Spectacular photography inspired by the characters, history and landscapes of the Devon fishing town of Brixham was the subject of Fish Town, a 10 part documentary for Sky Atlantic produced by Mentorn Media.

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Mentorn’s camera crews shot the series across a five month period starting in April 2011, with four teams of self-shooting producer directors armed with PMW-500s from Pro Motion Hire shooting in XDCAM HD422 at 50Mb/s onto 32 GB SxS PRO memory cards.

Pro Motion technical manager Alain Lolliot recommended the 500 set up over a workflow based around the PMW-EX3 teamed with external recorders because Fish Town was a long running production shoot which would need to cope with a range of challenging physical conditions such as shooting on trawlers. “The 500 made more sense because it's a much more sturdy shoulder mounted camera which offers the same file based SxS PRO XDCAM workflow and a choice of broadcast HD zoom lenses such as Canon HJ22.”

According to Mentorn and Sunset + Vine head of production technology Emma Riley commissioners at Sky were looking for a high end look from cameras which could be properly focused and beautifully shot.

“Trawlermen meets Doc Martin was the brief,” recalls Riley, who spend time with her producer/directors testing the various options. “Everyone preferred the 500 with HD lenses because of the depth of field they could get and the weight and balance of the camera.”

The quality of the results are clear for all to see, says producer/director James Bainbridge who used the 1080p setting to capture the town looking its best in the early morning and evening light.

“We continued to shoot the series whilst it was airing on Sky Atlantic and the locals in particular were very enthusiastic about how good we made Brixham look,” says Bainbridge.

Bainbridge reports that the show’s self-shooting producer/directors found the camera small enough to operate in the cramped confines of a trawler’s wheelhouse and the bustling atmosphere of the local pub The Maritime Inn.

With over 1,000 hours of HD footage recorded over the course of the series Riley calculated that 100TB of storage would be needed to back up the SxS PRO cards. With rushes being couriered twice a week back to base via a local Brixham fish delivery van – another cost saving innovation – Riley decided against a conventional transfer of SxS PRO media onto drives, opting instead for transfer onto cost-effective and robust XDCAM Professional Discs.

“We though that as there was a chance that the drives might get damaged in transit we employed two data wranglers to transfer the media from SxS PRO onto MacBook Pros, using a PDW-U1 external USB reader writer to drag and drop the files onto disc.”

“Another thing we loved about the 500 is that it offers the same proxy workflow which higher end camcorders such as the PDW-700 enjoy. We used the proxy files with our video logging and management tool CatDV, which gave us a proxy workflow at a lower price.” 

Bainbridge adds that another big benefit of the 500 was its four channel 24-bit audio, enabling each channel to be adjusted independently.

“That really impressed us. In the absence of dedicated sound recordists it was great to have extra sound channels so we could use a top mic, and a series of radio mics to get sound from a range of sources.”

The only real problem was making sure the camera’s electronics were kept away from the salt water out at sea, recalls Brainbridge. “That was a simple matter of having the cameras regularly cleaned and checked when it came back for a trawler trip 50-60 miles out to sea.”

WORKFLOW

Four team of self-shooting producer/directors armed with PMW-500s shot in XDCAM HD422 at 50Mb/s onto 32 GB SxS PRO memory cards. Over 1,000 hours of HD footage were recorded over the course of the series backed up onto drives and transferred onto MacBook Pros, using a PDW-U1 external USB reader writer before being copied onto Professional Disc. The 500 offers a proxy workflow allowing proxies to be loading into  Sunset+Vine’s logging and content management tool CatDV.

PROFILE

Alain Lolliot studied sound engineering  before joining Pro Motion Hire on a five year apprenticeship. Rapidly progressing to technical operations manager Lolliot is the first port of call for many production companies looking to make the most of file based workflows. According to Lolliot it's a technology that really taken off - particularly the use of Professional Disc and SxS PRO memory recording. Lolliot underlines the importance of using an experienced data wrangler to manage the media on bigger productions and getting all parties involved to agree to a workable file based route early on. It’s really important that everybody understands the workflow and is happy with it, he recommends.