District 9 RED One

[Wayne Morellini]

Hi guys, I caught the midnight screening for "District 9" last night here in Vancouver & was really happy w/ the audience response. We shot the film on RED One cameras & Cooke S4 primes in Johannesburg, South Africa late last year & had an amazing experience w/ them in an incredibly dusty & hostile environment. Please see the attached images w/ the cameras in action...

If only I had known before hand, I saw it last night to. It been on from probably Thursday, how we got it here before you guys I don't know.


I didn't get a good look at the quality, noticed it was not overly saturated. The movie itself distracted me, great (but the doco sequences were a bit much for some). The main character was more objectionable and distracting.

First movie of this type, that also included non horrifying science fiction horror, that I liked. Whoever had the idea of putting eyes with human/animal like emotions in the bug like aliens, had a brilliant idea. It was a magnificent move and tie in with the emotional content from the perspective of the aliens. A lot better than I expected, but maybe not everybody's cup of tea, but 8 out of ten for low budget trying.

Good luck to you, look forward to the next movie.

[Steve Sherrick]

Then every morning I would inspect the sensors and clean the OLPF as required, there was a prize for the dirtiest sensor!

Jonathan
RED Camera Supervisor on District 9

[Steve Sherrick]

A lot better than I expected, but maybe not everybody's cup of tea, but 8 out of ten for low budget trying.

$60 million was the budget right? I suppose for this type of movie that's considered low budget, especially to the Michael Bays of the world, but $60 million is still a lot of money.

Hoping to check the movie out this weekend.

[gbalaji]

CCTV cams where Canon HF100, we had both PAL and NTSC versions and settled on shooting 1080 25p with the PAL version.

Dust, we covered all the unused ports on the camera. Vents where not covered due to the heat.

Lens changes where done as fast as possible to minimise dust getting in.

At wrap, camera dept would blast off all the external dust using the nitrogen in the camera truck. Then every morning I would inspect the sensors and clean the OLPF as required, there was a prize for the dirtiest sensor!

Jonathan
RED Camera Supervisor on District 9

Congrats Trent and Jonathan.

I've not seen the movie since the movie was not released in india yet. I hope you would done a great job after reading the thread.

Could you discuss some post and shoot workflow you used for us to get more insight about Digital Cinema preps.

[Christian Edwards]

lekker! cant wait to check this out ,hopefully there will be a few Red1s (Epics /Scarlets) around South Africa for the world cup .

[Wayne Morellini]

$60 million was the budget right? I suppose for this type of movie that's considered low budget, especially to the Michael Bays of the world, but $60 million is still a lot of money.

Hoping to check the movie out this weekend.

I had thought it was 30-40 million. These days, big budget low budget of this sort is probably still pretty big as you say (unless it is being filmed elsewhere in Africa in the usual fashion, then it often shows). Have a simple sci-if movie around here somewhere from 5-7 years ago, they talk of a low budget of 12 million from memory (and they mean it, they are a low budget team) and it features few sci-fi effects. But it almost seems like people are building scale models with some budgets ;)

If you wanted to make a low budget sci-fi film, there are some people that make quality low budget kids science fiction TV series here is Australia (but you might have forgo aliens from the script).

[joshtownsend]

My fav movie in years. Had no idea it was RED until after the movie. It looked so much like film that I actually had no idea what it was shot on. Amazing.


Also I'm curious about post grain workflow. Amazing.

[Sanjin Jukic]

Amazing!

RED again shows its own unique value.

RED is not like a film, it's more something beyond that and have both included:

A price and performance value that you can't get with shooting on film or even any other high end digital acquisition tool.

Congratulations.

Also the latest sort of tests (RED vs. Film à la BSC, ASC,... or even Macgregor's) that showed here at the board they all

look pretty funny (or maybe some people included in shooting of those tests look and sound funny).

[Ryan S]

Going to see this tonight in digital projection, can't wait!

Trent, if you're keeping up with this thread; you mentioned S4s as your choice for the film, but what's that zoom in the first picture you posted?

What I've seen (trailers, clips) looks fantastic. Great work.

[JanneJansson]

Fantastic! Good work!!