Canon EOS R8 challenge 3: Shoot video
The next challenge saw Alexandra making a short film about Benjamin Benmoyal, a French-Israeli paratrooper turned fashion designer. Benjamin rose to fame with collections that use a unique fabric woven from old VHS and audio cassette tapes. "It's amazing, not only from the point of view of the designer, but also the recycling and sustainability aspect," Alexandra comments.
Keeping fashion in mind, Martin explains which video features in the Canon EOS R8 would be particularly useful. "We could make use of the 180fps slow motion to capture the movement of a model," he says, "and use the oversampled 4K to show as much detail as possible – as well as shooting in Canon Log 3 in order to allow for professional colour grading in our editing workflow."
Alexandra was not experienced in shooting video. But even as a beginner, she found it easy to shoot slow-motion and Canon Log 3. She was also very impressed by the quality of the EOS R8's 4K 60p video, as oversampling from the 6K sensor produces higher quality output than video recorded natively at 4K resolution.
"I wanted to start the film with Benjamin putting tape onto a bobbin so that it could be used in the weaving machine to make the fabric, and end with a model wearing pieces made from this material," Alexandra explains. She made use of the EOS R8's vari-angle touchscreen to capture the process from creative angles. "It meant that I didn't have to climb high or get down low when I was shooting the fabric being cut or pins being put in the mannequin," she says.
Being able to use 180fps high frame rate recording to film the model as she moved around enhanced the footage. "She was wearing a massive poncho made of the tape fabric," Alexandra says. "So I asked her to do some twirls and turns, which made the material shimmer in the sun. It looked great, especially in slow motion – like a sea of fabric floating around."