I was contacted by Bruce and Mathieu about their film KEEP EXPLORING and I had to share it with you. Enjoy the doc and make sure you read Mathieu’s article about the production after the video.
First, I was the only one to shoot in this filming adventure. I wanted to focus the film on Brice’s work and his way to capture beautiful photographs in the wilderness of British Columbia. I would say it’s a kind of intimate portrait of a professional photographer working on the field, about his inspirations & emotions, about his own quest.
From a technical point of view, I was filming with Canon DSLR 5D Mark II and Mark III. Here on Keep Exploring I only shot with my 5D Mark II. I choose to change the presets in the settings of the DSLR and installed different picture styles that give to my footage the way I want it looks. There is almost no post-production to vary color tone, sharpness, contrast, saturation as I already work on it while shooting on the field, looking for a pure, wild and authentic image from these natural places.
Lenses
I had my favorites such as 35mm f/2 IS, 24-105mm f/4 IS, 70-200mm f/4 IS, and also used the wide angle 16-35mm f/2.8. In order to smoothly follow Brice while walking, I used a steadicam Glidecam HD 2000. For the travelling movements, I am sponsored by LovinPix & Slide Kamera, a Polish brand, that provided me a Slide Kamera HSK-6 800 PRO for this shooting in British Columbia. It’s a great glide track, very solid equipment, although quite heavy too. I normally have some tripods while shooting but here I only had a very small and light tripod from Sirui, the Tripod Sirui T-025X. But most of my shots were handy made with my image stabilized lenses.
Sound
About recording and capturing the sounds of natural environments, I used my handheld recorder Zoom H4n and Sennheiser EW G3 for recording alone the interviews.
Filming in Remote Locations
To be able to shoot and work in such remote places, I also need a lot of professional outdoor and mountain equipments such as a backpacking tent (mine is a Vaude of 1.7 kg for two people), proper sleeping bag (mine is a Valandre Bloody Mary for temperatures down to -15°C / -20°C), waterproof clothes and bags, portable stove, disgusting but very light freeze-dried food and so on.
This is not my first documentary film shot in the mountains so I’m getting used about working in such remote and wild conditions. We had changing weather conditions which was just perfect to bring different kind of atmospheres into the film during the 3 weeks of adventure. We had to use bells while backpacking in the Chilcotin mountains because of the presence of Grizzly bears. We saw one of them and lots of wolf tracks along the main trail too. Everything went perfectly well.
To view more of Mathieu’s work, check out his website.
Mathieu is working on his next independent film LOW HIGH ENDS (2.0) through the crowd funding. You can support his film here.