new zealand Archives - Christo Montes Freelance Cameraman Cinematographer DOP

Auckland cameraman Christo Montes lighting a blue screen set for TVNZ

Saving Christmas: Technical Cinematography for TVNZ

Working as a freelance cinematographer in New Zealand, I’ve shot everything from high-end corporate interviews to run-and-gun documentaries. But every now and then, a script lands in my inbox that requires a distinct blend of creative lighting and rigorous technical discipline.

I recently teamed up with TVNZ to shoot a Christmas TVC for Woolworths. The premise was high-stakes holiday drama: Santa’s reindeer were out of carrots, and alarms were blazing in the “Santa Control Center.”

The Challenge: A Fixed World

To transport our talent into the high-tech digital world of the Control Center, we utilized a 12x12ft blue screen frame.

Why blue instead of the industry-standard green? Simple physics: our Elf was wearing a bright green costume. If we had used a green screen, he would have become invisible, blending right into the background. So, blue it was.

While this solved the wardrobe issue, working within the confines of a fixed 12x12ft frame introduced a significant geometric challenge. We needed to capture the frantic interaction between Santa and the Elf from multiple angles, but the relationship between the camera and the blue background had to remain fixed to ensure coverage. If I moved the camera too far to get a side angle, I would shoot off the edge of the blue screen.

Moving the Set, Not the Camera

To solve this, we couldn’t simply move the camera around the actors. Instead, we had to rotate the entire set around the camera.

This required meticulous lighting prep. Before we rolled, I sketched out the lighting plan for the “real world” of the Control Center, determining exactly where the alarm lights and console glows would originate in the virtual space.

For every setup change, we physically rotated the actors and props relative to the blue screen. I then had to re-rig the floor lighting for every single angle. The goal was to ensure that even though the physical set had moved, the light hitting the actors’ faces maintained the continuity of the virtual background.

The “Cleanest Key”

Having extensive experience with visual effects (VFX) and chroma keying, I know that a composite is won or lost in the camera. It’s not just about lighting the talent; it’s about achieving perfect separation and even exposure on the screen itself to ensure the digital background doesn’t stick out as a sore thumb.

I applied strict technical standards to the lighting ratios to make life easy for the editors. It was incredibly validating to hear back from the post-production team that this was the cleanest blue screen key they had ever received.

They were thrilled with how effortlessly the footage keyed out, which meant they could spend less time fixing technical issues and more time polishing the final creative look.

Mission Accomplished

It was a technically demanding shoot, but delivering high-quality rushes that make the post-production workflow smooth is one of the most satisfying parts of the job.

Plus, I’m happy to report that the mission was a success. The carrots were restocked, the alarms were silenced, and the reindeer were fully fueled for the big night. Just another day at the office helping to save Christmas!

Here is the finished 30sec TVC

Production – TVNZ Blacksand
Creative Director – Shannon Addison
Creative Producer – Will Munro
Head of Production – Varsha Singh
Commercial Producer – Xanthe Price
DOP – Christo Montes
Gaffer – Paul Eversden
Technical Manager – Ryan Everitt
Sound Operator – Eugene Arts
Offline Editor – Will Munro
Online Editor – Nick Henderson
Grade – Gareth Pearce
Sound Mix – Roger Green

New Zealand’s darkest day from an ENG perspective

It was a long week, after I had gotten home from a school camp and straight in to an early morning shoot that Friday, the 15th of March 2019. Returning home I was only looking to get some rest and prep for a live cross on Saturday morning. And that afternoon, everything changed and I mean everything, with my schedule being the least of it. The lives of many families were suddenly overturned as 51 people were brutally murdered in an unprecedented act of violence. An act that was particularly shocking for a small, peaceful country like New Zealand.

News frenzy

News setup in front of the Christchurch Botanical gardens

And as the shock was settling in, the international news frenzy was picking up and in a matter of hours every news agency was looking for people on the ground to send pictures and news from the area of the atrocious act. At the time I was not involved much in news coverage, so didn’t think much of it apart from being glued on the local news and learning all the latest developments. That’s until the phone rung from the UK asking if I am able to pack and head to Christchurch in a few hours, for an unknown amount of days… And when the BBC calls, it’s not a call you turn down, so despite my fatigue from a full on week and shock from the heinous event, I packed and got ready for a 6:30am flight and further deployment to Christchurch for the BBC.

Having not worked with a major international broadcaster in the past I was not sure what to expect, but was prepared to pull out all the stops and do what it takes to just deliver my best work under some surely challenging situations, both technically, but most importantly, psychologically.

A numb city

The moment I arrived in Christchurch I felt the eeriness of a shocked city, possibly caused by the quiet streets on a Saturday morning, the sad people’s faces, the lost innocence of not only a city, but a whole nation. Feelings I did carry too, but had to suppress in order to be able to do my job unaffected and in the most professional way possible, despite that meaning a very hard night at the hotel room… But looking back a few months later from a professional aspect, it was all worth it.

As big as it gets

live cross to BBC news — Crossing live to main bulletin of BBC news UK

Working for the BBC is actually… as big as it gets… We started by doing some stories around survivors of the attacks and relatives. We did various pieces for BBC News and a few live crosses to BBC World. The highlight of my deployment though was no other than a live cross to the Sunday evening news bulletin. (7:00am Monday morning Christchurch time). I was expecting a LiveU setup with my camera and lighting. But arrived on location to find a fully deployed crew of engineers and satellite gear.

Full portable broadcast studio

Add to that, a fully rigged camera with autocue… A direct connection to UK and Sydney with video return… And generally a fully functional broadcast studio that was totally independent of any kind of local facility. The least I could say is that I was intimidated. But having deep technical knowledge and great experience in broadcast situations, I managed to light and shoot what turned out to be the whole 7pm news bulletin coming live from Christchurch. And everything went very smoothly to air, despite the chaos behind the camera.

Fun story… After we wet off air I repo’ed the camera for an interview, without knowing that we hadn’t finished the bulletin. And I had 30 seconds to re-set everything before we go to air again… Funny now, not then!

Setup during Christchurch victims memorial service

Looking back , I see that those days were of very high demand. So every camera operator with some basic industry relations would definitely be working. I do however consider myself lucky to get to work in such a professional environment such as the BBC. But what I found more satisfying is the fact that after my four day deployment, the relationship didn’t end with it. I got called back to do the memorial and then a few more things for the BBC including this story. Something that shows that my hard work and professionalism paid off, as I am currently the first NZ point of call for any BBC vision needs.

And that is a career highlight right there…

TP+ Summer Series

For my next blog post I thought I’d try and do a bit of a project breakdown of something that was a bit of a challenge. And the TP+ series I shot for Sunpix is a perfect example of that. So let’s get stuck in…

The concept

At first let’s see what this project was and the challenges it came with.

Our presenters, Alistar Kata and John Pulu

The team at Sunpix wanted to shoot a few summer episodes for their Tagata Pasifika show. These episodes would be aired in the Summer time, instead of episode recaps or reruns and as so they should be able to be done on a limited budget. The concept was one of a 22min panel talk episode, between a select panel of 1-3 guests and 2 presenters.

The challenges

The concept sounds quite easy and straightforward for the broadcast world. However the challenges were quite a few from a DOP’s perspective. Let’s start with the studio.

The studio

Behind the scenes. 2 x Cineflex light mats, LED backlights and Dedo for presenter key. That’s my son/assistant Theodore, sitting in 🙂

The space we had to shoot this in, was an empty office space in the company’s premises, with a total size of 5m x 5m approximately and a ceiling height of no more than 3.5m. In this space we would have to accommodate the massive, curved background LED screen pictured above and our panel table for 5 people. There was no space for trusses or any kind of ceiling mounted lighting rig.

The coverage plan

After discussions with the producers, we agreed to shoot this with 3 cameras. One would be fixed on our main presenter, in order for this to accommodate an autocue, the other would be fixed on a wide shot of the panel and the 3rd camera would be placed in such a position that it would be able to rove between closeups of the guests and the 2nd presenter. When we agreed on that coverage, we also thought it would be good to have an extra option in post for the wide shot, so we decided to shoot that in 4k, giving us the option to push in or do some pans in post.
An important factor that also played a big role in our camera placement was that we didn’t have 3 FS7’s, but only 2 and an FS700. The FS700 could not shoot 4k 50p (see below) so that was assigned the safest shot, the presenter lock off.
So this is what the camera coverage plan looked like:

Cam 1 – Sony FS7, Sigma 18-35 f1.8 – Locked off wide shot, shooting in 4k (to reframe in post)
Cam 2 – Sony FS700, Nikon 105mm f2- Locked off closeup of presenter 1 – with autocue
Cam 3 – Sony FS7, Canon 70-200 f2.8 – Roving closeup of the of panel guests and presenter 2

One more thing I needed to consider was the fact that we were delivering a show for 1080i broadcast. And as much as it would be easy to just set all 3 cameras to shoot 25p, I wanted the show to have that TV look to it, hence I wanted it to be delivered in proper interlaced format. Because we are shooting in 4k on one of our cameras though and because the show will also live online, shooting interlaced was not an option either. So I decided to just go for 50p acquisition on all cameras and talk to post about how to work on the footage in order to get the best for both worlds.

Lighting

This was the most challenging part. With a low ceiling and no truss the options were limited. The main challenge was to handle the reflections from the background screen panels. The amount of them and the curved nature of the array would create light reflections in at least one of the camera angles. So the only solution would be some ambient, soft lighting that would come from sources high enough and to the sides, at such an angle that they will not produce reflections on the wide shot.
So we set the background screen to warm and decided to shoot it all in 3200K.
For the key, totally up to the task proved to be my 2 Cineflex 100W mats with soft boxes sitting on 3m stands almost all the way up. These provided the main panel lighting. I also rigged 2 LED panels with diff gels on the top of the screen in order to backlight the guests and fill in for my side-lit presenters. The only thing missing was a bit of punch on our main presenter, which I achieved with a couple of Dedo’s, one for key and one as a backlight.

Result

Here is the finished result

Hope you enjoyed this article. I’m always open to discuss ideas and answer questions so please feel free to get in touch, either via email, Whatsapp or Instagram DM.
Thanks for reading!

Welcome

This is my first blog post and the intention is to make a post every few weeks in order to give out a bit of information around recent shoots, techniques, challenges and solutions that I have come across as a cameraman.

As a welcome post I just want to throw out there a bit more info about me so you can get to know me a bit better.

So, I am originally from Athens, Greece. Born and bred in the land of philosophy and tourism from a Greek dad and a mum that was raised in a farm close to Te Kuiti. If you wonder how she ended up in Greece, that’s another story, probably a post on it’s own. So, having 2 nationalities was quite tempting and my family and I decided to give Aotearoa a go by migrating to New Zealand in 2010.

During my time in Greece, I ran a small video production company with my brother and we specialized more in the wedding and low budget corporate video area. Business was good, but one day we both decided to drop everything and f off to the other side of the planet. When we arrived in NZ and having no idea whatsoever about either trade or food, we decided to start up a food importing company. Talking about a massive leap and learning curve! We had to figure out how business works in this part of the world, the relationships, the jargon, legislation, accounting, etc. Everything was totally different and very hard to adapt to, leading to a few tough years to start with.

My restless creativity though didn’t let me focus only on the importing business, so I started seeking work in the area I loved most, which is being behind a lens. So after getting to meet some people I gradually started to shoot some weddings for Creative Video (thanks Craig, you’re a legend) in New Zealand. Then, through some networking and cold calling I was fortunate to connect with TVNZ in 2011. I will not forget the day John, the TVNZ Production Services manager, took me down into the camera store, handed me a camera and said:

“Here are our production cameras… You have an hour to familiarize yourself with them and in a few days we’ll send you out on a shoot”

At the time, although very confident around cameras, I had absolutely no experience in shooting content for broadcast, hence my stress levels were running quite high. So after exploring the camera for an hour or so I left the camera store and waited for the call. Sure enough a couple of days later I got my first broadcast job for TVNZ, for a program called Tagata Pasifika. At the time I had no idea that until this day and after 8 years of a constantly evolving broadcast environment, I would still be working with the Tagata Pasifika team helping them produce some very inspiring Pacific stories.

TheTVNZ logo used back in those days!

One of the first gigs I did for TVNZ. Phone cameras were pretty crap back in those days.

So TVNZ aside, I kept on building more local experience and in 2014 I decided to go full freelance and get out of the food importing business. I bought my first large sensor camera, a second hand Canon C300 and gradually started building a shooting package. As everyone knows this is a never ending process, which has lead me to today own a Sony FS7 with a full range of lenses, sound gear, a full lighting package, a small b cam (a6300) on a gimbal, on set monitors, accessories, and it goes on and on.

And that’s where we are today. Where I start a blog and put myself out there with no real idea how this is going to pan out. But hey, winging it has kind of worked so far, so why not keep on with it?

See you in the next one.

All the best.