio on his own separate CF card recorder. Doing it this way probably shaved a good month or two off of our logging, loading, and organizing in post, which was a huge benefit.”
Yourd also commented that combining their two EOS C300 cameras with an EOS 5D Mark III camera enabled the team to operate as “a well-oiled machine.”
“The EOS 5D Mark III meant that there was always a camera with somebody, which was crucial to telling the story,” he continued. “Without that I think we would have missed things and it wouldn’t have been the same documentary. This camera was used mostly for pick-ups, and for places where we needed to be totally low-profile. When people see it they think it’s just a still-photography camera and some even want their picture taken.”
“When we were out on the streets at night all three cameras could split off and roam, which helped us capture even more imagery,” Pope added.
Crocodile Gennadiy’s Glass
Although a documentary, Hoover, Yourd, and Pope utilized creative techniques in capturing certain portions of Crocodile Gennadiy in order to convey dramatic dimensions of the subject’s crusade to rescue the lost children of Mariupal. Accomplishing this often relied on the strategic use of Canon’s wide variety of EF series lenses, including not only primes and zooms, but also macro and tilt-shift models. Both the Canon EOS C300 cinema camera and the EOS 5D Mark III Digital SLR can be used with any of the more than 103 interchangeable Canon EF series photographic lenses for a virtually unlimited range of creative choices.
“We all come from a cinematic background, and we want Crocodile Gennadiy to be as visually striking as the story it tells,” Pope informed. “Lenses were a vital part of the tools we brought to the table to do this. We used all Canon EF glass.”
Lenses used to shoot Crocodile Gennadiy included: the EF 35mm f/1.4L USM, EF 50mm f/1.2L USM, EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM, and EF 100mm f/2 USM prime lenses; the EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM ultra wide-angle zoom, EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM standard zoom, and EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM telephoto zoom; the TS-E 17mm f/4L, TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II, and TS-E 45mm f/2.8 tilt-shift lenses; and the EF 100mm f/2.8 macro USM lens.
“As a producer, Canon’s lenses are one less thing I have to worry about because I know they’re going to get us incredible images and they’re affordable,” Yourd said. “We never fully knew what situations we’d get into, but having this lens package enabled us to be prepared. Having all these lenses allowed us to just ‘grab and go,’ which was super helpful. We framed for a 2.39:1 aspect ratio and took a very cinematic approach with this film because it’s so narrative-driven. This is a complex character study and we wanted to lend everything to the story, whether it was the musical score or the composition of the shots. Creative lensing helped us do that with everything from landscapes to some of the people we met. We’d experiment, and shoot through glass in front of the lens to distort the image. The two CF cards in the EOS C300 camera let us do that because of their recording capacity. We could shoot all day on the EOS C300’s two CF cards and still come back with something like 12 terabytes of footage.”
“The tilt-shift lenses provided some very creative opportunities to represent certain characters in the film, whether they were people or locations,” Pope confided. “We used them a lot of times to provide a particular feel for a character or a scene. Gennadiy is a powerful character, so a couple of times we put him in center frame while rotating a tilt-shift to where the sides of the image were falling off vertically – rather than horizontally – so the point of focus would be on him, creating a unique mood. Ukraine is a character in itself in the story and it’s a very broken place. It was interesting how we used tilt-shift both in focus and in plane distortion, which lent itself to that particular feel.”
Pope and Yourd added that primes were used both for interviews and for following Gennadiy around on his nightly rescue missions. “It was a bold approach,” Pope informed, “and I’m pretty proud we did that because we pulled off a lot of cool stuff that way.”
“Zooms were used for undercover work, shooting from a distance, and for some landscape-type shots such as steel plants in the distance,” Yourd added.
“We have our own color suite for our broadcast work, and you can honestly see – if you were shooting at an f/4, f/5, f/6 at your sweet spot of the lens – that Canon EF glass is incredible,” Pope noted. “The images hold up really well. As a documentary filmmaker I pull my own focus the majority of the time while I’m shooting, and I’m comfortable and used to doing that with EF lenses.”
Pope added that the three manually operated built-in neutral density [ND] filters in the EOS C300 Cinema Camera were also an advantage, saying, “these are worth everything, and an absolute must in the doc world. Forget about matte boxes; they’re just a hassle.”
Postproduction workflow
Preparing and editing all of the footage gathered to tell the story of Crocodile Gennadiy was a demanding task, but one made easier by the EOS C300 use of the industry-standard Material eXchange Format (MXF) container file format, which provides compatibility with all major editing software and systems. In addition, the filmmakers shot in Canon Log mode, which captures the full exposure latitude that the camera’s Super 35mm CMOS sensor is capable of delivering for film-style dynamic range between shadows and highlights. This is essential for achieving cinematic subtleties in post-production color grading.
“The format the Canon EOS C300 shoots in and Adobe’s Premiere’s ability to process and view it without transcoding shaved a lot of time off postproduction and helped streamline the entire process,” Yourd related. “We’re not dealing with massive files for the amount of footage we shot. Even if we shot for a half hour on one clip the file still stayed relatively small in size.”
“You get a lot of flexibility in post with Canon Log,” Pope added. “The more latitude you have to work with in post the better. We shot a lot of low-light scenarios for Crocodile Gennadiy and our colorist was able to do some amazing things with the footage. The Canon EOS C300 is the only camera I feel comfortable with for pushing the stops, maybe going up to 1600 ISO. I even shot a lot at 3200 ISO. It makes capturing real life easier and it serves the story very well.”
“Another great thing is the Technicolor preset for the EOS 5D Mark III,” Pope continued. “It gives you a bit more latitude in your shadows and highlights. We used the EOS 5D Mark III in tandem with the EOS C300 a lot and they held up very well next to one another in post if you’re shooting in those Log settings.”
“We were beyond excited to be able to utilize the amount of Canon equipment that we did and to tell the story of Gennadiy,” Yourd stated.
