Shooting on the Sony A7s III - 'Tinbeerwah' - Beauty film and BTS Ep#109

Well, g' day folks, it's Den Lenny here, host of the how to Scale a video business podcast. Back from a short break, shall we say? I took a few weeks off the podcast. Truth is, we just got slammed. We had something land on our lap that we couldn't say no to. So I dusted off my production shoes and got back into bed with Sony to produce our 8 8th commercial project for them. And what I want to do today is bring you up to speed with what we did, why we did it, and also a bit of an insight as to why after about eight years they're still coming to us to do projects.

So I want to start this story by telling you that when Sony in Singapore first approached me to get involved in this project, I actually said no.

A contact of mine who had met Whilst doing the YouTube pop up events a couple of years ago in Bangkok, Matthew got in touch and said, look, we've got a new project, we wonder if you'd like to get involved. And they introduced me to the marketing manager and their first questions were, you know, what kind of stuff are you working on just now? What cameras are you using? We'd love to help you, get you involved in helping us launch this new camera. To which I said, look guys, I'm, you know, I'm a big, I'm a big believer in living your purpose and my purpose is to help video producers succeed through our video business accelerator program and this podcast.

And I said, look guys, I'm not really in the production space anymore. You know, I made a decision a few years ago to really focus my efforts on the business coaching side of things and helping many, many clients achieve, you know, sometimes double or triple the profit in a year. And that's where my kind of real value I think lies at the minute. But I told them this, I actually said, look, you know, this is not really my 40 anymore. This is not really what I'm doing anymore. You know, as far as projects, I haven't really shot anything commercially since the FS5 launch film. Not, not a big scale. We've done a few projects in between some corporate stuff, but really I haven't sort of done a proper production for a couple of years. So I said look, I'm probably not the best person to ask to do this. And as far as gear, you know, I'm using my A7s with a Zeiss 35F2 on my webcam and, and that's, that's kind of it. And you know, kind of use my A7R2 to take some stills and occasionally use some video. Yeah, we did the Bereal series shooting on that a couple of years ago. And if you never checked out the Bereal series, I'll make sure and link it. It's quite a fun sort of documentary where we went around Asia making these sort of behind the scenes, four minutes sort of lifestyle type vlogs. I was trying vlogging. I was, I was doing what Gary Vee said, you're going to tell your story. So we did about 18 episodes of that. But what's interesting about that is that. And I guess the lesson I want to share is that you never know where opportunities are going to take you. So I did that trip around Asia over a number of months, about 18 months. We did Bangkok twice, we did Jakarta, we went to Seoul, we went to Taipei, Delhi.

Hyderabad, Bangalore, a lot of different places. And they were really kind of fly and fly. And we go in for a day and come out again. And I'd speak at a YouTube event in front of YouTubers and other creators. And what it got me realizing was how big the Asian market is for camcorders and camera equipment. And I remember someone at Sony telling me that, you know, the Asia market is bigger than Europe and the US combined and China's huge. So anyway, I got, I got asked to by Matthew to come and talk to these guys. And they originally said, look, you know, what would it cost to make a one minute film and a bts? And I'm thinking, well, you know, how long is a piece of string? And one of the lessons that I always share with my video business accelerator clients is don't give a price too early. And if you're in that stage of being a kind of freelancer who's migrating to becoming a business owner, there's a typical tendency to kind of think small and just think, think in terms of day rates. And the truth is you can really shortchange yourself because there's so much more work involved than just a day rate when producing content like this. And you know, this is my eighth time doing a project for Sony. And.

You know, there's always an awful lot more under the surface that you've got to think about than perhaps is first apparent. And what made me realize is that oftentimes clients will come to you and say, oh, we've got this idea for a video at how much? Or what do you think it's going to cost to do this? And the big mistake I see a lot of filmmakers make is they go, well, it's probably A couple of days filming, two or three days editing, so we'll call it, you know, five grand. And oftentimes that's, in fact, almost always that's the wrong approach because until you can fully understand what's required, there's no way of you being able to fully scope the job out. And so, you know, and I see this with some of the people I was going to hire for this project. There's one guy particularly, he's very much still in that freelance mindset. It's like, here's my day rate, here's my charge for mileage, here's my charge for extra lighting, here's my charge for overnights. And that is okay. But if you want to be a business owner, you've got to think beyond what's in it for me. You've got to think, how can I provide the client with exactly what they want in a time frame and in a budget that they're happy with? So to start back, to circle back around to this.

The person who's in charge of marketing in Asia said to me, so how much to do this? I said, look, I have no real idea of what you want and so why don't you tell me what you've got and I'll see how we can come up with something. And I really was kind of, you know.

Willing to walk away, I think is probably the best description. And I think that's a really healthy approach to have in your business, is like, if you know you're aligned and you know you have value to bring, don't try too hard to win the job. So I said, look guys, it's probably not from me, but they came back and said, no, no, we understand all of that, but we really want you because you've got a perspective on not only helping people develop businesses, but you've got the podcast and the books. And so all of that collateral, the books, the podcast, they play a really important role in building trust and credibility and authority. And so I said, look, let me know what you've got. And they came back with a very healthy multi five figure budget. @ which point I went, okay, that sounds pretty good. I think we can probably do something with that. And then we had a few challenges because we were originally going to film mountain biking down in Melbourne with a good friend of mine, a client, Tim Arch from Arch Creative. And Tim is absolutely a specialist in sport and making beautiful photography and films around athletics, mountain biking. And we were all set to go down there when then Covid kicked back in Melbourne and Locked us down. So we had to kind of pivot from doing a whole kind of concept for Sony. We had to pivot in a couple of days and do something completely different. And that is an example of where if you charge too little you end up doing work for free. Because that was an unforeseen. Expect an unforeseen circumstance that blew us out the water. Now fortunately we hadn't booked any travel, we were just about to. So we had to completely turn the idea on its head and we had a very limited amount of time to do it. So I was very fortunate that Sony gave me a pretty open brief.

I kind of knew it was going to be the A7S3. And for those of you that are new to the show, you know, I launched the A7s in Scotland back in, was it 2012. We made a film about a fisherman catching haddock and smoking them in the ground on the beach. And that was probably the first film that we'd made for Sony where. Well, not for the first film. The first one we made was the Annex 5 and then we did the PXW180. I think I forget the name of it now. We produced a lot of different content, not always me presenting, but we did the FS5, sorry, the A7s mark one. We'd filmed something in Scotland for the 4K version. But two days into the edit I got a call from Japan saying look, there's a problem. We used the wrong setting. The firmware wasn't quite ready. And that's always a challenge with pre firmware, pre release cameras is that they hadn't quite finished the firmware. So we shot it in S log 2 but it was really underexposed. So they said you need to come to Japan tomorrow. And at that point I was like, well we're just about to do the grade for the main film and I was in Brighton working with that. So I said look, you know, we, we can't get there tomorrow, but how about. He said we need to get here for Friday. And so my first, my first response was, well, we've just finished a two week shoot and we're exhausted and you want us to come out and reshoot something on Friday. So we're certainly not flying economy. At which point they turn and said okay, you know, scope up to business class tickets. And so, so often, and this is the business lesson. So often you just have to state your position and say look, this is what I think is fair and reasonable and, and I've never had anyone say no And I think a lot of that comes from just confidence and knowing your value and knowing your worth. So we did the fs the Ace of an S and that was a huge success. And they flew us out to Las Vegas to B to launch that. And that was a, a really big moment. I remember being in the press conference when the people gasped when they saw the, the tempo at 10,000 ISO. And ironically, you know, I just shot some shots in this BTS film at 40,000 ISO in S log 3 and it's clean, it's phenomenal. But yeah, we did the A7s. Then we did the FS7. James Tonkin and I from Hangman in London, we went to Kanazawa in Japan and I think it's east of west of Tokyo. And we shot the.

The FS7 film. We did the handmade kimono.

Excuse me, and, and then we did the, we did two films actually, handmade kimono. And then we did this kind of this, this model Yulia who was, was modeling the kimono and kind of being dressed by this, this, this, this, this kind of traditional seamstress. And then from there we did the FS5 in Sydney with Mick Jones and Filthy Luke. So there's a kind of, you know, we produced a lot of content for Sony. So we're kind of a very much a trusted partner. And that relationship has been built over, oh, I'd say probably 2004, 2005 was when it first began. So it's a 15 year relationship. And so what I want you to think about is that if you, if you're in fairly early into your business career, like, be patient, like these things take time. Everybody I know in my coaching group who is very successful have been doing it a while and understand that patience is really important and that you build relationships over a period of time. I come across people who, who typically don't spend a lot of time in our community who kind of come in and go quite quickly because I think they've learned it all and they tend to be younger and I think that tends to be. Because there's an impatience, there's an impatience around.

Wanting to learn all now and get to the next goal. Whereas the, the more experienced, the more successful businesses ultimately are the ones who recognize that this is a long game for business. I mean, if I were to ask you today if you could make a connection with a client in an industry today, that I could tell you we're still paying you multiple five figure budgets in 15 years time, what would you say? Because I Can tell you something that I said no to this job first and they came back and gave me a number that I couldn't refuse and I didn't have to provide a quote, they just agreed a budget. I invoiced 50% up front, which is something I want to touch on, actually. I hear people telling me all the time, oh, I can't get 50% upfront from a client. I'm here to tell you, yes, you can. If you ask for it the right way, you will always get it. And if you're not getting it because your relationship isn't strong enough for the client and perhaps they don't trust you enough or they don't feel that they're understanding why it's important, and I'll share with you why it's important is I say to every client, we are a small business. Video production is very expensive and the expense comes in the pre production and the post, the hard costs of time and labor and, and crew on location. And I say to them, we can focus on the creative if we're worried about the money. So what I like to do is make sure we get 50% upfront and that means that you're committed and we are committed. We know that money's in. So therefore we can spend on pre production, we can book locations, we can book crew, knowing that it's not going to come out of our pocket. And then what we do is we then do the production. The knowledge that my production costs are always covered in that first 50% and the latter half is usually all my profit. So I want to encourage you to always ask for 50% up front. It's a great measure of a relationship. Anyway, I'll talk to you a little bit about working with this camera. We've just actually finished a live stream into Asia. I think we're going to 10 countries in Asia. And that's happening. Well, by the time this goes out, it will have just happened. But I'm recording this a few hours before, so let me share with you, you know, a bit more about my journey with Sony. So I've been shooting Sony since 1994. Professionally, that means being paid. My very first job was with Reuters Television working for GMTV in Scotland. And I began life as a sound recordist. But I was shooting pretty quickly doing pieces to camera and bits of B roll. So I started life on the Beatacam sp. I then moved into a career through GMTV and then I went to BBC for a year. So I was GMTV for a couple of years. BBC in East Anglia for a year as a single shooter. Then I moved to London and went and got a job with London Tonight. And then after three and a half years, London Tonight, I went freelance. And in my freelance career, I was largely shooting on digital Betacam back in the days of tape. And then I bust my leg in 2001, that kind of a couple of years. I was back on the tools about six months after that, but it was about 18 months later I was out in South Africa filming A Place in the Sun, Homer Away, the pilot for that film, that series, and ankle didn't feel right. And I went back home and saw a specialist. He said, look, you've got arthritis. What do you do for a living? It was like, well, I'm sorry your cameraman is like, not anymore, you're not. So very quickly, it kind of all changed. And then I went to Procam Television, where I'd been hiring my kit from John Brennan and Cal Barton, and they offered me a job as the warehouse manager. So, you know, I kind of went back down to grassroots. But very quickly we got the gear sorted out and then started developing some business. Ended up with a stake in that company. And then in Las Vegas in about 2008, I think Mark 4th said, you know, why don't you come and work for us at MIT Corp. And I said, well, you know, I want this number. And it's like, I want to earn 100 grand. He said, okay. And so I went over there. And then 2009, we started doing the DSLR stuff and that's when the kind of next incarnation happened for me because the cameras got smaller and we started developing these training DVDs with Philip Bloom and. And we kind of saw a meteoric rise with me producing all of that content and Phil fronting it. And so then I started getting more and more involved in Sony. Once I went and set my own company, F stop Academy, in 2009, and then we had a kind of catalog of things happen that got us to the point where we're launching cameras. And I've used the FS5, the FS7, the A7S, the A7R, A7S II. And then when you got to Australia in 2015, the Sony approached me, Kanta. And this is a great example of relationship. So Kanta Yamamoto, who was then running, who he started in the UK from Japan, he came to the UK in about 2005, 2007, maybe 2008, 2009, and I. And I got him involved in some projects. I took him along to some shoots. He was kind of the kind of the rookie guy who was being sent from Japan to work out in the, in the colonies. And you know, eight years later, Kanta was running the entire marketing division in Japan. So, you know, a lot of that relationship was through my relationship with Kanta. And so, you know, you've always got to remember that people are in jobs for a very long time and you never quite know where they're going to end up. But really my secret, if you like, is always caring, always over delivering, always giving people way more than they expect. And I think that's part of the reason that we keep being asked back. And now my network with Sony extends from, you know, Sony Europe, Sony uk, Sony, Sony.

I've done stuff for Sony Belgium, I've done stuff for Sony all over Asia, Australia.

It's kind of phenomenal. You know, we've been all over the place with them. But really the secret, I think to if I can share any wisdom as to why, it's because we care, we genuinely care about the result. We don't think about what's in it for us, we think about how can we serve the client. And I've got to tell you, it's not easy. You know, Sony are a very, very demanding client. People don't give you multiple five figures on a short project unless they expect a lot in return. But it's a real collaboration and there's an enormous amount of trust. So let me tell you a bit more about this project. So when I'm choosing a camera system, I'm always looking at, you know, three things. Size and portability, functionality and workflow. I like to keep my footprint small. When I do shoot one to two people. It's just I've got to credit James Tonkin for bringing me into this realm because James from Hangman shoots all over the world for the Rolling Stones, Beyonce, Coldplay, you know, he's done stuff with, you name it, every major artist on the planet. U2 hangman London are a phenomenal outfit and James largely does it himself. So I like the idea of, you know, especially coming from a broadcast background where we always did things a very broadcast way. James taught me that small is beautiful and it can put the camera in places where it traditionally might not feel very natural. So I like to carry everything in a backpack. I've got a Peak Design backpack and this film I made with the A7S Mark III, the 70-200F 2.8G Master, a 12-24F 2.8G Master and I think I used a 16 to 35 on a couple of shots and maybe a 50 macro. I actually don't think I ended up using the 50 macro shot. I shot most of it on the 12, 24 and 7200. And the, the 5 axis image stabilization, the inbuilt stabilization, it's just phenomenal with the lens. So there were times when I would just shoot handheld at 200 millimeters, 120 frames a second and just shot the most beautiful buttery images. I shot everything in S log 3s gamut cine.

Giving me the full 15 stops. And I look at my gear. I use a slide, I use a Kessler stealth slider. I think it's like the middle length traveler. I use a tripod. It's a good tripod. It's. What is it? It's the Miller DS20. Had that for a good 10, 15 years. Phenomenal tripod and head. I think one of the mistakes a lot of new filmmakers make is they just don't buy a decent tripod. Good solid set of legs is just your best friend. So slider, tripod, two lenses mostly no filters, didn't even use any. NDs show everything at 500 ISO. And that's the other thing. S log three will record easily at 500 ISO. So it's really clean. And that high sensitivity meant we could shoot in this surf shaping bay, which is quite a dark room, not very big with two sets of strip lights at kind of waist height either side of the room. That allows the shaper to see the contours of a board. So I thought it was perfect, you know, great example of using the space. So let's talk about the image quality. You know, we started the film up on Mount Timberwa, which is why we called Film Timberwa. So Timberwa is the mountain that overlooks Noosa Shire, where we now live. So the opening shot, the film is kind of not far from where we live. We live down by the, by the rivermouth. You know, we, we do live in paradise. There's no two ways about it. It's. It's a beautiful place that we, we've ended up and we're very grateful for that. But we got up very early so I wanted to shoot a shot straight into the sun. And when you see the, the film itself, which is probably below this on the page on the website. So if you don't, if you're not, if you're listening to this on our, your favorite podcast app, go to denleny.com and click on Blog or podcast and you'll see the the films. But we wanted to shoot straight into the sun because I felt that what I wanted to do is make a film that that filmmakers would appreciate the reality of the situation. Most of the film was shot just by me. I had a couple of assistants and a BTS guy on on some of the shoot days in the shaping bay. But everything else was shot single camera with me. One of the fortunate opportunities I had was I got to shoot like shots at the perfect time of day. So I'd shoot the sunrise and the next day I'd go and shoot the surfing and go and shoot the creek at a specific time of day for one angle and then another angle a different kind of day. So I had that luxury. But the opening shot of the film, I love the starburst coming off the sun. That is the 12 to 24 lens. At 12 millimeters it's stunning. There's no distortion and you can see full dynamic range. 15 logs in. S log 3s gamut cine. Brand new sensor. So anyone who's had issues with S log three before, they've gone away with the sensor. I remember Mick was telling me when he was grading it, he said, oh man, that's just a totally different look to this. He said, it's clean as a whistle.

Beautiful tonality. Actually that's something that I loved was even an s log 3. Even just correcting for luminance and putting a bit of saturation back in brought things back very beautifully. Very filmic in my view. Very clean, but very filmic. Really faithful skin tone reproduction and you know, shooting in 4k 10 bit 4 2, 2. 100 frames a second, 120 frames a second was just, it's just such a treat, you know, up to 280 Mbps in bitrate. So, you know, there's a lot of information there and I wanted to shoot some really challenging subjects. We've got a plane planing like an electric plane planing a polystyrene surfboard. So you've got very fine dust, very fine detail, moving very fast. So I think you'll agree that the camera does a great job of capturing that. As I mentioned before, you know, 40,000 ISO is what I shot the nighttime stuff for the BTS film and it's pretty good. And that's S log three. So the advantage of shooting S log three at night is you get those tonal gradations on the highlights of things like neon shop signs so they don't blow out and that's really, really, really helpful. For the river crossing scene, or as we call it, Australia, a creek, I wanted to test the camera's ability to process all of that information. So what, you've got a surfer walking across the frame wearing a black wetsuit, carrying a white surfboard, going across a brown river which has water moving. You've got paper, bark, trees and lots of shades of green leaves. And the shot is backlit. So, you know, this was a very choreographed shot. We start on the 12 mil wide with a very, very slow creep track. Right. You don't really notice it. It's very subtle. But I like to. I like to shoot 100 frames, 122nd with always a bit of movement. So even if you don't see it, the camera is always feeling like it's moving. And I wanted to immerse you in this film. But then we cut to one of my favorite shots, the film which is actually using the world cam light. We actually strung a cable cam across the river for the, for the mid shot. And that's, I think, at 24. And we just, we just tracked with Bryn as he went across the creek. And so, you know, some interesting challenges there. And I think the camera handled it really, really well. And then the final shot of the film is the sunset shot, which I'm going to let into a little secret. It's the east coast of Australia. So the sun doesn't set in the east, of course it sets in the west. We don't get sunsets over the water in Australia on the east coast. This was actually shot at sunrise, probably about 20 minutes after sunrise, maybe not even quite as it broke the horizon, maybe 10. But Mick did a beautiful job grading it and it feels like a sunset. And I think that's one of the great tools you want with the camera system, is that you want to be able to create things and cheat things for the story or the narrative without necessarily compromising.

Again, really helpful that it's E mount. You know, I think Sony's got over 50 lenses now, 56 lenses. The Sony lenses have really stepped up. And I don't know about you, but there used to be a battle between, you know, Canon and Nikon for stills cameras. And I think now it's very much, you know, Sony at the forefront and maybe Canon Nikon neck and neck behind. Maybe Canon's a bit higher than Nikon, I'm not sure, but certainly I think Sony is a bit dominant player now in the space because they're making such great tech.

So you've got, you know you can swap lenses between FS5, FS7, whatever E mount camera you've got. And it works really well as a kind of second camera as well. You know you can have a B cam as an A7SIII and it will match with the S gamut cine. It'll match your FS5 or your FS7 beautifully.

Heat Management's been massively improved on this camera. Brand new body, brand new heat dissipation system. It is a weather sealed camera but it's got, it's got this new kind of built in heat sink which just. We just didn't have any issues. I think we must have filmed for about an hour and a half and maybe not running the whole time but I felt like we got a whole hour and a half out of a battery. It was like well into the morning before I was like oh shit, the batteries died. It's like I wasn't expecting that and you know, to last so long because I've got a 7s, a 7r2 and like they burn through batteries in no time. But this has got a much bigger battery so we didn't have any issues with losing out power. I actually bought five batteries for this project and we only used two. Dual card media slot. It uses CF Express Type A which are 160 gigabytes and they're good for the slow motion stuff and the high bit rate stuff like the 600 megabit stuff. But the rest of the time you can shoot on, you know, class two SDXC.

Using cards at 300 megabits, right. And.

Read 300 megabits and write 299 megabits super fast to cover everything else. And then got a new XLR adapter which is really interesting. It's a four channel XLR adapter. So with a future firmware upgrade there's going to be the opportunity to plug in. There's like a stereo mini jack which give you left and right from your camera mic and then two further inputs so you end up with four channels of audio in the A7SIII and that, I mean that's mind blowing. I love the form factor of the A7SIII. You know I got rid of my FS7 a couple of years ago and just stick with the smaller cameras because we were not really doing production anymore. So it kind of suited us for the kind of things we were doing. But honestly it was just such a, such a treat to make this film. And so if you look underneath this blog post you'll see the actual beauty film and I'll link to the BTS as well. There's a five minute BTS of us working behind the scenes. But honestly, guys, it's been a real pleasure and a real honor to kind of continue to work for someone as prestigious as Sony. And when I was coming up with a name for this podcast, I was like, fuck, it's like eight years, eight different projects. And those are just the commercial projects we've done for like, like a lot, you know, fairly healthy money and certainly very good profit. And I'll be sharing with my, my, my video business accelerator clients as we do, you know, we break down these projects and I, I show them everything, the communication, the workflow, the budget, how we priced it, what our margin is. Because, you know, I want you guys to understand, you know, you can make money whilst being creative and make, you know, beautiful films and be paid so you can enjoy the nicer things in life. Anyway, guys, I am taking off now, heading off to Port Douglas for a few days downtime. Podcast is now back. We're going to be going back one episode a week for the time being just because we're so busy with our accelerator clients and that's really going well and so I need to focus my energy and effort on those guys. But we'll certainly be doing one episode a week and I'll be doing a few shorties in between. But it's great to be back.

And I hope you found this to be of some value and be sure to check out the page and watch the films and I'll see if I can make sure the comments are on. So you kind of love to know what you think of it and any questions you have about it, let me know. Anyway, guys, talk to you soon. You've been listening to the how to Scale a Video Business podcast with me, your host, Dan Lenny. If you're a video business owner, we'd hit a CPU healing and we benefit from mentorship, support and coaching. Then check out how you can work with me over@denleny.com don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on itunes and we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review. And don't forget to share if you feel you've gotten value from this episode and you think it would be useful for other filmmakers, you know, then please do me a massive favor and share it on social media and in groups that you might be in. See you next week.