Run and Gun

“We got last minute approval to shoot at Tanglewood,” says Jerry Simpson, veteran director/cinematographer and the principal of production company Simpson Films of Long Island City, New York. “I needed an ENG style, run-and-gun style camcorder—it couldn’t be too heavy and we needed to be able to set-up fast.” Simpson recently shot a pilot for a documentary profiling drummer Steve Gadd.

Gadd is an American session and studio drummer notable for his work with popular musicians from a wide range of genres. While hardly a household name, Gadd is a favorite of discriminating musical artists; a short list of musicians with whom he has worked includes Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Steely Dan, Joe Cocker, Chick Corea, Eric Clapton, James Taylor, Jon Bon Jovi and the Bee Gees.

"Every drummer wants to play like Gadd because he plays perfect,” jazz great Corea once said. The untitled documentary is being co-directed by Simpson and Bill Zules, themselves both drummers.


Simpson is well known as an advocate of digital production in the advertising industry and through his outreach to camera manufacturers became familiar with earlier generations of P2 HD camcorders. He was eager to work with Panasonic’s HPX3700, and decided to take two of the P2 HD VariCams to the Tanglewood Music Festival, where he shot five days of rehearsals, master classes and concerts featuring Gadd.

The drummer was performing with Tanglewood favorite James Taylor, who gave a series of four sold-out concerts in late August.
 
Simpson has also used the HPX3700 to shoot sit-down interviews with Taylor, Sheryl Crow, and Lou Marini, among others, with the performers discussing their work with Gadd. He interviewed Gadd as well.

Simpson was experienced with the P2 workflow, and was confident that they could get what they needed with P2 media. He also thought the HPX3700 would be well suited to the interview work.
 

“I usually insist on painstaking camera testing before taking a new model in the field, but there was no time to test the HPX3700 before leaving for Tanglewood,” Simpson says. “We essentially took the two camcorders out of the box and set them up on fluid heads in the balcony of Ozawa Hall, where we changed out three 32GB cards between the two cameras to shoot a percussion master class.”

More cards arrived shortly thereafter.
 
All the material was shot in 1080p-24pN in AVC-Intra 100. The HPX3700s were equipped with Fujinon XA17x7.6BERM HD zoom lenses.
 

“We could go through the HPX3700’s basic settings and know we’d get a superior image,” says digital supervisor Sean Donnelly, a longtime Simpson collaborator. “The AVC-Intra codec looks a lot better than DVCPro HD. We were thrilled with the camera’s latitude. At this type of event, we had no control of the lighting. For instance, James Taylor would be in the foreground of the stage and two or three stops higher than the band. But the HPX3700 really held detail in the highlights and shadows.”
 

“We did engage the Dynamic Range Stretch function, which reduces blocked shadows and blown highlights,” Donnelly says. “While we didn’t shoot off-speed, we did a time lapse interval record at one frame per half second to give the effect of the Tanglewood performance space filling up.”
 


“It’s easy being out in the field with P2 equipment, and we loved being able to see the material right away,” he says. At Tanglewood, Donnelly used the AJ-PCD20 five-slot P2 drive to offload footage to a MacBook Pro; material was then output via FireWire 800 to mirrored RAID1 drives.
 
While the official edit of Gadd documentary has yet to begin, Donnelly has done rough cuts of the material in Final Cut Studio 3, which he says he finds twice as fast as Studio 2 when importing AVC-Intra material.

“I’ve applied some color grading, and it’s amazing how much range you have for adjustment with the HPX3700 source material.”
 
Simpson plans to use the HPX3700 to shoot a food show intended for broadcast, as well as for possible pick-up segments for the Gadd project. “At the moment there’s nothing better than the HPX3700 for documentary and lifestyle, magazine-style shooting,” Simpson says. “It’s not a big camera, and consequently the crew gets smaller. It has that 4:2:2, 10-bit depth of color: it’s where we want to be with acquisition.”
 


Simpson Films www.simpsonfilms.com