Crank: High Voltage Shot with High Definition Camcorders

I’ve been meaning to talk about this for the past few days:

I saw the movie “Crank: High Voltage” this week. If you don’t know about this film, Jason Latham stars in this action film that was apparently shot with small High Definition Camcorders (as compared to the big Panavision film rigs). Apparently, they used the High Definition Canon XHA1 and HF10 to help keep the costs of the film down (the film’s budget was only $20,000,000).

If you don’t know anything about these High Definition Camcorders, the larger one of the two is the High Definition Canon XHA1 – kind of considered the “prosumer”model. The other is the High Definition Canon HF10. Both are both fairly cheap HDV cameras (especially when compared to an ARRI d20 or even the RED), to say the least. So the “look” looks like cheap video throughout the film.

What I did not see though (and believe me, I was looking for it) in this film was digital compression and artifacts (that would have originated with these High Definition Camcorders).

This film was jerky and these High Definition Camcorders were moved around a lot, and yet I never noticed any digital tearing on the side-to-side up-and-down camera movements. It could have been that it was shot while hooked up to some long cables allowing uncompressed video out, but I don’t think that would have been practical.

Post-production had to contend with the HDV workflows, but it seems they pulled it off. I did notice that they did a LOT of color correction. Skins were extremely gold and such. But there’s nothing they could do for the blown out sky (which is a dead give-away of video).

Also, wanted to say that there did not appear to be any DOF adapters on those cameras…

Anyway, just something to talk about. This film was definitely made for the 15-25 year olds out there. Although anyone can enjoy this film that likes action films, this is definitely NOT a family film to take the kids to see…

Convert this post to pdf