Freefly wave thoughts
Slow. Very slow. That’s one way to describe Velvia 50, considered one of the most magical daylight film stocks for still photography ever made. You needed a lot of light to use Velvia 50. At one frame per second, you needed to respect the film, the low iso, 1/2 stop latitude of change, the light. Nail it and your image is gold. My first photograph on slide film, the kind you place in a projector, was of the Warm light from the California Ocean sun off the coast of Ventura. It was 2003 during a time when digital photography was just in the beginning stages. With this film your exposure had to be spot on, and my camera back then only shot at one frame per second. With this There was no photoshop, no fix it in post. If the image was too dark, it was too dark. But when it was perfect, it was a thing of beauty. No one argued about velvia.
In Sept, In a seemingly Hail Mary of a message I asked if they could send me one of the prototypes of their first camera. My eyebrows raised, heart double thumped and iris opened a bit when I saw a dm response from the ceo of Freefly Cinema, a company that brought the world the first gimbal, based in Washington. “We’d love to see what you can do with the Wave”. This camera, the Wave, boasts 1461 FPS at 2k and 422 FPS at 4K. That’s slow. Very Slow.
Upon unboxing I instantly notice this camera was not like my new A7r4 which holds insanely high megapixel count, but is housed in the cheapest plastics. The wave is Machined like a Ducati motorcycle part. Metal, perfect, the Wave is lite, compact, and built to push every limit of high speed filmmography. It might as well be a flex capacitor: it can record limitless high speed when plugged into an external source. Use it on its own, it kills with Internal ssd in 1 or 2tb and internal battery that can worked be plugged in while shooting.
I am not much for the technology detials, the very proteins that fuel the nerdsphere. I am very much for what the technology can do and how that equips me to shoot past my vision.
I was looking at high speed cameras for a long time. But the price point was always above 100k. Wave comes in around 10k. And this Sony E mount game changer has already sold out of the first 3 batches.
Mount it to a golf club, under a skateboard, fpv drone, kids spoon. This camera definitely can be In the studio, but bringing it out to the wild is one of its greatest strengths.
It’s literally a camera the entire industry needs to respond to. Most cameras can only do 60 or 120 FPS at 4K. Many leading cameras shoot in raw, a format that allows for a lot of post production change. The Wave is, well, like Velvia. You have to be spot on. I see that as something to master instead of complain about.
In 2013 when Freefly’s movi m10 gimbal first came out, it changed the industry and took me a few months to get into understanding how to incorporate a gimbal into my production. When I started to think about what I could shoot at 1461 FPS it took me a minute. There is already a lot of high speed cinematography out there so there already a lot of low hanging fruit: water pouring, bubbles popping, a bullet. Etc. Because of how this camera is built, it opens opportunity to get a high speed camera into places to see the unnoticed world in never before ways. Still photographers would make great high speed photographers. You could be flying over a fire with a 70-200 lens, shoot for 1/6 of a second and make 10 seconds of footage. A new lens to the world is a powerful tool.
I filmed my dog. My drone. My dog barking at my drone, my kids. Bubbles. My kids and bubbles. My wife on her Bmx bike. Then tactfully risked my life filming the illegal driving called TSNLS in Detroit. I shot bees. Rain. It became a visual element, style, language I looked for in the day to day. I then bought a bunch of fireworks and had some awesome skateboarders do one trick over an abandoned plane. It’s the opposite of Timelapse photography but somehow using the same part of my framing brain.
I failed math. A bunch. So I’ll break down what editing footage has taught me. There are 24 frames in a second of normal footage. That’s like 24 still Photographs every single second. When you shoot 1461 frames per second and place it in the timeline of your editing software, it turns one second of footage into one minute of footage. 1/6 of a second is about 10 seconds. That is powerful. So driving by a running cheetah all you would need to do is click the shutter button as fast as you can twice to make 10 seconds of very stable, very new, very slow, Footage.
I have filmed Detroit for 14 years, and now entering my 15th I’m trying to put that footage into a documentary feature film, and now with this type of technology I can see everything in a new way. That is very fulfilling. This camera has made me think more as a Filmmaker, Has equipped me to shoot like I never have before and now after using it for a month I am so stoked. My small bag now has a killer trio; song alpha a7r4, red Komodo and the wave. Think about how much power that is.
As these cameras ship, 2021 will dawn new imagery that will blow our minds. I’m so stoked to see what you make with this. If you are one of the lucky ones to be receiving the camera, well that is something worth waiting for. So in the mean time. Open your mind and find something fast, something unnoticed. Find the light. Feed the sensor.