“The Playground” by Tasos Kosmatopoulos

“This is a personal project that I wanted to do for quite some time. Single location in order to get some directed filming, one rider (Panos Manaras) and an edit to combine regular, slow & fast motion. Four cameras and three filmers participated in this in order to cover the angles we thought were the most interesting. Personally I have been riding this ramp since day one when its was more ghetto than ghetto and now after years of reshaping and getting done better I find it very absolutely fun and beautiful. So we used Canon 5D MK2 for details (at 1080p 30p) with a 50mm, Canon 60D for action (at 720p 60fps) with Tamron 24-70mm, Canon 550D with a Samyang 8mm at 720p 60fps on a ProAim crane and I also used a Sony FS700 as main camera & for the slow motion footage (1080p at 240fps) with Sigma 70-200 2.8 and Canon 17-35mm lens. We also used a dolly called Eazy Dolly which is an amazing tool and very smooth for the majority of our shots. I used a ProAim crane in order to get some shots of the whole ramp from above and some action on the spine (icepick over to over, and some flow riding). Quite a lot of things where also filmed on hand in order to give an edgier look on action. A note from my experience with FS700 is, its unique picture quality, dynamic field and colour depth. We didn’t use any external recorders in order to get even higher quality (through HDMI uncompressed 100MBPs 4:2:2 footage) but even with an SD card 28Mbps and 4:2:0 chroma the footage from that camera is superb. I realized it even more while colour correcting the footage. Everything was shot on neutral-flat picture style (sharpness to -4, saturation -4, contrast -2 and colour tone to 0). I use Adobe Premiere CS5 to edit and this video was edited at 720p and 30fps. I feel that 1080p footage downscaled to 720p is somehow nicer and crisper but this is an unscientific point of view. Although in europe we use PAL system I also wanted those NTSC extra 10 frames to help on slow motion and since its uploaded on the web it doesnt even matter. Editing wise having footage from 4 cameras can get tiring in order to decide the clips to use. Also its quite difficult to make the picture match as all these cameras have different sensors and the lenses were also different, but in the end its a nice experience and you can learn a lot of new stuff to add to your workflow.”

Rider: Panagiotis Manaras
Direction – Photography – Editing by Tasos Kosmatopoulos
Photography by Leonidas Germanopoulos
Photography – Crane operation by Dimitris Katranidis