This was a passion project of mine. To film the stunning performance of “Earth Ritual” by the Of The Wild-Ecological Circus Collective. This was an act I first saw at Glastonbury in 2023 and I wanted to film it properly in a more controlled environment. I wanted to help give the act the publicity I feel it deserves, it’s very hard for contemporary circus acts to get funding these days.

 

So, I approached FujiFilm to see if they would fund the film and loan me a GFX-100 II to shoot it with. The GFX-100 II with it’s medium format 100MP sensor seemed to me to be the perfect match for this film.

 

The very large sensor, bigger than Full Frame giving me a very shallow depth of field, especially when shooting with the Fujifilm 55mm f1.7 lens. This, plus the smooth highlight roll off, combined with a warm look that I could get by shooting using F-Log2 with the 14 bit sensor readout mode gave  a very organic looking image that was a great fit for this performance which centers around our relationship as human beings with the earth, plants and nature. I really love the way the images from this camera looks. Skin tones look beautifully textured, highlights are well rounded. The shadows are full of subtle details and also remarkably noise free.

The GFX-100II is a very interesting camera with many different scan modes available from the huge 43.8mm×32.9mm 100MP sensor. I did some test filming with the previous GFX-100 Mk 1 a few years ago and I loved the way the images from that camera looked. There is just something very nice from having a massively oversampled image.

For this shoot I could have used an 8K crop from the 11.6K wide sensor or a 5.8K 2.35:1 read from the full width of the sensor.  But in the end I settled on the cameras 4K 17:9 recording mode which is downsampled from the full sensor width. This greatly downsampled readout mode delivers a beautifully clean yet immensely textured image at the F-Log2 base ISO of 1000 ISO. It uses the full width of the sensor so you can take advantage of the very wide field of view that even the 55mm lens will deliver. And then by shooting at 55mm and f1.7 you get a very shallow depth of field. When you downsample like this you get full 4:4:4 colour, so unlike the output from a more conventional 4K bayer sensor where there is less colour information than brightness information, the colour and brightness information from the GFX-100 II in this mode are equally balanced. This makes it highly gradeable.

An interesting feature of the GFX-100 II is the ability to change the sensor readout bit depth from 12 bit to 14 bit. When shooting video most camera sensors run at 12 bit. But the GFX-100 II can be set to a  special F-Log2 Dynamic Range Priority mode that increases the bit depth of the sensor readout to 14 bit. This 14 bit readout increases the dynamic range and improves the textural qualities of the image. Considering that the pixels on the camera are very small, the dynamic range it delivers is impressively high, especially if you choose this enhanced readout mode.

However – nothing is ever free, the readout speed of the sensor is slower in this mode so there is a bit more rolling shutter. But, I think Fujifilm should be applauded for giving us users the ability to be able to choose between increased DR with more rolling shutter or reduced rolling shutter but a bit less DR. And you can mix the two modes within a project depending on how much motion you need to shoot. For some of the more dynamic shots in this film I turned it off to minimise any rolling shutter effects. I wish other manufacturers would give us this control.

Although I didn’t use them for this shoot, another item worth of note is the cameras built in film emulation presets. For this film I shot using F-Log2 to maximise the dynamic range and give myself the best grading flexibility. But if you don’t want to grade the GFX-100 II like many of the Fujifilm cameras includes a range of very pretty looking film emulation presets that mimic classic Fujifilm film stocks including Provia, Velvia, Eternia as well as a number of other film style looks including monochrome.

You also have a huge range of codec options in the Fujifilm cameras. You can choose between internal ProRes, H264 and H265, either I frame only or Long GoP, as well as external ProRes Raw. For this project, after much testing comparing ProRes HQ with the H265 options  I settled on H265 I frame only at 720mb/s. For me this gave the best balance of excellent 10 bit 4:2:2 image quality but with smaller files than I would have had with ProRes HQ. The camera records to either SD cards or CFExpress cards, there is one slot for each type of card and it can switch from one slot to the other as one fills up.

For many of the shots the camera was mounted on the end of a 6m camera jib and remotely controlled.  I relied heavily on the autofocus for these shots. The AF performed very well considering the challenging lighting and fast movement of the act. But it would sometimes struggle a bit, not always tracking correctly or simply struggling to focus. I guess in part this is down to the very large sensor and extremely shallow DoF. However since shooting this there has been a firmware update for the camera that includes some big improvements to the AF performance, in particular the object tracking, it’s a shame I didn’t have this at that time.

I loved shooting this project with the GFX-100 II. We are now at a time where we have so many camera choices and pretty much every camera can deliver a very good image. So a big part of the decision as to which camera to use will come from deciding on how you want your project to look. Often most of the look will come from the lenses you choose and you lighting. The GFX-100 II does bring something a little bit different to all the full frame cameras out there today. That huge sensor when paired with a fast lens can deliver an extremely shallow depth of field, even at wider focal lengths. It is a fairly bulky camera, but it remains easy to use. I don’t see it as a replacement for my more Full Frame cameras, but it is certainly a camera I would use for special projects like this.

Also a big shout out to Nanlite and Prolight Direct for providing the lights for the shoot. I used a Nanlite 720B with a Nanlite PJB projector lens and gobo to create the shaft of light from the rear that is the main light source.  There was a Nanlight FC-500B (really nice low cost bi-colour COB fixture) with a Fresnel lens providing some foreground fill light. To light the singer when she was sitting on the floor towards the rear I used another 720B with another projector lens and used the shutters to create a very small pool of light exactly where she was sitting.  Then to add some interest to the otherwise black background I used 6x 4ft Pavotubes.

Other points of interest for the shoot: We had to bring in 3 tonnes of top soil to cover the floor area. The location is a circus training space called Unit 15 in Bristol in the UK. It’s a big space and we shot this in February when it was freezing cold, it didn’t get very warm inside! When the circus performers rise up into the air they are counterbalanced by 2 riggers on the other end of their ropes, the riggers sliding down a vertical truss as the artists rise up. This is a highly skilled job and the act couldn’t exist without them so a big thank you to David, Barney and Fran, the riggers for the shoot.

Below you will find the behind the scenes video for the project:

 

To get your GFX-100 II: https://cvp.com/product/fujifilm-gfx100-ii-body-6805452?aff_id=139

DJI RS4 Pro Gimbal: https://cvp.com/product/dji-rs-4-pro-combo-cp.rn.00000346?aff_id=139

Nanlite 720B COB light: https://cvp.com/product/nanlite-31-2008-forza720b-bi-colour-led-light?aff_id=139

Nanlite Projector Lens: https://cvp.com/product/nanlite-pj-bm-19-projection-attachment?aff_id=139