“I started playing with the thing and said, ‘Oh my god, this is going to change everything’,” says Hollywood cinematographer Shane Hurlbut of his first encounter with the Canon EOS 5D Mk II, the camera at the heart of the burgeoning DSLR filmmaking phenomenon. “I started looking at it on 24 January 2009,” says Hurlbut. “I went to an American Society of Cinematographers [ASC] function, and Vincent Laforet’s Reverie was playing. I was like, ‘What?! That came from this camera? That’s kinda unusual’.”

Laforet’s Reverie is billed as the first 1080p short film photographed with the Canon EOS 5D Mk II, and it shows of some of the camera’s filmmaking advantages – its portability, its low light capabilities, the access to prime lenses and the control of shallow depth-of-field and quality of bokeh. Inspired, Hurlbut immediately bought the camera.

He had recently shot the $200 million blockbuster Terminator Salvation using 35mm film cameras, and was approached by director Joseph McGinty Nichol (better known as “McG”) to make a make a series of webisode promotions before the movie’s release, and it was the perfect chance to use the Mk II as a kind of helmet cam. “The actors are carrying the camera around, walking with it, getting blown up, the thing hits the ground, and they pick it up,” he says. “I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is like a whole new type of cinema’.”

Not everyone is quite as vocal as Hurlbut, but many others are equally enthusiastic about DSLR filmmaking. Rodney Charters, the cinematographer twice Emmy-nominated for his work on 24, was shooting overseas when the Mk II came out, but heard the buzz as soon as he got back. “A friend of mine from the ASC, Bill Bennett, called and said, ‘You’ve got to see this camera. It’s insane, it shoots in the dark and so on, you should try it on the set’,” he says. “So on my birthday a couple of years ago, a Canon rep showed up with two of them.”

The cameras were already accessorised, and Charters says he was amazed that so much had already been made for them. He was less impressed with the video speed though, which shot at 30p. “Depending on the motion we were shooting, it was successful or less successful or not successful at all. We said this camera doesn’t work until it does 23.98.” It was possible to convert (which Hurlbut had been doing for a project involving Navy Seals in the US), but it wasn’t ideal.

DoP and filmmaker Philip Bloom is another key exponent of the DSLR phenomeno, blogging extensively about it, teaching, and even working with Lucasfilm for the upcoming feature Red Tails using the 5D Mk II. But he too had problems with the camera at first. “I didn’t jump on camera straight away as there were issues: frame rates and the lack of manual control. It’s much better now than it was a year ago [thanks to a firmware update in March].”

It’s clear from looking at Bloom’s films that the visual quality is one of the standout factors of shooting on the 5D Mk II or 7D (with its 18 megapixel sensor compared to the 5D Mk II’s 21.1 million). “It’s certainly about the visual aesthetic,” he says. “With the 5D the aesthetic is really quite unique. But the price is key. We’re going to have camcorders with large chips coming out – Sony will have one early next year, hopefully. The price will be cheap in TV and film terms, but it’s not cheap.”

Hurlbut is also emphatic about both the visual and budgetary issues. “HD is very sharp, it’s very ‘not real’,” he says. “It looks like plastic. But I find that if you go with this little Compactflash card and this compression, it gives you the look of film [with the 5D Mk II]. It has a quality that its compression is its grain. And the fact of the matter is you still can’t take traditional rigs and do the things you can do with a 2.5lb camera.”

The sort of things Hurlbut is referring to include the neat shot in the short film The Last 3 Minutes where a father twirls a baby and throws it in the air, and the viewers see it from the baby’s point of view. Creating it was deceptively simple. “He just chucked the camera up in the air and caught it,” says Hurlbut. “We stripped it down to just the lens. It took him a couple of tries to get the right toss, so it didn’t flip over.”

Considerably more dynamic cinematic action is also on its way, courtesy of Hurlbut’s work with media company the Bandito Brothers on the Navy Seals project. An action movie called Act of Valor, it was shot with 5D Mk IIs, 7Ds and even the fifth generation of the EOS 1D (Mk IV) for a trifling – by Hollywood action movie terms – $11 million. It features: “Car chases, explosions, helicopters, everything,” says Hurlbut, adding: “Never before has a camera system rippled through production so much. You save in so many areas, and you can put all that up on the screen.”

Independents day
Of course, it’s not all about big action movie spectacle; to date, most of the DSLR filmmaking phenomenon has been more modest. “This rebellion was somewhat more grass roots,” says Charters. “Somewhat more accessible to people. You can go down to the high street and for a thousand dollars you can get a Canon EOS 550D, which has a chip the size of a standard motion picture camera. Whatever the lens you use with it, you’ll be stunned by the results.”

American filmmaker Robert Rodriguez has also been playing with filming with DSLRs. Bloom visited him while he was shooting a video on 7D cameras and was struck by the number of accessories he was using – the 7D body itself was dwarfed by the add-ons. But, says Bloom, it’s a matter of personal preference. “You can have as much kit or as little kit as you want,” he says. “You can pimp it out as much as you want, as long as you have some way of stabilising it. The lenses are obviously the most important thing – make sure you get decent lenses, rather than just the kit lens that comes with it. But you don’t have to spend a fortune on them.”

Bloom mentions a video of the band Hanson by way of example, “shot entirely on 7D using old Nikon AI lenses from 20-30 years ago, which can be bought cheaply online”. And interestingly, various tech sites were reported on a film called Searching for Sonny back in April 2009, reportedly being shot on Mk IIs fitted with old Nikon lenses. The film is currently in production.

The first feature to be shot entirely on DSLRs may well be Tiny Furniture, writer-director Lena Durham’s debut, which took the Best Narrative Feature award at the South by Southwest film festival Texas in March. The film’s producer, Alicia Van Couvering, affirms: “As far as we know, we’re the first feature to premiere that’s shot entirely on a DSLR. We used the Canon EOS 7D because of its low cost and sensitivity to low light. We have lots of night exteriors in the film, and with our very low budget, we couldn’t have lit them without this camera.”

The arrival of features like Tiny Furniture indicates just how fast DSLR filmmaking is progressing, and it’s also making an impact on TV. Charters incorporated it into his repertoire of cameras for 24, though he explains: “My use of it was not so much the principal drama, but we use it to shoot all of the plates – travelling background plates and so on. We cheated [making out that we were shooting in] New York City, even though we were shooting in Los Angeles. We’d put blue and green screen down the end of a street, then all the plates would be shot on 5D.”

Other TV directors are using it more comprehensively. The season six finale of House MD was shot on the 5D Mk II, for example, apparently so that they could get three cameras right next to each other in a very tight space. Bloom discussed the shoot with director Greg Titans and points out: “Even if you go down the EX1 [Sony HD camcorder] route, they’re still bigger.”

Charters, a peer of the show’s main director of photography, Gale Tattersall, adds: “They had a set that was two and a half feet high, with people crawling about underneath something that was crushed for a long part of the story. It made sense to put that camera in there. But nonetheless, when they shot on their normal set, they were totally happy with the look they got from it. You have this little tiny camera, you can shoot incognito, you can go anywhere.”

Small is beautiful
This diminutive size was factored into Bloom’s work with Lucasfilm too. “We’re testing out technology, so we’re doing a mixture of shooting side-by-side with an F35 [Sony’s flagship Cine Alta camera],” he says. “But we’re also using it where the big cameras are not so useful – the low-light and cramped quarters shots.”
But naturally, DSLR video isn’t perfect for every sort of filmmaking. “The camera’s limitations are with focus and movement,” says Van Couvering. “Focus is extremely tricky and the depth-of-field very shallow, which not only affected our camera department but also meant that the blocking and action had to be rather subdued and careful. The camera also doesn’t handle fast movement or pans very well, which I think also contributed to the decision to keep the photography calm and the blocking simple.”

“It’s very challenging to hold focus in a take, but the results are extraordinary,” adds Charters, and even Hurlbut says he faced a learning curve shooting Act of Valor. “I learned from my mistakes,” he says. “This camera – it’s a still camera.”

For Bloom, it’s a matter of learning your way around the kit. “One the things I can’t stress enough, [the 5D Mk II] isn’t one of those cameras you can just buy and then go straight out and shoot a masterpiece,” he says. “Beautiful images are obtainable, and they are obtainable without too much practice. But you’ve got to understand the camera. If you go in blind, you’re going to end up with pictures shot by a blind man.”

Either way, it’s already having an impact, and Charters says that he’s heard that clients are starting to request it for commercials. “It’s encroaching in huge ways,” he says. “People love the form factor, its small size and its availability. This in many ways is the future of television. But let’s be frank, this is a work-in-progress camera. It’s an afterthought that just suddenly happened. To say that this is a useable camera stretches things – it’s a challenge to shoot with it. The real question is, what will Canon do next?”