The Big RED ONE
Jamie Hannigan talks to cinematographer James Mather (Adam & Paul, Prosperity), proud parent of the new RED ONE Digital Video Camera.

Jamie Hannigan: Apparently the red one is described as ‘a hard drive with a lens in the side’…

James Mather: Well yes, I suppose that is a way of boiling it down. It does do the things that all the other cameras do and it’s more elegant than a lot of the Arriflex stuff. A lot of the criticisms that are coming at the RED are from two camps: people who have a vested interest in seeing it not succeed, so people like Panavision – they’re not interested in seeing the RED succeed and I wouldn’t be if I were them either. They’ve got a €5,000-a-day Genesis to rent so it’s in their interests not to find any positives. The other camp tends to be people who have come from using handycams, where the camera does everything for you. They’re used to taking a camera out into a field and just shooting something and it does auto-focus and does all those things, but pro-kit has never been like that.

From what I’ve heard from the two red features underway this year – Brendan Muldowney’s Savage and Conor Horgan’s One Hundred Mornings – moving onto the red would seem to be more analogous to the challenges of a 35 mm shoot.

You’re right, yeah, it’s not a pick-up-and-go camera, it requires all the diligence that 35 mm filmmaking has, so this idea that it’s the kind of low-budget option – from a crewing standpoint – it’s certainly not. I mean you need two people, plus the cameraman, to run it safely. You can run it on a hard drive, but there are risks: hard drives and laptops fail all the time, and you’re basically shooting with all your eggs in one basket, as it were. But if one memory card fails, you’ve lost maybe three minutes; you can easily pick that up in a shooting day.

So essentially you’re going to need someone like a clapper loader, constantly changing memory cards and dropping the footage onto a computer?

You need a clapper-loader, exactly. You get about four to five minutes on the cards. But that’s good, film rolls are exactly the same, film rolls are four to five minutes. So again, it’s people who are coming from shooting on MiniDV who find this difficult, whereas in the film world, we’ve been doing it for years. And it’s also good discipline, because it means everyone is focussed when the camera’s running, which is what I quite like: ‘We’re rolling now, everybody pay attention.’

How does the RED compare to Super 16 mm, price-wise?

It would be a lot cheaper, I would have thought. Well, the potential is to be cheaper. But the myth that suddenly there’s this camera on the market for $17,000 is really not quite true, because you can’t shoot with that thing. In the last couple of years I’ve spent about a hundred and fifty, maybe a hundred and sixty thousand getting the kit together. But that’s all the bits you need to shoot with: you need lenses, you need a way of viewing your image, you need a means of recording it, you need a means of downloading it and you need good kit to shoot with.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 126.