Unify chatted with Director of Photography Hunter Buchanan about his first outing with the Alexa 35 on our recent project for Queen City Futbol Club; the visual approach, the overall shooting experience, and his takeaways.

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“On the piece, After Hours, we wanted to cultivate a balance of grit and clarity. It was important to me to highlight this team with a sense of honesty and professionalism. I wanted the gear and image to reflect that.

QCFC is a semi-pro team with stellar athletes performing at the top of their game, but often committing their “after hours” to put in the work. Bringing on the Alexa 35 was an intentional choice to have the best sensor on the market while shooting it in an approachable manner.

The Alexa 35 is hands down my favorite camera. It's easy to use, its menus make sense, but most important of all - it's a killer image. During the camera test, I was truly amazed at how hard it was to break the image. I instantly felt that excited nostalgic feeling of holding my first cinema camera over 15 years ago. In honor of that, and with serving the story, I decided to use Arri’s Nostalgic texture. The nostalgic texture gave us the grit we wanted to showcase without compromising quality.

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We decided early on that we wanted to do spec work that gave back to the community. I’m honored to have had an incredible team donate their efforts to Queen City Futbol Club. The piece represents an equitable solution for youth players to have an avenue to go pro. I’m truly grateful to the crew and the team for coming together to make something special for the local Charlotte futbol community.

As well as being the DP for this project, I also got to color grade the piece. I find as a DP and colorist that being able to follow the image throughout the entire process has helped maintain the integrity of the initial vision. Working with Arri’s color science allows me as a colorist to push the image further than any other camera. To be able to start out of the gate with perfect skin tones is half the battle in the role of a colorist. With the textures, we were able to develop the final look of the camera down to the grain before we rolled our first shot. And with a very tight turnaround, this allowed us to work efficiently.

One of our biggest challenges with this project was being at the mercy of the public practice fields for our main soccer scene. Having no control over the stadium lights and shooting off speed at 120 without large fixtures is normally near-impossible to pull off. Having the Arri sensor and color science was our safety net in this situation. I remember saying to my producer, ‘Thank God we shot this on the 35, because I don't think this would have been saved had it been on any other camera.’ I think that's a true testament to how hard we were able to push the camera, and it still outperformed our expectations.”