My name is Ben Chua and I am a second year film student at Freestyle Academy. I took film because it has been a big passion of mine since I was around 11. I got into film by shooting so I could learn to edit and shooting became more and more fun so I stuck with it! While I have a skill in post-production, most of my proficiency is in production, specifically in the camera department.
This last year, I got the lucky opportunity to work with some bigger commercial companies such as Think Out Loud and Mac House. I have worked with clients like Dexterity Robotics, Mono Creators, Viiia Events, Lyra, and more recently ESPN. I also had the opportunity recently to work on some narrative pieces for SJSU students as a 1st Assistant Camera.
I will be taking a gap year to work in the freelance film and commercial space and hopefully decide if I am going to college or not. I hope to do AC work in the commercial space, and maybe even DP in the low-budget narrative space.
BCC Earg is a nature documentary inspired satirical piece, created for our humor unit at freestyle. I wanted to portray a more ridiculous version of the classic David Attenborough narrated documentary by showing a very boring and static subject with a very enthusiastic narration. I knew most people have seen BBC Earth and other nature documentary-style content, so I thought this piece would be very relatable and funny to a broader audience.
This project was done in less than a day because I had other productions I had to work on. This was shot on the ZCam E2-S6 in 6k ProRes 422 LT and cropped to 2.39:1 Scope. I graded the color in Blackmagic Design’s Da Vinci Resolve from ZLog2. The correction was very basic with White Balance, Tint, Contrast, and Saturation nodes.
As I didn’t have a lot of time, I didn’t fully rig the camera. I also worried my batteries were too low so I used a Sharkfin to use both v-mounts at the same time. As far as the rig goes, it was camera, lens, sharkfin, and batteries. I used WiFi monitoring for focus and other assist tools.
For my Zenith project, I made a fight scene with my classmate Alex Chen. We wanted to create a generic fight scene from the ground up. We choreographed and shot a previs, planned out shoot days, and then executed production over 2 shoot days. We took inspiration from asian martial arts movies. Alex did the majority of the choreography while I did most of the lighting and editing.
This project was also shot on the ZCam E2-S6 in 6K but encoded internally with H.265. It was shot at a resolution of 6244 x 4168(Open gate) but cropped to DCI 4K 4096 x 2160. Alex focused heavily on the look of the choreography, whereas I focused more on the look of the piece. This led to us making different versions. I edited in Resolve and he edited in Premiere Pro. The version featured here is my cut. There is no audio.
This project had a lot of setbacks. A few times talent backed out because of last minute scheduling mishaps. Alex was unable to make it to do the previs and productions. We ended up changing locations so we could shoot way faster and finish the project. I was unable to rent ND filters in the time we decided to shoot so the sky is entirely blown out and distracting. I originally was going to rent a frame and diffusion to bring down the sunlight to create a softer key, but we didn’t have time to start that process in the time we had before the shoot. In post, we did some foley tracks in the Freestyle studio and it got corrupted and was unusable. Ultimately, we finished the project and made something I can be proud of.