Adelaide Fringe shoots part of its program with the Blackmagic Studio Camera 4K Plus

Hartstone-Kitney Productions broadcast over 30% of the Adelaide Fringe Festival’s digital program with the Blackmagic Studio Camera 4K Plus and Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, and ATEM Mini Extreme ISO mixers.

HKP is an award-winning Adelaide-based production company specialising in plays, cabarets, immersive events and theatrical digitisation. During the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, the company took the opportunity to implement a hybrid broadcast model. To this end, it created Black Box Live, a broadcast service that has given metropolitan and regional theatre companies in Australia the opportunity to continue to operate without relying on ticket sales. To date, its workflow has been used to broadcast 52 shows during the Adelaide, Edinburgh and Hollywood Fringe festivals in 2021.

Blackmagic Design products, such as the new Blackmagic Studio Camera 4K Plus, Pocket Cinema Camera 4K and Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro models, plus ATEM Mini Extreme ISO mixers, are at the heart of its proposition. DaVinci Resolve Studio editing, colour grading, visual effects and audio post-production software was used to finalise each of the pieces.

Blackmagic and Fringe

Over 7000 artists took part in the recent Adelaide Fringe, the world’s second largest annual arts festival. To ensure that everyone had access to the shows, even those unable to attend due to travel or COVID-19 restrictions, HKP decided to live stream the shows and offer them to the world via its platform. Tom Kitney, co-founder of HKP, notes that thanks to the “portability, flexibility of use and excellent image sharpness” of the Blackmagic equipment, the production company was able to “train a number of smaller technical production teams without sacrificing any quality.”

For example, during the staging of Lewis Major’s Spaces Between Us and Epilogue dance shows, broadcast live during the Adelaide Fringe Festival and available via the HKP platform, the production company used two Blackmagic Studio Camera 4K Plus units, a Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro and three Pocket Cinema Camera 4K models, alternating between them with the help of an ATEM Mini Extreme ISO mixer. The stream was stored on the device in order to process the images further. A 4K UHD version of the shows was then created from the footage recorded in Blackmagic RAW format.

Both shows were broadcast from the Sir Robert Helpmann Theatre at Mount Gambier, a large auditorium with a traditional proscenium located in the South Australian outback. During the filming of the shows, a number of wide shots and close-ups were included which required flexibility on HKP’s part with regard to camera placement and operation. However, the Blackmagic solutions proved to be flexible and reliable tools for both Kitney and Joanne Hartstone, artistic director, who also notes “the freedom the local screen brightness and contrast controls give our operators to enable them to pick out performers in the darkest of blackouts before the lights come up.”