Optimizing the Speed: Pairing the Sony FX6 with Arles High-Speed Cine Primes for Fast-Paced Commercial Shoots

1. Could you give us a brief introduction to you and your studio, Capitol Collective?

Hi, Hoezit, we are a small creative team from Johannesburg South Africa. Capitol Collective has a very non-traditional structure and outlook on film production, although the team comes from a more traditional background in TV, Sound, Advertising and photography we have evolved into a space where adaptability and collaboration have set us apart. 

2. How did you first come across DZOFILM?

We have come across DZOFILMS products for many years at local gear houses. We had hired the DZO Catta Ace Zooms before but hadn’t found our lenses of choice until we came across the Arles Primes.

3. What made your team choose the Arles Prime series?

We chose to hire the Arles Prime series for a Nissan shoot that we did. There were a few narrative character scenes taking place at night where the T1.4 allowed us to supplement available light with small house powered fixtures, speeding up our production. The 95mm outter diameter also made lens swops with a matte box seamless.

There aren’t really any apparent negatives with the lenses, even the larger size and weight can help with hand held and shoulder operated scenarios. If anything I’d say a lighter version of similar size would be amazing for gimbal work and overall flexibility. The focus falloff does need to be mentioned, it’s something we’ve never seen with lenses in this bracket. The colours seem very natural and each lens matches very well. We went with an 18,25,35,50,75mm set.

4. For the Ford Everest project, what is your Camera and Lenses Setups and Why?

On the Ford Everest project we needed a camera system with a simple and quick workflow that made exposure changes, lens swops and our post post production as easy and quick as possible. Ar a result, we chose FX6 as our main camera, pair with Arles T1.4 Prime. We opted for hiring the Arles Primes even though we had already ordered a set of the Arles which hadn’t arrived yet. I guess we just couldn’t wait to shoot on them again. The pair seem to balance well whether you’re hand held, on sticks, on gimbal or on a motorised head like the Kessler Cineshooter.

5. The Arles series is known for its T1.4 fast aperture, how did that perform with LED lighting setup?

We had received a brief from our client to shoot two vehicles, a list of features on each vehicle and to shoot each vehicle in studio on a similar background colour to each of the car's paintwork. It had to be done within one day and there wasn’t sufficient time to light two studios or to have two studio spaces. So we opted for planning our shots, frame sizes and the cars position under the lighting carefully. Thus painting one studio wall green and the other a grey while splitting the floor-plan in half. We figured changing the background with lighting wouldn’t give us the right graduation and effect and didn’t want to deal with the coloured spill onto the vehicles.

We chose an 8x8 Aputure infinity mat positioned on the gantry above as we could position each car's features under the light in relation to where we wanted highlights, luckily with all the crew's efforts we managed to get the heavy cars and large wheels onto wheel jacks where we could just push the car around the studio into the right position. Another light the Aputure 1200D was also used to supplement the large key above, while we could control both via Sidus Link on an iPad to produce lighting fades in certain shots.

The Arles are so powerful with their T1.4 aperture but for this project we actually opted for keeping the lenses between T5.6 and T8 to get a deeper depth of field which lent itself to the sharp, clean look we were after. The 35mm worked really well for the shape of the front end of the cars and the 50 and 75mm for closer details. Thanks to CTRL Media studios for facilitating this shoot.

6. Your team has extensive experience shooting commercials with the Arles Primes. How do they perform in advertising work, what advantages do they bring, and why?

We have used them for a few different kinds of work such as narratives, car commercials, skin care commercials and even corporate videos and I think that is their biggest advantage, they are so versatile. They are clean and have a very satisfying sharpness to falloff quality, I do love how they render out of focus foreground objects, it makes it easier to create layers in your frame without things becoming distracting. We have plenty of other vintage glass with great characteristics that make them unique but that’s all they can do. The Arles primes look great clean as they are or pair really nicely with a 1/8 black mist and a good circular polariser to give them a softer vintage look. 

7. You've recently added the DZOFILM Arcana anamorphic lenses to your kit. What led to that decision?

We actually haven’t added them to our kit yet, we had them on loan from our local distributor ProSales for a bike shoot that we did in our studio. The Arcana primes literally surprised us with how great their look was for something like a bike product shoot. We were able to get close enough with the wider lenses and we were pleasantly surprised with the look of the warm flares from the bikes headlights.

We have never been able to successfully incorporate anamorphic lenses into our workflow as we have always wanted to be able to provide deliverables in multiple aspects for TV and social media. We decided to try out the DZO Arcana anamorphic lenses for this project as it was purely for social media and we wanted to see if shooting vertiscope would allow us to deliver a 4:5 tall image for social media and in future crop off the top and bottom for a 16:9. It worked really well.

8. Do you have any suggestions or feedback for DZOFILM's future product development, anything you'd like to see next?

If we had read this same question a couple of months ago we would have said we definitely need an Arles matching zoom lens in the range of 25-75mm and T2 for certain jobs . So we are very keen on testing the newly released Arles 25-75 T2.6 soon. I think the Vespid 2 primes will definitely be useful when we need a lighter lens setup, although a standard 95mm OD for matte boxes would have been great. It would be great to see some DZOFILM Filters on the market too. Otherwise a 10-600mm T1.0 pancake, manual and auto focus switching with internal wireless focus motors, internal VND and effects filters as well as switchable circular and anamorphic modes all in a 180g lens, thanks.

But jokes aside, thanks for reaching out to us for the interview and we look forward to working with many great DZOFILM lenses in the future. Shap shap!
Mike, Chase and Talia from Capitol Collective