Carrying a Movie On Our Backs
Building A Camera Package When Every Pound Counts
Body, Lenses, Monitor, Batteries, Tripod, oh my.
The Arri Alexa Mini was the first thought, however the body of the camera alone is 6.9 lbs - this is the lightest weight of the Alexa line
The Sony FX3 was the next thought - coming in at 1.4lbs
But, the need to have internal ND filters lead us to the Sony Fx6 - 1.9lbs
The Cannon EOS series was considered as they weigh similarly but ultimately we liked the look of the Sony Sensor better
The process of bringing a feature film to the top of a mountain
In July 2025, the team of Can’t Go Over It embarked on their two week journey of backpacking through the Adirondacks while shooting a movie.
To make this crazy vision come to life each department had lots of prep to do. I’ll walk you through my prep as the cinematographer.
Make it
Our director (Ethan) and I met weekly to go talk through visuals and create story boards
Kelly Reichart (spell check) was a huge inspiration.
Deep depth of field, wide lenses, allowing characters to move through the frame and create interesting shapes
look later for that video of ethan playing with gummy worms
We picked an ideal color pallete,
discussed camera moves, who motivates movement, when is it still, when do the characters deserve singles, all in all developing a visual emotional language for the story
One of the worst feelings in the world, corrupt media, lost media,
Being in the woods put us in a challenging offloading situation.
A huge advantage of using the Sony camera line was the ability to simultaneously record to two separate slots. Essentially, recording our back up file.
While still risky, we did have a backup and mitgated risk by using type A cards.
Color
While we can only bring so much production design to the middle of nowhere, digital manipulation help us maintain a color palette
Molly Piard created a unique lut using our references and test footage
—— a before and after would be nice
Raw Footage
Standard LUT
Simply put, we wanted to bring out the warm tones of the trees and skin, while making our “man made” colors pop. Molly did an excellent job and it gave us a nice baseline to go off of.
2 Lbs Down, 28 to go
It is not advised to carry more than 20% of ones body weight so everyone was capped at 30lbs (this includes camera gear, sound gear, camping gear, and food)
Next on the list - what lens
A big goal for me was to make this feel different from a nature documentary, were the images are crisp and clean. To achieve this I turned to vintage lenses …a heavy lens.
Luckily, Cooke makes a series the SP3 lens, which is a rehoused vintage Cooke Lens built specifically for a Sony E mount. The dream was alive
#WATB
(what about the batteries)
But we still had the infamous question - what About The Batteries
We looked into Gold mounts, V mounts, portable generators and chargers. For us, the best payoff for payload was the BPU 98 batteries with a usb outlet, to ensure the external monitor got power.
Camera Rentals NYC has an amazing wattage calculator that allows you to simplify the process. For five days of shooting, I estimated 16 batteries were needed. Each weighed .9lbs. Add 14.4 lbs to the total
STILL NEED —- media explination
tripod
location scout
coloring the footage to make a custom lut
the actual creative of framing and story boarding
Location scout
The Best Prep is a location scout. Late in May, 4 of us went on a test run of sorts. Submitting two peaks in one day.
This allowed us to test our shooting limitations - a big goal was to not kill anyone. But more importantly, we got to capture pretty images.
Due to budget reasons, we were only able to bring one Cooke SP3 lens, I chose a 35mm
The ap Artemis allows you to put in your camera and lens settings to take some previs with your iphone
Demonstrated to my right, you can see what a 25mm SP3 lens looks like and the sun data artemis collects
Custom Made LUT
-
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world.
-
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world.
-
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world.