PRE-PRODUCTION: SONY A7S ii TEST

The next camera I tested was the Sony A7S ii. This is a camera I've been using a lot lately for personal projects and so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and use these as my tests for filming the documentary.

First test I did was another interview for the Behind the Scenes of Last Night which was with Ru Gilfillan who was the third character in the film. This interview was done in a small corner of a office which had no relevance and didn't look very pleasing either so to add drama for this interview (as Jon Stapleton told me) I threw on my 50mm Prime lens to blur out the background. This helped as Ru's character has the biggest twist of the film and his character literally snaps with angry towards the end and how intense it's played made me want to add in drama to the interview. Annoyingly, the camera didn't agree with the lighting, from the screen shot below you can see black lines across the footage which is due to the lighting at the location (I believe). These move up and down the footage, although slowly and can be hidden with cut aways and archive footage and could potentially be fixed in post, it didn't put me in huge amounts of confidence with the camera.

Below is all the camera tests with the Sony A7S ii:

RUN Footage

All the night footage is from my short film RUN (currently in Production), this shows how good the camera holds up in Low light, the quality of the footage is brilliant and even with the ISO at 800 you're getting clear quality and no noise. As well as this, the camera is nice to operate with the shoulder rig as it's so light weight. Easy to get nice and stable footage even on a rig instead of using a stabiliser. There are only 4 LED lights being used on this shoot and the camera is bringing out all the detail both foreground and background. 

Harry Evans - Tinfoil Arms footage

As I have to film a performance with the the chosen camera, I took the opportunity to film a music video with this camera. The video was a basic performance video covering the entire band, the clip I've put in the test video is just an extract as the footage is mostly the same just different band members. The lighting is C.T.O (Colour Temperature Orange) with 3 Red Head tungsten lights behind the band to add to the set. Annoyingly, with the location of the performance still unconfirmed I'm unable to test the cameras with lighting for a theatre/club so I used this as an alternative. My main practice here was with the rig. Which from the footage can see it's nice to operate, the follow focus works nicely and the weight isn't too much either. 

The issue with this camera is the same with Canon 60D and Canon 5D in that audio has to be recorded separately as a microphone can't be attached to the camera. This normally wouldn't be an issue but as it looks like we won't be having a sound operator I'll need a camera where I can have the sound being recorded into the camera both for actuality and interviews. As well, the black bars on the interview footage have made me sceptical about using this camera as the main one.   

Decision: Not to use this camera