Receiving the 101st camera off the epic-x line is an extreme honor.  We’re truly grateful to all the folks who have helped make this happen.  The number 101 itself has a variety of connotations which really have us excited. So, to borrow an old question, Which is mightier the pen or the sword? With the 101, we aim to bring both.

The Pen

At our core, Zebedee Films makes working with students a big priority.  Over the past 3 years we’ve taken the RED ONE #181 to local film schools and given the students the opportunity to learn the camera, shoot some footage, and learn about the workflow solutions available for RED raw.

The sincere enthusiasm of the students both encourages and inspires us in our own pursuit of beautiful cinematography (plus they tend to push us creatively which we don’t always get from tvc work).

It’s a big win for the students, but it’s also a huge benefit to us.  Every new student who shoots on RED is a future director/producer/DP who’ll remember their experiences.  We aim to see this generation of filmmakers embace shooting with RED – and to get the most out of their footage!

With our new Epic-X, we’re providing students with a ’101′ on RED’s latest technology.

The Sword

It’s no secret to any reduser, that Jim Jannard, CEO of RED is at war with planned obsolescence and mediocrity in the camera industry.  We love this.  We 100% support Jim in this.  The number 101 has a ton of meaning for us here as well.  The story of the Screaming Eagles, the 101st Airborne Division (specifically “Easy Company”), during World War II was made famous by the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. My brother and I have devoured the series multiple times.  It inspires us, humbles us, and pushes us to be our best.

Courage, perseverance, and outstanding loyalty are qualities synonymous with the 101st and with RED.  With our new Epic-X, our aim is to bring those same qualities to every job and every client we have.

These things aren’t new for us.  Education and excellence have been in our DNA from the beginning.  We’re stoked by what we’ve accomplished thus far and eagerly anticipating so much more. With Epic #101 we’re bringing our A-game – the pen and the sword – each and every day.

We have a lot of options when it comes to putting together a kit for the Epic-X Camera. Feel free to contact us with any question and check back here frequently as we are constantly getting more gear!

They called us with another project they had planned to use the Red One for, but it didn’t take much to get them shooting EPIC-X instead! Especially when you are shooting on green screen, you want to get as much resolution and as little compression as possible. We were shooting at Full 5k all day with a 7:1 compression ratio.  We went with the 7:1 compression ratio because it is a good medium ground between 3:1 (massive files sizes) and 12:1 (which is good enough for most footage). Most of the footage was shot slightly over-cranked at 30fps based on a 24fps time base. We stayed on our Red 18-85mm T2.9 Zoom lens all day. We love this lens! It is such a sharp lens and even though it vignettes a little at 18mm, it feels super-wide! We have considered getting a PL doubler for it, just to give us a little more range on the telephoto end. The camera performed perfectly!  Thanks again to the Director, Brandon Windish and DP, Jon Wolding! It is always mind-blowing what these guys do!

We know that everyone is very interested in getting their hands on 5k footage so we are including a .R3D frame grab with this post! You can download that frame here. This is a .R3D snapshot of Brandon Windish. Apparently he isn’t afraid of being on either side of the camera =)

This is a highly compressed .jpg for reference =)

We were a little crunched on time but  we worked hard to get as much footage as we could. The full short film will take a bit of time to edit, but we wanted to make sure our friends get to see a clip! We shot this clip at 300fps @ 2k resolution. The 2k resolution is a cropped image from the 5k which makes the shot more telephoto. We used our 18-85mm T2.9 with a few ND’s in the mattebox. The shot here is not the final grade, but does have a little curves and saturation thrown in. We are excited to be able to use this camera in place of what would have previously required a Phantom flex camera. Once you have this slow motion footage its incredible to see how much slower you can take it with Twixtor. We hope everyone enjoys and please leave your comments after the break!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Need further evidence this footage could be made into super high fps shots? Check out this video on Vimeo. This is red footage processed by Twixtor to be 4800 fps!

Click here to view the embedded video.

(The feather clip was not shot by Zebedee Films, nor did we process it through Twixtor.)

It started at 3PM on Monday when a very large package arrived from San Diego, CA.  Yes.  Our RED Epic-X had finally arrived!

The unboxing went rather quickly, with the boxes and packaging quickly tossed aside the way excited kids do on Christmas.  The camera itself comes with a beautiful case worthy of the camera name.  Having anticipated it’s arrival for several weeks, we had separately purchased many additional accessories, modules, and lenses we knew would be needed to begin shooting right away.

Unfortunately, the pro LCD touchscreen wouldn’t display.  We hooked up a secondary monitor via HD-SDI and saw that the ‘touch’ portion actually worked, but we obviously couldn’t see which menus we were activating in order to get it working well.  With the Side-handle and REDmote on backorder, we began to worry.  Fortunately for us there was no need.  RED came through as they always do with amazing customer service.  They sent us a shipping label so we could overnight the faulty touchscreen back to them.  They weren’t able to locate a touchscreen as a loner so they sent us a side-handle instead.  We’d be able to use this along with the LCD screen from our RED One to be able to control the camera.

We shipped the screen out on Tuesday and received our sidehandle on Wednesday.  We eagerly booted the camera and shot our first Epic-X footage, offloaded it from camera, and then uploaded it to the interwebs:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, while the idea of shooting home movies in 5k is rather exciting, we had to get down to business.  Thursday we had a commercial scheduled with the extremely creative folks over at Ground Up.  We were shooting a new video for the Culpepper Kurland guys who’s previous commercial got some attention:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We brought both the Epic-X 101 and the trusty RED One 181.  We shot an entire day on green screen at the WEDU studio in Tampa.  We’ll be posting up a review of how the Epic-X handled it’s first full day and some of our thoughts on the RED workflow in a future post.

Just a quick update for everyone to let ya know we have a new Vimeo channel here:

http://vimeo.com/channels/zebedee

The idea here is that while we have our own Vimeo account, it very often just contains more of our personal ramblings, test footage, and home movies (in 5k of course).  Most of our work is for other production companies with whom NDAs and other restrictions keep us from posting anything ourselves.  Now, when they post a project shot on one of Zebedee’s RED cameras we’ve been allowed to ‘tag’ it creating an entire channel of finished work that has our handprints on it :)

Take a look at the link above if you haven’t had the chance to see our stuff before.  And expect some exciting new items to be served up there regularly.

Zebedee Films is excited to announce we have just received shipment on the Red 18-85mm T2.9 PL Zoom Lens!  This will be part of our Epic Rental packages in the near future. This is just the beginning, more exciting announcements coming soon!

The picture below is the lens alongside our little puppy Penny! It weighs more than she does!

This project seemed impossible from the beginning but the challenge was what excited me the most!  A friend named Joel called me a few months ago and talked to me about wanting engagement photos.  His idea was to propose in the morning and photo-document the day so that he could give his fiancé (Emily) a scrapbook at the end of the day. The idea is crazy. To get all the photos printed and scrap-booked in the same day would be hard, but then he hit me with the real challenge,

“I want it to be a surprise!“

Whoa, he wanted me to become a stealth photographer for a huge day in his life. These photos were important and logistically it seemed intense. How could I pass it up!?

The day started at 5:30am with a trip to the beach for breakfast at sunrise. I found a cozy spot behind some sea oats to catch a few shots.

The plan was that they would get up and go for a walk while I planted a rose on their beach blanket. When they returned he would propose. Everything was going well and they got up to go on the walk. I had the flower, so I snuck up to the blanket and looked down the beach.  They were pretty far away and looking the other direction so I planted the flower.  Just as I did, as if Emily had a sixth sense about it, she turned and looked at me. She grabbed Joel and said, “I think someone is stealing our stuff!” Joel was caught by surprise and said the first thing that came to his mind, “Look at the ocean!” He reassured her everything was fine back at the blanket and by then I was gone. They continued their walk. I will note that I had not met Emily before that day and I was pretty sure she wouldn’t think about it after the proposal.

They returned from their walk to find the rose and I was safely hidden about a hundred feet way.  The proposal was beautiful.

I told Joel that if he took pictures with his iPhone, he could send them to me and we would include them in the scrapbook.  This idea proved to be a great way to get pictures of them up-close and smiling at the camera, genius!

The next location was Lido for kayaking! One of Joel’s brothers, Jer, was my gondolier. It was crazy to sneak around and find cover to get pictures. Cell phones were critical! We were text messaging Joel most of the day to get updates on where they were and to help buy more time to get things set up. We found a dock to sit on and get photos from while they were in the bayou. Vignettes are beautiful for photos, but I knew there would not be time to get into photoshop, so I used trees and the dock to make borders for my photos.

After kayaking, they stopped on a semi private beach where other members of Joels family had set up a beautiful lunch spread. The beach was small and almost impossible to find a good place to take photos from.

I ended up jumping on shore and trying to get near them.  I was getting pretty close when another kayaker yelled to Joel and Emily, “Is that guy taking pictures with you?” Emily turned and looked right at me! Crap! Think fast.  She doesn’t know you. I walked up to them and pretended I didn’t know them. I said, “Sorry, I have never seen anything like this before. It is very cool!” They agreed. I asked them, “How did you get the table in the kayak?” They laughed and explained that it was already setup. I told them I didn’t want to be a creeper and that I would leave them to it. I turned to leave and Joel seized the moment and said, “No, wait. You can get a photo.” I asked Emily if that was ok and she said yes. I got a great picture of them at the table and with a sigh of relief I walked away.

Still…. the day wasn’t over.  Would she now be looking around for a creeping photographer? Would she see me again and recognize me? I just had to be more careful.

We were rushed to make it over to the next location in time and I almost missed them leaving on jet skis.

With them out on the water we took some time to get started on the scrapbook. CVS Photo Center was the closest place to get prints done.  We met up with Mary at CVS. Mary is a friend of Emily’s and is an incredible scrap-booker! She already had a head start on the scrapbook and the pictures fit in perfectly. After Jet skiing, Joel and Emily went to the RItz Carlton for a spa treatment and to relax.  The whole time Joel was sending me photos from his iPhone and we were making prints.

We got most of the scrapbook done. The only location left was dinner at a restaurant in the Ritz. All the staff was in on the engagement and photo-documentary. They seated me and a friend at a table near where Joel and Emily would be seated and I got  a couple photos while we waited. Joel and Emily arrived and their waiter Keith was incredible! He made sure they were entertained long enough for me to get a couple good photos and get out.

Joel made sure to get a good photo as well.

Now we were on a race against time! We had to get the scrapbook done and back to the Ritz before sunset. Mary did an impressive job with the last few photos and we raced back to the Ritz. The sun was about 15 minutes from setting! We set up a small pedestal n the courtyard and put the book on it. Jer and I hid as the waiter told Joel and Emily about the romantic sunset they should go watch. That was Joel’s cue and they left the table and started walking toward the courtyard.

After such a long day, Jer and I leaned against a balcony and watched as Joel led Emily to the pedestal. You may recall the scene from the end of Oceans 11 where all the stars have a moment in front of the fountains in Las Vegas.  They look at each other so proud of what they accomplished. This is the feeling we had as we watched Emily and Joels surprise and amazement at the pages in the scrapbook. She couldn’t believe it. She was so thankful to have so many photos from such a beautiful day. As the sun set, they kissed and we knew the day couldn’t have gone any better. Jer and I left to go meet up with the rest of Joels family for an after party.

It was a beautiful end to a great day! I was finally introduced to Emily and she thanked me for the photos. We all swapped stories for a few hours and re-lived what ended up being a perfect day.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.