A 17K camera sounds like data madness. Why I shot a one-woman show using Blackmagic’s monster-megapixel cine camera

When I first walked into Wilton’s Music Hall for Musik, I knew the venue itself was going to be as important as the performance. It’s an old, worn, slightly derelict hall with a rich built-in texture and atmosphere. That kind of space instantly gives you an aesthetic to play with.

Creatively, the goal in capturing this live performance was to balance intimacy, spectacle, and energy. Musik is a one-woman show, starring Frances Barber, and my role as DP was to ensure we had enough angles over a 60-minute runtime to make you feel like you occupy the space alongside the performer. We shot across three shows. I wanted the coverage to move from wide shots that hold the room to close shots that sit right within the performance, and for the continuity to feel seamless when both shows were cut together.

Because the show itself worked so well, and Frances is such a strong performer, my job became making sure the edit had everything it needed to get the best out of the material.

Working with the venue

The hall largely dictated how we worked. It’s a distinctive, characterful space, but you still have to respect audience sightlines and the practical constraints of working in a live environment. I was very conscious that we needed wider shots that really acknowledged the architecture. At the back of the hall, we rigged a camera high up to give us a wide, high-angle view that took in the space, the truss, and the room. On other shows, we added a couple more high angles for the same reason.

If you have a great venue, I think it’s important to make it part of the piece, not just let it disappear into the darkness behind the actor. I always want to be able to pull something out of the shadows so you can see the environment you are in, because that becomes part of the artwork, too. With a venue like Wilton’s, it would be a shame if you couldn’t see the walls or the depth of the hall. A lot of the exposure and lighting decisions were about keeping enough information in the shadows to define the space, while still protecting the performance on stage.

We also needed enough angles without turning it into a chaotic multicam shoot. We had one handheld camera off to the left of the stage to bring some freehand energy into the coverage. Beyond that, everything was a mix of tracking cameras and long-lens positions, set up so they could move slowly and predictably rather than whipping around. It was all about keeping the viewer grounded in the space and making sure every move felt deliberate.

The lighting plot was largely set before I came on board, but once I was involved, I made some suggestions in prep. We varied a few of our A and B angles so some positions could sit a bit closer for key moments. In practice, I shot two cameras one night, seven cameras on the matinee, and another six on the following shows. That gave us around 15 distinct angles. The key was making sure none of those positions doubled up. I wanted every angle to bring something new, so the edit had the widest possible range of options.

Building the camera package

For Musik I kept everything within the same Blackmagic family: an URSA Cine 17K 65, an URSA Cine 12K LF, supplemented by a mixture of PYXIS 6K Cinema Cameras and Pocket Cinema Camera 6Ks, so I knew the sensors and color science would all play nicely together.

We were lensing this as a full-frame show. Sensor sizing and the ability to intercut across cameras were important to me. Effectively having the same or very similar sensors in everybody, but with different ergonomic designs, is a big advantage.

I love large-format and am very attached to it. On a small, intimate show like this, a larger sensor size can draw you deeper into the performance. You can go closer and tighter with your lensing, but still feel like you have a meaningful field of view, as if you are seeing more through the sensor than you would on a smaller format.

Lens-wise, we had large-format coverage across everything. On some of the longer lenses, we went back to Canon stills glass. Those lenses have great sharpness, they cover full frame easily, and they're relatively quick to adapt into something ergonomic for a live show. We combined those with cine zooms and primes where needed, which gave us full coverage for the large-format look we wanted and a more immersive frame.

A few years ago, shooting 17K 3:2 on the full sensor would have sounded like data madness, but Blackmagic RAW keeps the files totally manageable. I was able to oversample down to an 8K image in-camera without any changes to the field of view or a loss in image quality. I honestly do not want to go back to shooting Super 35 if I can avoid it. I just really like what bigger sensors are giving us on these kinds of jobs.

For post-production, we have prepped everything in DaVinci Resolve and generated proxies, with the offline being done in Avid elsewhere. The plan is that we will handle the final finish and delivery in DaVinci Resolve, so the whole workflow has been set up with that in mind.

A leap forward for multi-cam

One thing that’s really starting to change how I approach multicam work is the level of camera control we now have during a show – I‘m getting quite obsessed with it. In the last six months, having Ethernet ports on the PYXIS and URSA Cine, and the Blackmagic Camera app allowing multicam control, has opened up new possibilities.

I first tried that approach on a larger job in New York and was pleasantly surprised by how quickly we could deploy it. We essentially just needed Ethernet or reliable Wi-Fi from the cameras to an iPad, and I had camera control.

On Musik, it was not a hard requirement, but I had it in the back of my mind from the start. On this show, we didn’t need to switch live, but we did need to build a gallery so the director could see every feed at once. That was a hard requirement, which is why I knew the ATEM SDI Extreme would make sense.

I hadn’t touched an ATEM for four or five years, but handled intelligent switching and locked to everything immediately, whether it was 25p or 30p. Most feeds came in via straight SDI, but we had some wireless links due to the building.

The real benefit for me was having a 24-inch confidence monitor fed from the ATEM. I could sit through the show and use it to nuance the image, tweaking ISO by a stop here or there, dialing in color temperature, and refining exposure as we went. I could see things as we were shooting instead of having that traditional experience of seeing it two weeks later in post and wishing I had changed something. That level of immediate control feels like a big step forward on multicam work.

Everything was filmed using Blackmagic’s Generation 5 color science, with a LUT applied in camera and white balance set so that everything was at roughly the same Kelvin. I adjusted the ISO based on lens speed. The only wrinkle was a monitoring device with a gamma shift, so I built a small correction LUT downstream for that wireless unit. Beyond that, everything was effectively managed in camera.

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