so the wizards over at magic lantern have figured out how to hack canon software to shoot raw video. no more compressed .mov files – but real raw video. it’s gorgeous. kind of dreamy, even. but it IS a hack, and the workflow is a little less than dreamy. like everything else, once you pass the learning curve it starts feeling more comfortable. there are still some bugs in the system and glitches happen – but it’s an open-source work-in-progress and gets better daily. i actually shot this piece a few months ago and the quality of the builds lately have been a lot more reliable.

i whipped up this spec commercial to get my feet wet with the whole canon raw process. my inspiration was, “what if a girl loved running so much she ditched her date to go running?” so i built the storyboard, called a couple friends, and we went for it. it took maybe 4 or 5 hours to shoot everything. my favorite part of the night was shooting the running scenes. i conned my friend sam to drive me around on his moped so i could track our runner. we dropped off everything but the bare bones at our base camp and headed to our location. now imagine this, me on the back of the moped, sitting backwards – wearing a backpack on my chest with a c-stand arm jutting out supporting my key light (a small LED setup) – holding my steadicam merlin 2 rig – and best of all, i left my gaf tape at our base camp, so i had to cover the moped’s brake light with my leg so it wouldn’t hit my actress – all the while trying to balance and not fall when speedway sam took off like he was racing a funny car in the quarter-mile.

big hug and sloppy kiss to all the wizard-magicians over at magic lantern for making raw video on an SLR possible. xoxo