If you ever attended an OnSet event at Adorama, you might recognize Dave Brusca, host Daniel Norton’s right hand man and production guru on Daniel’s OnSet videos. Dave’s technical know-how has acted as the supportive back bone especially when focusing on video tips and how tos. Dave also hosts a monthly, Sunday-only Filmmaker meet and greet at the store. It allows him to demonstrate his prowess as both a videographer and teacher of all things film. Next week, Dave will play an important part in an Adorama Pro special event showcasing the new Canon C300 Mark II. So I sat down with him to see if we could get a preview of what to anticipate.
ME: Tell me a little about your background.
DAVE: I went to college in St. Petersburg in Florida. For video production. So it was more centric on news-eng stuff. Before I was in college – when I was in High School – I was shooting short films with friends. Started on 8 mm film then went to High 8 and then mini DV and then HDV when many of those things came out. When I got to college it was very technical oriented which was good. They didn’t go over theory so much. Which I kind of appreciated because once you understand why doing this does this and that does that you can start forming your own theories whether it’s about how make something look good or sound good.
After awhile I was doing events, things like weddings. I started working at ION Media Networks in a sort of engineering capacity but it was quality assurance. It was making sure that all the stations and transmitters were streaming properly or they were broadcasting at the right power outputs, the flow of signal and all that. It was cool and it was kind of close-ish to, it was in the same overall realm for what I wanted to do which was filmmaking but in the sense of “hey, I am dealing with video files” but I wasn’t actually creating video files. I actually wanted to produce stuff.So they opened up a studio.
ME: You’re still in Florida at this time.
DAVE: Yes. Technically there was already a studio there but it was for this sort of televangelist thing so we tore down the church that was inside the place and we built this studio with a huge green screen, went up 15, twenty feet or something like that. There was a fully automated three-camera system with the automatic pedestals and everything. So really high end stuff. And I was excited. I told them I was super interested in working it and they had heard from a couple of people “oh yeah we’re gonna’ get into actively producing stuff sometime soon” but they didn’t really have any plans on that. Instead it was outside production companies that would use the studio so they were just renting it. And that happened for awhile. So I decided, “alright this is not going to happen, I’m never going to work in the studio here so… I need to move.” And the choice was either New York or LA. I knew some friends at both. My girlfriend was from here (New York) and she knew a lot of people here so it made for an easier transition. And I didn’t want to have to deal with driving anymore (laughs).
ME: Did you find it any more or less competitive here than Florida?
DAVE: Hard to say. More competitive in the sense that the average skill level is higher here so you need to be more on top of your game. But less competitive in the sense that there are way more gigs. I would say the number of gigs I’ve had there are about the same as here. But they were very small and very low pay like, “such and such store is having a shoot and we’ll give you $200.” There really isn’t a whole lot. There is some pretty good production happening but it feels like there’s this massive valley between the two “real” production worlds in Florida. While here it is much closer together. Even student films here are made with much higher budgets and you’re dealing with a larger cast and crew and better equipment. New York is a much better location.
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ME: so you find yourself in NY. You get yourself acclimated to the scene. What brought you to Adorama?
DAVE: I was looking for a job (laughs). After about a month of moving here – after we had found an apartment, signed the lease and moved all our stuff in – I went out to a bunch of different places. Mostly photo/video related like camera stores, rental houses. I think I only went to ten or fifteen places. At Adorama Ben (Ben Lowenson, Adorama’s Director of Hospitality and Retail Operation) met me asI walked in and he interviewed me on the spot. He seemed interested and we went from there. I was told I was going to be working customer service but after talking to Daniel he was like “no, you should come over here and work with us.”
ME: How would you define your role at Adorama right now?
DAVE: It’s a split role. I’m either helping plan or working the OnSet workshops. Or helping plan and/or helping to shoot the OnSet videos. That’s four days a week, basically. I’m editing the videos we make. Some of them are not OnSet videos. The rest of the time is spent being extra coverage for the other guys over in lighting and video.
ME: You got this event coming up. The Canon C300 Mark II on September 16. You’ve already had a chance to play with the camera—
DAVE: We did shoot a short film, “Jordan’s Birthday Cupcake.” We’ve been using Jordan Paul Miles (member of the Pro Sales staff and host of AdoramaNYC’s irreverent “Movies And Burritos”) for a lot of our videos. I feel he’s a great character actor. He’s out there just enough, a little bit zany and he can form a character specific for the thing we’re about to do. We basically walked around a lot (in the Chelsea area of Manhattan) so we shot a lot of footage with him around here.
ME: What about the camera itself?
DAVE: Not counting the image quality increase – going with a higher bit rate codec, etc. – even if it didn’t really have that and the 4K, it would still be a substantially better camera because it’s more usable. The top handle mounts bolt to the sides as well as the shoe which was always flimsy before… it’s like you’re on set you can’t use that. And they changed the power output to a Lemo connector so it’s more standardized. There’s a better auto focus system. They use this method of inverted triangles so that when they merge it’s in perfect focus. It’s cool, it’s a focus assist type thing. I believe it’s using the basic tech from the auto focus system but it works on a Cine lens so you can select the point that you want in focus and as you turn the ring you can see the triangles merge and then they light up once it’s fixed.
ME: Is it both EF and PL compatible?
DAVE: It will have both. All the other features: it’s got slow motion, 4k output, the new c-log, the dynamic range is higher… they say about 15 stops. I would not put it past it that, as far as I can see it’s pretty comparable to S-Log 3 or Arri Log C cameras. It’s up there. It’s really high end. And it’s got a lot of flexibility. Kind of on purpose but “not really” as they say, we shot most of this short at the wrong white balance. Although we mostly corrected in post–
ME: (laughs) wait, you mean you did not “intentionally” shoot in the wrong white balance?
DAVE: We didn’t entirely shoot the whole thing in an entirely wrong light balance (it’s not like we were shooting at 3200k and walking around in daylight) but it was a lower powered temperature. One of the shoots we did – we were testing it – we set the viewfinder at 4000k and we didn’t have a monitor attached so I was just hand holding the camera bare bones—
ME: so you didn’t use a steadying device like a shoulder mount or a monopod—
DAVE: No, no. I was just body bracing, just getting low or setting it on something or against a pole for most of the video. It was interesting to get into post and see how much I can push both exposure and the color and it holds up really well. All in all I think it’s a great camera. It totally and utterly replaces the C500. It’s kind of how the C100 Mark II utterly killed the first generation C300. You can now rent or buy a C100 and it basically does the same stuff. There are obviously little differences. But when it comes to the C300 Mark II there’s very little reason to go much higher than that.
ME: Did you play around with different lenses at all?
DAVE: A little bit. We used an EF mount camera. We had one or two Canon Cine primes on hand. And then we used… I think it was a 24-70 zoom lens. We didn’t get really risky with the lenses.
ME: How is the weight?
DAVE: It’s good. It’s about the same although technically it might be a little bit heavier. It feels more robust, more solid. It helped to make it feel more stable even though it was mostly hand held. Going over the footage I was pretty surprised – I did use some warp stabilizer in post – but it was like going back to older cameras in how they were heavier and more stable. Most of those older, shoulder mount, EMT cameras are crazy stable but don’t really do much.
ME: We seem to be going back to… you know, when you had a true a cine style camera that was digital you had to be prepared to shell out about $10k or higher. And then DSLRS arrived and suddenly you could shoot quality video on those cameras. You went back to the simplicity of a regular movie camera. You’re dealing with F stops and ISO. It seems like you have a whole generation of affordable camcorders that are now following that model.
DAVE: Yeah, yeah. I feel like my kit has always kind of reflected that trend a little bit. I didn’t care about the weight and size of my equipment; I just need something to do this and this. Then over the past few years I’ve been paring down and trying to get my kit smaller and smaller. Especially now that I don’t have a car. For many things I just transport by train. At the same time, I’m also getting bigger and heavier now because you need everything to be stable and everything to be workable and the usability is definitely important especially on longer shoots.
ME: So what do you have planned for the event?
DAVE: Daniel is doing most of the planning for the event. But I’m coming up with some ideas on how to use or showcase some of the new features I think are what makes the camera really standout. Besides showing the video that we already shot, it’s hard to show the quality of something like the c-log 2 but maybe we’ll showcase the ND filters. Because it’s crazy! That is awesome: you can go up to 10 stops of ND internally.
ME: Wow.
DAVE: So if you’ve got a 1.2 lens you can go wide open and still light the crap out of the scene and turn to the ND internally and not have to worry about using a filter to cover the lens. The Canon cinema cameras are pretty much the go to for documentary and run and gun stuff. Sony’s got a couple of cameras out that are good at it, too. But at least in my experience, with events, it’s important to have a camera that has good dynamic range and ND filters—
ME: And can zoom silently and focus silently—
DAVE: Exactly. And do that fast and accurately. Also, simple things like the way Canon cameras deal with white balance and ISO, it’s more in essence like a DSLR where you just hit the white balance button and you dial the kelvin up and down. Whereas the Sony cameras, the Panasonics… you’ve got the AB preset switch and you’re like ”I gotta’ preset for one thing but if I run into a situation where I don’t know what the white balance is in another space when I’m still rolling…” it takes longer usually. The run and gun stuff, Canon’s got that down.
Adorama Pro presents Canon Pro Day. Free Film School: The Camera For Cinema, featuring the new Canon C300 Mark II. Adorama, 42 West 18 St., NYC. Wednesday, September 16 at 2pm. OnSet events occur every Thursday starting at 12pm. All events are free.
