Bright Lights, Big Sensors: DSLRs Are Making Their Mark in the World of Filmmaking

February 2013 By Greg Scoblete

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“In Hollywood,” the screenwriter William Goldman once observed, “no one knows anything.”

Perhaps he was being a bit uncharitable, because there is one thing that Hollywood certainly does know: cameras. And these days, cinematographers are increasingly immersing themselves in digital SLRs to augment, or occasionally even replace, traditional cinema cameras on movie sets.

From serving as secondary cameras to achieve close-ups, or unique angles that bulkier cinema cameras can’t obtain, to being placed in harm’s way where more expensive alternatives fear to tread, video-capable DSLRs are making their mark at the movies, to say nothing of their increasingly common appearance on the sets of music videos, TV shows, documentaries and online productions.

The Hits Just Keep On Coming
Even a quick survey of some recent DSLR film credits shows the remarkable surge of interest among professional filmmakers. The Navy Seals-inspired action flick Act of Valor was shot predominantly on Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II. The short documentary The Tsuanmi and the Cherry Blossom, chronicling the devastating Japanese tsunami in April 2011, was filmed using Canon’s EOS 7D and was nominated for an Academy Award. Canon’s 5D DSLRs were also pressed into service for Lucasfilm’s big budget World War II film Red Tails. In that film, the 5D was used for capturing unique angles and also as a kind of a test for Lucasfilm to see how well DSLRs could cope with the demands of shooting a special-effects-laden feature film, as Philip Bloom, who handled the DSLR filming on Red Tails, explained in his personal blog.

Nikon also notched some achievements on its belt: its D4 DSLR was certified by the European Broadcasting Union, passing what is known as the “BBC Test” for use in filming—the only DSLR (as of this writing) to do so. The same camera was tapped by the Warner Music Group to film its “Live Room” YouTube series. Nikon’s new D800 DSLR was roped into duty for the TV series Wilfred, which is (as of this writing) currently the only major network series filmed exclusively using a DSLR. The D800 was also tapped for camera work on Showtime’s hit series Dexter.

While the high-definition recording capability of DSLRs is what’s typically sought after on set, several major stop-motion movies have snapped them up for the stills as well. The Oscar award-winning British animation firm Aardman shot this summer’s The Pirates using Canon’s EOS-1D Mark III (Aardman’s technical director noted in an interview with TechRadar that the company actually rebuilt the focusing mechanisms on some of Canon’s EOS lenses to mimic the behavior of cinema lenses). Ditto for ParaNorman, which used EOS 5D Mark II cameras to capture over 400,000 still frames for this 3D stop-motion feature.

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