¨La vía de la plata¨ is a two-part episode of the documentary series ¨Nuestros caminos a Santiago”. The series was produced by EL Camino Producciones and Media Pro for TVE. They were both shot with the Sony Hdcam F-900/3.

From a photographers point of view, the documentary required not only a lot of historical research, but a thorough conceptualization of all the aspects of production before starting the project: from a proper camera preparation to digital color grading and print of copies for distribution. As for the documentary´s setting, one must ask himself, what exactly are the pilgrims going to encounter during their journey? Cities and towns, most surely, but mostly rural landscapes. The question is how do the pilgrims respond to these landscapes? Most pilgrims start their journey in groups, with high spirits, but after a short while, they settle down, and start to feel tired and lonely. At this point, the pilgrims start becoming part of the scenery. They literally blend into their surroundings, becoming one with the landscape.

Filming a documentary of this nature without a clear idea destines the project to fail. The film must search for the elements that emphasize that idea, through logical processes and intuition. The idea is to only film what is really relevant to the subject of our documentary to be able to extract some truth to the matter.
Having taken the scenery, its’ silence and loneliness as pivotal subjects of our film and how they are reflected on solid, timeless elements such as the stone bricks of the churches and houses of the towns, which helped us to capture the way the scenery manifests itself in an organic way, with as few artifices as possible, which in fact requires a great deal of technique.



Colour and Framing

These aspects have been key in carrying out that kind of camera work successfully. When alluding framing, I also include the natural lighting because we hardly used lighting equipment. In these conditions it is of the utmost importance to have an excellent camera and set of lenses so that the quality of the footage remains outstanding under almost any conditions.
Thankfully our F900/3 allowed us to modify the picture substantially, which is what we first did by adding the 7D25NMVA44A curve. This curve allowed us to have a picture with soft contrast and neutral colours, and afforded us up to 9 F.stops in latitude, with excellent handling of whites, which came in very handy when coming across whitewashed towns that had the sun shining directly on the houses with very contrasted shadows. However, it is very important not to over or under-expose, so I normally adjust aperture manually evaluating the image through the
viewfinder (which had to be adjusted daily), which I have come to judge accurately thanks to the pre-production tests; in these kinds of shoots we don´t usually have a wave monitor with us and many times we don’t even use the regular monitor.

Following are three images, on which we can see the marked areas on the image as well as their corresponding gamma curves showing the values of reflectance of those areas in blue and in red we can see the points of over and underexposure stop by stop. This way we can clearly see how the image matches the range of the gamma curve.






We can see how the readings for A and B in the first imageare out of the camera´s range. However, we can see how the whites aren´t shrill or become solid. Notice the different values for the shadow, reaching almost four stops under the median grey.







Here we can see the camera’s excellent handling of the whites. The façades shun with direct sunlight, and the shadows, are still in full detail.







As in the shot of Sevilla, the reading for A is outside the camera’s range, but we can still appreciate the wide range of luminosity the camera offers.


We also modified other aspects such as the detail:

Detalle:
Level -60
Crispening 15
Freq. 3
Level dep. -8

Contrary to what I normally do when filming in HD , like leaving out some detail, this time I have decided to actually emphasize the detail for the documentary´s TV airing, because I believe it looks better.





Inside the Cathedrals it was important to modify the HD correctly to get the maximum detail. We used the gamma 5 curve.

I must point out that for the majority of the interiors I had to use the natural light available on set (sunlight and sometimes artificial light that was already there). And I didn´t only just use the 7D25NMVA44 curve, because there were other ones that gave me more detail in the shadows, as if I had changed the emulsion, from a less sensitive one to a very sensitive one. I also used +3db for interior shots without a consequent loss of image quality.

As for the color, I started modifying it using the parameters set by the Film de Digital EC for the Betacam. The first thing I did was adjust the phase, specially the red and the cyan, because the red was too magenta and the cyan was not blue enough. I also saturated the colors until they reached the value of 70. All these were tested using colour cards, monitors and vectoscopes. Despite the aforementioned modifications, colour grading is absolutely necessary when such notorious colour deviations are applied. In general the whole picture had a magenta touch to it, which, after colour grading, gave us very soft images with realistic skin tones (and not the reddish tone we usually get with video). As for the whites, I tend to use them on the white balance preset but with a 5600 camera filter. I personally prefer this because you can capture all the different types of lighting you come across during the day (brighter, dimmer), but also because you can modify them when colour grading or editing the footage afterwards. I do it this way because I don´t like it when you can´t tell between dusk or dawn because of the white balance, nor that the whole day goes by with the same color tone.

With all these modifications we managed to escape from those classic tour agent panflets with saturated and intense colors, and come up with a soft textured film, charming for the viewer, and above all, faithful to our concept.







In these shots we can see how modified the colors are compared to the normal Pal.

For this project we also included "field tools" such as the 4x4 parasol and the set of filters: Neutral, Smooth Neutral, Pola, Classicsoft, etc.





As difficult and important as everything else were to find the correct compositions (or, better said, to have the compositions find us). There are a few things to take into account when choosing an adecuate composition. First, the focal length, then, the height of the camera and finally, establishing the edges of the frame. We looked for pleasant compositions that evoked other images and situations. We didn´t want to use any panoramic shots because we preferred shots that ¨give a glimpse¨to the viewer. Still shots that allow the viewer’s gaze to wander within the frame. The static camera helped to convey the idea of silence, stillness and loneliness inherent to the journey.
The camera was usually parallel to the floor, with no degrees of inclination, even when we used the smaller tripod. We didn´t use any zoom either and the focal length was normally between 12 and 40mm. We also strayed from the route to be able to show both the pilgrims and the countryside from afar so that we could also portray the concept of the documentary. For these shots we also looked for various horizontal and vertical elements that could help us perceive the space surrounding the pilgrimage. We searched for compositions that avoided visual rhetoric and preserved the camera’s inconspicuous nature.





Our remaining episodes (El camino Inglés, La Vía de la Plata, La ruta del Mar, el camino de la Lana, El camino del Ebro y la prolongación jacobea a Fisterra y Muxia) were filmed in Digtal Betacam and were also corrected to the extent it allowed us to. Whether Betacam is better than HD is a debate where I find HD to be a more vesatile piece of equipment. The HD allows us to use specific gamma curves and also has greater definition compared to the Pal when considering the nature of what is being filmed. As for the final look, in my opinion, HD footage has more depth, is sharper, and is less flat than original Betacam footage; however, you can hardly see the difference when it airs on TV, but there is quite a difference in other formats such as DVD.


Technical info:
La vía de la Plata : Sony F-900 HDCam 25psf 1/50 16:9
Canon Zoom.
G amma curves: Cinealta (Cvpfile editor)


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