Although most feature films and many commercials use the ARRIRAW format with the ALEXA camera, it’s relatively unusual for a music video production to choose this path. However, Nao’s Bad Blood video, one of the entrants in the music video competition at Camerimage 2016, was shot RAW to Codex Capture Drives on the ARRI ALEXA XT by DP Ben Fordesman. 

Ben’s first choice of camera is the ARRI ALEXA. One of the reasons for shooting RAW was that the original aspect ratio was going to be 4:3. As he wanted to shoot at higher frame rates, it was necessary to shoot RAW to Codex Capture Drives. Despite changing to a 2.39 aspect ratio at the last minute (the night before the shoot!), Ben decided to stick with ARRIRAW. “We were compositing a lot of VFX,” he explains, “and I generally prefer the original recorded data not to be compressed in any way.”

The on-set workflow was straightforward – the ARRIRAW files were recorded to Codex Capture Drives. Although the piece wasn’t shot in black and white, a monochrome LUT was used on-set for viewing and the dailies were transcoded to monochrome. Post was done by Four Walls in London, with colour grading by Luke Morrison at the Mill.

And to see more of Ben Fordesman’s amazing work, click here.

Feature films captured on Codex and showing at Camerimage include Hacksaw Ridge, Arrival, A Monster Calls and Snowden.

Images courtesy Ben Fordesman