I think we have a bombardment of information hitting us
every single day and this causes a lot of compassion fatigue,
but I think we need new ways of approaching
global issues that actually make us curious again
and makes us ask questions, turns us into an active audience.
My name is Elisa Iannacone and I'm a cinematographer with experience working
in six continents. I've covered various
kinds of humanitarian crisis sometimes conflict
zones and I just very recently relocated to
the UK.
I wanted to be a filmmaker since I was 12 years old. I knew that
it was what I wanted. The only thing is that I thought I wanted to be a film
director. And then once I actually got to be
behind a camera and started to work with lighting and
just how you could control colour and texture and all of these
things I just fell in love with it and decided that that was where I really
wanted to be.
My work has encompassed covering domestic violence in Iraqi refugee camps
the devastation of cyclone idai and mozambique and various kinds of
pieces on sexual violence.
I'm quite drawn to human rights stories and
certainly pieces that raise awareness about
a particular issue that perhaps is underreported.
So Cyclone Idai was one of the worst
cyclones that the Southern Hemisphere has seen in history.
Basically the city of Beira had lost
90%, was destroyed 90%. So they'd lost electricity they'd lost water.
So the idea was to go in and I
was shooting a project for a couple outlets
and I just didn't really know exactly what I was going to find.
I try to find stories that are beyond the mere facts.
I connected with a group of artists there
that had lost all of their musical instruments and
you know didn't know exactly how to cope with what was going on and all the loss
that they had experienced. For me that story just felt so meaningful.
I worked on a multimedia exhibition for the last six years called "The Spiral of
Containment" and this was addressing the impact of sexual violence. So it was
working with a range of survivors and how it was that they were made to feel
after the assault. And finding ways to express this through the realm of the
imagination. So one thing that I hate is when we
re-victimize the victim. Right? When we present someone that's
already been through a lot in a very black and white
photojournalistic way.
I think certainly when you tell a story in a way that's
unexpected, you start to reframe people's views on it and suddenly
an audience that was once quite passive because
they feel like they've seen that image many times becomes quite curious
and they start asking questions that perhaps you know otherwise they wouldn't have.
So I do really like telling stories in a different way.
I think as a solo shooter you just want to make sure that the quality that
you're getting in your image is great. And that you're not going to
have to pay huge attention to any one department
because you're basically juggling all of them.
The expectation on the market now is that you're going to deliver higher quality faster
turnarounds. Less people especially now with COVID
we're seeing much smaller crews. So you need technology to be an ally.
You need that camera to actually support you and make your life easier in
every way that you can. And also allow you to to work
comfortably as a solo shooter where you're not stressing about all the
things that could potentially go wrong. You need a camera that's responsive and
that basically becomes an extension of your body. And it's just going to do
exactly what you're hoping it will do and sometimes more.
Having rugged equipment is really helpful because sometimes you're in a protest and you
have to run sometimes you have to climb a wall sometimes you have to climb a tree.
And you know you don't have anyone to
pass this stuff to you so you just need to be able to
to ensure that if your camera gets hit accidentally by something you're still
going to have a job. And you need your kit to be
portable as well. It's really important to have
portable and lightweight cameras because when you're in those situations
every dead battery is weighing on you. So having kit you know with long-lasting
and that's portable enough to keep you nimble
is really really paramount.
I got a chance to go to Wales to compare the
Canon XA55 to the EOS C70. I decided to go cliff camping overnight in Wales
and actually get a chance to test out these cameras
from you know daylight into night time.
And I also wanted to see you know, how
easy it was to get the cameras to respond when you're
dangling from ropes and you know, trying to balance and get
focus and you know, get image stabilization from a portaledge.
So I just really wanted to test them out in an I suppose a strange environment.
I really enjoyed working with the XA55 when I was
shooting in Wales from a portaledge. It's a camera that can give you 4k UHD
all the way through from 25.5 mil to 282.5 mil and it really is good at
tracking with the autofocus, it's dual pixel autofocus. And I got
to track a high-speed boat which is going into the sunset where you have
those highlights and you also have the darkness in the waves.
So having that latitude is also really really nice.
So overall it's a really good camera, quite portable and it's got
XLR inputs which are really great for audio.
Unfortunately for me, people will forgive an image more
than they will forgive audio, which shouldn't be the case but it is so
having strong audio in your camera is really important.
Sometimes a zoom lens is exactly what you want because
you're in a quickly changing situation and
for safety purposes sometimes you need to be at a vantage point and you need to
just zoom in very very quickly. It's nice in the XA55 that it can also control the speed
at which that zoom works. So I don't necessarily like to have zoom
inside my shot but I like it to just go all the way in as quickly as possible
when I need it. So having that incredible range i mean
it's really wide, to very telephoto is very very
helpful in those kinds of conditions.
Going back to this dual pixel autofocus on the XA55
it was really wonderful to have that camera to shoot
a holocaust survivor in a room where I wasn't able to be
operating the camera because of COVID. So you know the autofocus just had face
priority, it locked into her and I actually never
had a problem, everything was in focus, I didn't even have to operate which was
terrifying. But yeah it worked perfectly.
I really like that you know even though the C70 is the cinema camera it's just
so compact. Aa compact camera is very helpful because
sometimes you need to hide it underneath the burqa,
you don't want to call attention to yourself sometimes you need to pretend
that you're a tourist. And you know you don't want to show it
to anyone so small is good. Small you know form
factors is really important in the sense that
there will be quite sensitive environments as well and sometimes it's
not even just about your own safety but it's about putting other people at ease.
Sometimes when you come in with a big kit
and you know lights and everything people get intimidated.
It's amazing how much is inside of that body.
It's wonderful that it's compatible with RF lenses as well as EF lenses and that
connectivity between lens and camera is faster which gives
you a greater image quality. I was shooting XF-AVC at
4:2:0 10 bit, but you can shoot other you know, kinds of
codecs that are way less weight you know, about half the
weight of XF-AVC. Which for post purposes depending on you
know what your capacity is on the field, if you need to edit something for
example on your laptop, and you need to turn around very very
quickly that's very helpful. It's great that you can shoot also
straight into PQ and HLG. HLG being the BBC NHK format
that's you know straight for delivery. So this saves you
a ton of time in post, in terms of colour-correcting if you're shooting on log or
something like this, so it's just quite varied and that's
great because versatility is key.
One of the things that I also really appreciated was the fact that I could shoot 120 frames per second still at 4k
at full cinema 4k. And I got a chance to track some mountain bikers that were
coming around a bend. And it was a very quick reaction moment you
know I didn't know this person was coming and I'm like "Oh my god!"
And that's the thing about the camera it just auto-focused even in slow motion,
I didn't even have to worry about that. And when I looked at the
material and I was like "Have we, have I got this? Is it even...?"
And I saw it I was like "Yes! Great! That's exactly what I want!"
Certainly when you are in a journalistic scenario
and you're working sometimes inside of a person's house that doesn't have electricity,
or you know you're shooting after dark
because you don't want to be seen, you need a camera that's going to be
able to read into the shadows.
So the more latitude you have the better and this camera did not disappoint.
So in this camera you have the possibility of shooting C-Log 3,
which gives you 14 stops, and in C-Log 2, which gives you 16 stops of dynamic range
I chose more dynamic range and I loved
using that because when I was working in Wales I did shoot well past sunset.
And I wanted to make sure that I could still extract that detail from the rocks
and the detail and the waves with basically just moonlight and a fast lens.
So the fact that I could do that really was excellent. What's really important when
you're on the field is to be able to control
lighting without having to A) put a big lighting setup
or have to change lenses all the time. The ability that these cameras
have is to switch NDs internally and that is huge.
Because one of the beautiful things of the C70
is that you don't have to build a whole
map box and add all the handles everything around it suddenly you have a
small camera with a massive amount of things around it and it's not portable anymore.
Right? So the beauty of the C70 having internal NDs
is that I can actually control
my lighting situation. I can get a more beautiful shallow depth of
field have that bokeh effect. I can control that just with a
little knob, which is awesome!
What I love about cinematography is that you really start painting with light and you realize that if you
don't have that darkness you can't actually create images.
You need both sides and I think this is like a perfect
example that applies to any situation in life.
You'll go and tell a story and you will find darkness and you will find light.
And I think that the ability to think in that way
both technically but also story-wise is really beautiful.