Cinematographer Ben Saffer and director Charlotte Peters coupled the Blackmagic URSA Cine 17K 65 with Cooke Panchro 65/i lenses to shoot the 70s period film To Fly or Float. And you can download clips from it to have a play with 17K RAW footage.
"When you think of England in the 1970s, the aesthetic just feels like it should be overcast and a bit gloomy!" says Cinematographer Ben Saffer. Can't argue with that. Apart from the occasional neon splash, the 80s weren't much of an improvement either.
For To Fly or Float, Saffer set out to create a 1970s period look built on layered images and interesting contrast ratios, with something bright in the frame to anchor the shadows. Working closely with Director Charlotte Peters, Blackmagic says he chose the URSA Cine 17K 65 digital film camera "to translate the emotional closeness of handheld 16mm into the sculptural space of 65mm, keeping the audience inside the moment rather than looking at it."
You can see if he succeeded in this brief clip here.
A bit more on how Saffer worked with the camera below, but first let's talk clips.
Blackmagic has updated the Blackmagic URSA Cine Gallery with clips and information from the film. There's a lot of detail here. For instance, for the pic at the top of the piece you get Saffer's detailed thoughts ("The field of view of a shot is a combination of sensor size and focal length of the lens, but what’s really important is that you can tell how far the camera is away from the subject. With an intimate scene like this one, you don't want to be right in their face, because it feels like we're interrupting something."). You also get exactly the sort of detailed technical data about the scene that gets sent along to post.
All of which means you can download the 3.0 GB Blackmagic RAW clip and have a good play with it in Resolve. Amongst other things, this is about as good a way of benchmarking your set up as we can think of at the moment.
There's other stuff on the site to investigate and download too, notably The Ranch and Iceland shorts that the company released as it was prepping for the camera's launch, as well as other projects including the Cine 12K. Worth a look.
"One thing that stood out in practice is how straightforward the URSA Cine system felt to use," he continues. "I have now shot narrative films on both the Blackmagic URSA Cine 12K LF and the Blackmagic URSA Cine 17K 65, and I think they make for a great A and B camera combination. Our Steadicam operator was using both cameras, and, because the setup was so similar to use, she kept forgetting which camera she was on. I can definitely see myself shooting a feature or a television show with both URSA Cine cameras given both weigh pretty much the same and the accessories are interchangeable."
As for working in 65mm, Saffer says he is always chasing a format and lens combination that gives him options without pushing the audience out of the story. And with 65mm, he gets another creative option that sits somewhere different to how he would normally approach a scene on anamorphic.
"In an exterior, like our canal sequence, we wanted a canal in Birmingham during the 70s. This was shot using daylight only, so having trees to one side and reflections off the water on the other side gave us a bit of everything we wanted. To get a sense of geography and space, I would normally shoot anamorphic on a 50mm or 60mm lens. But the larger 65mm format allows you to step back while still getting that same level of compression. Shooting with the URSA Cine 17K 65 meant I could use the spherical 75mm Cooke Panchro 65/i, which is quite a long lens, while retaining a sense of being right there in the moment."
More at the Blackmagic URSA Cine Gallery.