What did Shades Of Bad get for Christmas - technical bits ....

 Merry Christmas from all at SHADES OF BAD

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Jean, Lynn, Donna, Ricky, Buster, Mark & Stuart.

Two Christmas presents to ourself here at Shades Of Bad, an L series Cannon 17mm to 40mm zoom, and a LCDVF which is an eye piece you fit to the back of our BMPCC. as a film company we own a number of Red Dragons and a Scarlet we have never upgraded, which hires the best of the whole family.

When we decided to start Shades Of Bad and shoot in a real kitchen, the space was so small we could neither use a crew or a big camera. After much discussion with many DoP's I know and trust we decided on the Black Magic. We shoot everything 2k raw and master at that level two, often boldly reframing and zooming and since watching Brooklyn we have less fear of using the stabilisation feature in FPX. The wallpaper behind Julie Walters had turrets.

I have been very pleased with it, but since shooting the Doris Visits shows we have suffered with not being able to see the rear screen in extreme sun light. The are a set of films from Doris Visits Bequia to Key West where you can see why these wonderful places gave us the problem. Our 28mm to 80mm zoom also listed the wide visits we could shoot because we use an active Metabones to the EFS camera lens whole, which converts to the better EF lens and gives us more light stops.

That means that the lowest we can go, 28mm is actually about 35mm as the metabones conversion is still about 1.35 times the zoom size. The 17mm will mean I have about a 24mm lens. Great. For those tech types you might also like to know that some of our very light lens gave us stop problems in the bright light because the metabones just made them unusable. We added a full set of NDs ages ago and use at least 8ND in sunlight the camera and metabones are so good together.

We are going to do some films on how we shoot Shades Of Bad and Doris Visits but as always there is a queue. We lost the edit suit for three weeks and I got it back yesterday and threw Doris Visits the Norwegian Fjords in there for a first cut but know that next week we shoot with our new star and all our focus will be on that and first cuts of the work with him. Who he is you will have to search for, it is revealed in one of the James Whale radio interviews, which you can find by searching the my blog on James episode which is released tomorrow.

Next year I can promise a release of a mega episode, the first 5 cut into a ten minute piece and they look terrific as a longer version. More Doris Visits with trips planned to the Three Valleys, Russia and Denmark, the Canary Islands towards the end of the year and March see is back in the Caribbean. There is a muted but not booked yet trip to Dubai.

In between, our new star head hunts Doris for higher crime, and she will take over the world.

So merry Christmas from us, I am just about to turn the turkey off to let it rest, visit some friends for drinks then enjoy the day ... I hope you do too. Tomorrow Boxing Day, apart from being the release of the James Whale episode, I shall be watching Watford play Chelsea with great interest.

Seasons Greetings to all....