One of the ways we plan to keep down costs on All the Others Were Practice is by owning as much of the equipment as possible. New camera technologies allow us to buy the equipment for less than it would cost to rent it. Plus we save on insurance costs and the equipment is always available to us with no extra rental fees. If we have to re-schedule a day or get a pick-up shot we can schedule it around the actors and locations and not the equipment.
The downside of using new cameras is, well they’re new.
In Early January, we ordered a Blackmagic Digital Cinema Camera. The camera seems to be a perfect fit for our production, with RAW images captured directly to solid state drives. But the camera is still back-ordered, and we have no way of knowing if it will be shipped in time for us to complete our tests before production begins.
We have a Plan B camera package, but we’ll wait until the beginning of April before we abandon the Blackmagic.