Pre-Production for a Project in Sierra Leone

I'm excited about a project that will start filming in two weeks in Sierra Leone. Headed there with Tony Buba and Jan McMannis of Braddock Films and Marcus Rediker from the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Rediker will be presenting his book, The Amistad Rebellion in Freetown at Fourah Bay College and we will travel with other colleagues of from St. John's University to various locations in Sierra Leone that are associated with the African rebels of the Amistad, and the slave trade in the mid 1800s.

Tony and I are going to shoot with two recently purchased Panasonic GH3 cameras. These are micro 4/3 DLSR cameras that shoot 1080p video to QuickTime.mov files @ 50Mbps or higher in 24p, and can also record slo mo speeds. I've shot a short test and met with Glenn Przyborski, guru of everything camera in Pittsburgh and Tony has had Maranda Wodzinski shoot some on street interviews on which he has gotten dual sound with a zoom recorder. We're still working out some details of the scene file settings, etc. in advance of our departure in early May.

The whole idea is to travel fairly light for this project. I have the Panasonic f2.8 12-35mm lens and a few Nikon still lenses (f1.4 50mm and f2.8 28mm) in my kit. Tony has the Panasonic f1.7 20mm and f1.4 25mm primes. We'll be recording to SDHC cards and treating them as negative, with a double backup to portable Hard Drives that we should be able to do at night in the hotel.

The cameras are relatively light with the battery grip and feature a headphone jack to monitor sound, which was crucial for the project. we'll record sound directly to one of the cameras and get separate audio from a boom and wireless to a zoom recorder that we can sync in post. The cameras should be able to record for long stretches w/o shutting down with overheating. Yet to be seen is how they will function in the relative heat in humidity in Sierra Leone in May.