Hyvää Suomesta
March 19
I had worked with Halla before on a similar commercial shoot in the past. On this assignment, my role was to assist DOP Tomas Karike with camera setup and focus pulling. The plan was to create immersive bolt-cam spins and twists, which made this shoot quite different from what I’m used to. Normally, you would use a motion-control robot arm to achieve these kinds of movements, but instead we used a Steadicam.
The stedicam operator Alvi from BongoBongo was a really cool guy, and our workflow felt smooth and natural throughout the production.
The camera of choice was a Sony PXW-FX9 with a PL adapter, paired with rehoused Minolta Rokkor PL lenses and a Tilta Nucleus-M focus system. This is the same focus system we used on previous student film productions, so I’m already very familiar with it. Because of that, the camera prepp and setup was straightforward, including the monitoring systems.
I did encounter signal interference at one point while we were shooting inside a grocery store, when I was sitting behind a large stack of beer crates filled with aluminum cans, which makes sense in hindsight. Other than that, there were no major technical issues. Only the challenge of keeping the focus exactly where it needed to be. It was complex but fun, and it might be some of the most demanding focus pulling I’ve done to date.
