The Desperate Hour, a feature directed by Phillip Noyce and starring Oscar nominee Naomi Watts, was shot by DP John Brawley, ACS using the Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 12K digital film camera. Debuting last month, The Desperate Hour stars Watts as recently widowed mother Amy Carr who’s doing her best to restore normalcy to the lives of her young daughter and teenage son in their small town. As she’s on a jog in the woods, she finds her town thrown into chaos as a shooting takes place at her son’s school. Miles away, on foot in the dense forest, Carr desperately races against time to save her son. Production happened in July 2020, during the heart of the COVID outbreak in a remote area of Northern Ontario.
The key for Brawley was having a small cinema camera that could be rigged in multiple ways, ensuring they could achieve a wide range of coverage. “The film kind of plays as real time so when you start thinking about how to shoot that, it really is challenging. We had to think, what are we going to use to be able to keep up with her when some of the takes are 15 minutes long and she’s going to run a few miles? What are you going to use that can keep up that isn’t going to make sound? It was sort of deceptively complicated and also ambitious.”
Brawley brought aboard four URSA Mini Pro 12K bodies, rigging one on the back of an electric motorcycle using the SRH3 Stabilized Remote Head. “The great thing I loved about that is that was a very small and lightweight package on the motorcycle,” added Brawley. “When we’re trying to literally weave in and out of trees and so on, you want a small head and a light camera package.”
A second camera body was rigged in studio mode, with a third used by a splinter crew shooting B roll or working with Watts’ doubles. The fourth body was saved for a backup. Brawley also used a Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro for various added inserts. Brawley explained, “There were lots of reasons to choose the URSA Mini Pro 12K, but principally we realized we could have four camera bodies on set for the price of one, and the cameras gave us the extra resolution we might need for some stabilizing and shot resizing.”
