My Name Is Rubidium I'm a filmmaker and an educator and the director of the
devil's Fortune. The film is a dramatization of the real life hunt for
Saddam Hussein's missing billions and all the lives that have been lost on The
Quest for this Monday cursed treasure. the film deals with the corruption of
the Global Financial system and how greed causes many of us to willfully
turn a blind eye to where our profits come from. We shot the film in 17 days in
2020 on the Canon C500 Mark II and the Sumire primes. It was very start and
stop because of COVID but we made some changes to the script and locations
to substitute enclosed spaces for outdoor ones so that we could finish the
film. I'm a big believer that a film can be made outside of the Hollywood
superhero sequel Factory and that those films can ask questions that people in
power aren't interested in asking. The leaner more efficient and cheaper that you can
make a film the less investment you need to raise and the more time you can spend
actually making the film rather than pitching and in meetings. The Canon Cinema cameras
are unmatched in the visual quality and control that you get for the price. Being
able to own the camera instead of having to hire it makes a huge difference. It
means that you can shoot tests and develop confidence with what the final
result will look like or you can go and shoot inserts or small scenes with the
lead actor and just a couple of crew members and those smaller scenes can
make a real difference to the final quality of the film. Having a camera that
you own and know how to use because you shoot with it every single day is always
going to be better than one that may have better specs on paper but that you
don't have experience with. I think Canon is unique in the cinema world in that
has an upgrade path all the way from the $400 Rebel T7 the $33k C700 full frame.
You can start wherever your skills and your budget allow, learn to get the great
image and then take those same skills and understanding and experience
with you to the next camera as you upgrade. Over the past 15 years I've gone
from the the 50D to the 5D Mark II, 5D Mark III, the C70 and the C500 Mark II
and each time I kept most of my lenses my understanding of the menus and the
exposure tools and as I got more cameras the older ones usually became the B and
C cameras to my new A camera and because they share a universal color science
they cut seamlessly. The chase scene in the old Griffith Park Zoo in the Devil's
Fortune doesn't have a lot of BTS for it because our day was cut short by rain
and I commandeered the BTS crew to actually start shooting footage and
shots that ended up in the movie and the C200 that they were shooting on Cuts
seamlessly with the a camera. You just have so much more flexibility. It's so
much more redundancy when you're shooting all on the same brand the Sumire
primes meant the footage looked great and distinctive and beautiful right out
of camera. We shot C log 2 and just by applying the preview LUT that I had
built for the shoot we were 80% of the way there with the color grade. Focus
assist was another amazing tool that we used a lot because it allows me, the
director, and the focus puller to share the same Monitor and know that the image
is sharp without covering the whole screen with focus peaking or something
else that diminishes the visual appeal of the image. Pushing in on the frame
with the sensor crop was another tool that really allowed us to make our day
and get incredible results really really quickly. There were days when the 35mm
Sumire didn't leave the camera because we could choose it to shoot the wides, we
could crop in on a 35mm sensor size to shoot our mids and close-ups and then we
could crop in again to the 16mm to shoot our inserts and extreme close-ups
All without having to wait to change the lens or without having to potentially
expose the sensor when it was rainy or Dusty outside. It really is like
changing lenses with the touch of a button and even at the 16mm crop the
image is still super sharp and really usable. When I first got the C200 it was
a real learning curve for me because before that I only ever shot with DSLRs
A dedicated cinema camera has so many more tools for exposure, for sound, so
many more options as far as codecs go. I started experimenting and uploading a
lot of these experiments to my YouTube channel, the Crimson engine. It's grown to
70,000 subscribers over the past couple of years and has become a real
destination for Canon Cinema content. As I've got new
cameras I've continued making tutorials but I soon discovered that there was a
real need for longer form, more detailed educational content. What I think people
wanted to do when they got a new camera no matter their experience level, was sit
down for a couple of hours with someone that had used the camera and put it through
its Paces, had experience with it and teach them everything that they needed
to know to get a great image. I created Canon Masterclass. It has multi-hour
long-form tutorials for every Cinema Camera in the Canon range. We have
dedicated classes for C200 C70 R5 R5 C and C500 Mark II. We've since expanded to
over 30 courses that cover everything from lighting, blocking, grading producing
and a ton of other content. Canon masterclass currently has over 2 000
students and is the largest resource of its kind. I've always found that the
freedom to experiment is what leads to advances and it's only by trying things
that you've never done before that you're able to breathe new life into
your filmmaking. I really believe that the future of filmmaking belongs to
people who have the courage to pick up the camera, learn how to create the
images and tell the stories that only they can tell and make the world a more
interesting place