What Should I Do With This Camera?

Mike K

TCG Elite Member
Apr 11, 2008
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Story Time

The year is 2006. The company is RED Digital Cinema. Many of you might know RED. If not for their currently awesome cameras, you might know them because they caught a lot of flack back in 2006ish for basically peddling vaporware, or at least that's what people thought.

See, RED had just announced that they were going to introduce a 4K cinema camera for under $20,000 when lesser cameras were upwards of 100k. Somewhat understandably, people called bullshit on them but they trudged on, each prototype a bit more polished than the last, until March of 2007 when Peter Jackson shot "Crossing the Line" with two RED One prototype cameras. Meanwhile Steven Soderbergh sees this and decides he needs to shoot his upcoming biopic "Che" on a RED camera. There's only one problem: RED didn't have any cameras to give him. All they had was prototypes and they weren't ready. They likely wouldn't be ready for another week and even when they were ready they were still prototypes.

As luck would have it, filming was delayed for a week and at the last moment RED was able to get Soderbergh two prototype RED One cameras. The very early cameras all had internal code names. Soderbergh ended up taking "Mars" and "Bombay" to Spain and immediately put them to work. Soderbergh would go on to say that RED was somewhat panicked that he was relying on these prototypes to shoot a feature length film and they went so far as suggesting that he have a backup in place. He ignored the warning and instead trekked out to the 110 degree desert with two prototype RED cameras, 237 8GB compact flash cards and faith, a whole lot of faith.

They experienced a handful of problems: An issue with the camera dropping frames which was fixed almost immediately before filming and an overheating warning which resulted in them needing to sandwich the cameras between bags of ice in between shots but was ultimately just the result of a poorly placed sensor. Soderbergh later said in an interview that he was going to shoot on that camera even if it meant he had to stick it in an ice chest and cut a hole in it for the lens.

When it was all said and done the RED One gained almost instant notoriety and was used to shoot films like "District Nine" and "Social Network". RED cameras have gone on to shoot some of the the biggest hits but the RED One was the camera that started it all and Soderbergh's two prototypes - Mars and Bombay - were two of the cameras that put RED on that map.

And Now to the Point

I just bought Bombay. The price was right and after reading up on it's history I just couldn't pass it up. But I don't know what to do with it. I'm not big on trophies. If it's sitting on a shelf it's not doing anything for me. But I feel like I can do something with it, like maybe give it away.

So what should I - a company that sells cinema cameras looking for more customers to sell us cinema cameras - do with this camera? My first inclination was to send it to RED, have the firmware updated so it's as current as it can be and then find some way to set it back into the wild to make more movies. I'd like to give it to someone worthy but that's were I get lost. I'm coming up blank in implementation. So I did what any reasonable person would and posted about it on a car forum.

Ideas?
 

Flyn

Go ahead. I'll catch up.
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Mar 1, 2004
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LOL to asking us for advice, Mike.

Still... I find this site often is first and best when it comes to covering news events and the discussions here have plenty of intelligent thoughts from the members.

That said, your goals are

1. To increase your business.

2. To allow this camera to add to its history.

Noble, to say the least.

To increase your business, you need to publicize whatever you end up doing with Bombay. It doesn't really matter as much how you use the camera as to getting the most publicity from whatever you decide to do.

To bring Bombay back into circulation, I think you need to find a production company that will use the camera in its production(s).

I have no idea what the best way is to accomplish this. Do you have connections with production companies? If so, would one of them be willing to use the camera with a credit to your company in its productions? That might be valuable to you. In my power washing biz, I washed the USS Silversides, a submarine that was going to be used in a pilot for a show. I tried to get them to list my company in the credits but they said that was too valuable.

If you don't have a specific company in mind, could you set up some kind of give away that would have production companies vying for the camera? Maybe something like them submitting reasons why they should get the camera and uses to which it will be put? Then you could decide who would best use the camera and spread your name. Put the production company posts on a public website or, even better, on an industry site? If you could find a company that has a future Tarantino who can really use the camera, it might work out well for both sides.

I'm just tossing this out here. Hopefully it gives you an idea or two.
 

BrianG

Big Dick Team Octane
Oct 5, 2008
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Wear t-shirt for your business, make money, gain notoriety on TV, make more money.
 

Mike K

TCG Elite Member
Apr 11, 2008
13,214
2,586
May be cool to "donate" rent it to small indi film guys that have a good story ready to go but a budget that doesn't allow them to shoot on a RED camera?

I'm thinking it's going to be something like this. RED got back to me today and they're going to see if they can verify the camera's history and they're helping me get the firmware up to date so it's not still running as a prototype.

I'd like to give it away to someone in some sort of contest. Preferably some sort of contest that brings us some publicity. It's too cool to just re-sell and I can't imagine just tossing it up on a shelf to look at it.
 

JeremyCliff

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Dec 22, 2008
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I'm thinking it's going to be something like this. RED got back to me today and they're going to see if they can verify the camera's history and they're helping me get the firmware up to date so it's not still running as a prototype.

I'd like to give it away to someone in some sort of contest. Preferably some sort of contest that brings us some publicity. It's too cool to just re-sell and I can't imagine just tossing it up on a shelf to look at it.

If you need help with any of it, let me know. Always up to help out stuff like this.
 

Mike K

TCG Elite Member
Apr 11, 2008
13,214
2,586
Well things are getting weird. I reached out to RED to confirm the camera's history and get some help getting it calibrated and updated. I then mentioned what I thought it was and the agent I was speaking to told me he'd get someone a little more knowledgable to help me. Well that guy emails me outside of the company's ticket system, tells me they'd be happy to have a look at it but that the camera it purports to be (Bombay) has been in storage since 2007. He can pull the pallet to confirm this but not for another week.

Then he goes on to say he thinks it might be a counterfeit. I.E. Someone is trying to make it look like a pre-production camera. There's a couple problems with this:

1. Nobody sold it as a special camera. It was actually up on eBay as a parts cam.

2. It's just completely implausible. Now you have to keep in mind that the differences between what I have and actual production cameras are small. The power switch is slightly different, the menu buttons are different, finish on the case, software is missing key features, etc. Everything about it screams pre-production camera and when you combine that with the fact that it's running basically the oldest firmware and displays the name of a known beta camera when it boots up, that all seems to suggest that even if it's not truly Bombay that it's at least a pre-production or beta camera.

I push him on this and he seems to want to downplay that notion, instead saying that they've seen people cobble together cameras from parts before. That statement struck me as odd. It doesn't make sense that someone would jump to that semi-wild conclusion. You have to jump through many more hoops for that to make sense than for it being a pre-production camera to make sense. I can't cobble together a set of switches that will fit a specific camera body. This is all proprietary stuff. The simplest conclusion is that it's a beta camera. To say that it's not that but that someone homebrewed a different set of switches that fit the body perfectly, uploaded old firmware to the camera and then tried selling it on eBay for less money than they normally sell for just doesn't pass the sniff test.

Then I post on the forums

I can't drop the camera off because I'm out of town so I decide to take my pictures and post them on the RED forums along with a list of differences in the camera body I have and ask people that were around when they first came out if they can help identify it.

Well the first response I get is from someone with a 2007 join date and he says it's a beta camera. About 5 minutes later I refresh the screen and poof. The entire thread is gone.

Then I get an email from the guy from RED who'd been emailing me and he asks me not to post anything about the camera because it could be stolen. He's seemingly been trying to convince me that it's just a homebrew frankenstein camera but after deleting my post goes on to tell me that they are very interested to see what the camera is and if anything suspicious happened to it and then followed that up by telling me it's raising a lot of red flags. I mean if you're going to delete my post simply asking for help identifying it then clearly they suspect the camera is greater than someone's homebrew. I just wish they would have been honest about that.

I can only assume he was downplaying my claims of it being a beta camera because they know it's something, they don't know how in the world it would have ended up in my hands and they don't want to let on to this for fear that I won't give it to them. Of course, these are just my suspicions. It just seems odd that he went from trying to convince me that it was nothing but that they were happy to look at it to deleting my post asking about it and then telling me they really want to see it. If they don't think it's anything why in the world would you delete my post asking for help identifying it?

I mean if it's theirs I want them to have it either way and I'll just get my money back from the dude I bought it from but still... I wish they would have told me off the bat that it was a bit suspicious to them instead of just trying to discount my own suspicions that it was not a standard camera.

Will report back after they look at it. Something tells me I'm not going to see it again after dropping it off with them. :rofl:
 
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