Jonathan Marzolla is a Freelance Director of Photography working in Nashville, Tennessee. On a recent shoot for Bethel Music - a collaboration with musicians Brook Ligertwood, Jenn Johnson and Brian Johnson that was produced and directed by Luke Manwaring – his team was asked to try out ARRI’s ALEXA 35 cameras with their collection of ARRI’s Signature zoom lenses as part of a Church Production Road Test User Experience.
“The highlights to me are just beautiful. Even if they're slightly clipped, they feel organic...” - Jon Marzolla, Director of Photography, Bethel Music (Holy Song)
The ARRI Alexa 35 camera system has received the Church Production Road Tested certification.
“I was super pumped that we were going to use them because I knew that the environment we were going to be in was going to be changing,” Marzolla says. “I knew we were going to need internal NDs (neutral density filters.) We didn't have a huge team to change a bunch of NDs all the time. I knew that contrast ratio was going to be a big thing for us.”
In one of the frames from the shoot you can see the sunlight coming in through the stained glass. They had lights on the outside to look like sunlight and it’s those kinds of highlights that get Marzolla excited about ARRI cameras.
“The highlights to me are just beautiful. Even if they're slightly clipped, they feel organic, they feel soft, they don't feel harsh to the viewer's eye,” he explains. “It doesn't feel like a clipping of the highlights that you would see in other cameras.”
Marzolla says the updated dynamic range on the ALEXA 35 camera gives users more flexibility in post and the ability to shoot ProRes files makes editing run more smoothly.
Going in he says he was concerned about using a variety of cameras (they had three ALEXA 35’s on this shoot) on this shoot because the results might seem mismatched – but he was wrong. “And I mean, they were flawless on this project,” he concludes.
To see the Bethel video and hear more of Marzolla’s interview, click this link.
