This was shot over a few days in Montauk in March 2015. I haven't done too much on the shoulder doc work with the Ursa and this was a great test run. I shot everything in 3:1 raw and was pretty pleased with the way things turned out. Shooting 4k raw isn't ideal for this type of situation but it helps being able to dump cards in 5-10 minutes. I'm still not crazy about the massive amounts of data but it pays off when I put everything together. The surfing was 80fps, I shot this a week before the 2.3 firmware update came out that enabled 150 fps 1080 recording.
All the handheld stuff was shot on the sigma 18-35. I don't think I had the camera too well balanced as some of the shots have a bit too much shake for my liking. I like the weight of the Ursa as it provides some stability but there isn't a really solid kit out there for shoulder mounting the thing. I have a porta brace shoulder pad and some shape handles because the official "ursa shoulder mount kit" is pretty worthless. My setup works but its not ideal. You want a camera this size to be extremely stable and ride on your shoulder like a cowboy on a well worn saddle. Well I'm definitely not there yet, it sits on my shoulder like a kid in a padded church pew.
The other thing that doesn't help the situation is using an alphatron evf on an articulating arm. It wouldn't be so bad if I never had to move the evf but it needs to swing out of the way to access the media. This could be fixed with a better evf mount but still, not ideal. I would also love a handle with a record trigger - maybe an iris control. Maybe the ursa mini handle works with this big fella? All that being said, I've dealt with much worse.
I did the grade in resolve and used kodak color in the film convert plugin. I set the film color to 30 and then boost the saturation to 30 in the camera raw tab in resolve. I'm very much an amateur colorist and I've been experimenting with different looks since getting the Ursa. I think I'm finally getting close to a look I like. After looking at quite a few other grades I got sucked into the trap of preserving every tiny bit of dynamic range. I ended up with a bunch of flat, boring washed out colors. I thought I liked the grade for 'winter is a beach' (see below) but when I looked at it a week later, I kinda hated it. Granted the beach was misty/hazy but the flat colors were just not pleasing to me. In what may be an over correction, I added contrast and made my luminance curve relatively severe in this grade. I was going for richer/defined colors while still preserving a filmic feel. I didn't nail it and I probably won't nail it anytime soon, I may never get it but I'm getting closer to what I like. I would love to hire a professional colorist for every shoot but that's not going to happen. I'll just keep reading, watching and self teaching another skill. The more you know the farther you go or something like that . . .
