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?
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?