In a shocking exposé amusing post over at Gizmodo the author informs readers that J.J. Abrams new film Cloverfield was NOT in fact shot on a garden-variety consumer camcorder. I for one am completely taken aback! I can’t be the only one that was certain that Paramount Studios backed a film with millions in financing knowing full well it would be shot on a camcorder bought at Best Buy…

Ok, enough messing around…while the Sony F23 WAS in fact used for much of the filming, there may actually be some truth to the camcorder rumors. Officially, Cloverfield was sourced with a mix of the F23, Grass Valley’s Viper and a few “handheld and intermediate cameras.” This article in Variety references a “lightweight Panasonic HD HandyCam” (can you say HVX200?) used for 1/8th of the film, and a “3-lb. Canon” used for about a third of the film. So perhaps Best Buy figured in there somewhere. UPDATE: Videography has a feature article on the production process, apparently the HVX was used quite a bit, and the F23 and Viper mainly for VFX shots (of which there were plenty).

“The HVX 200-shot images could look as genuine as everybody hoped, but if they weren’t robust enough to hold up to the heavy digital effects work required in post, all the realism gained would be lost. Oscar-winning character animation expert Phil Tippett’s company would be creating the CGI monster and Double Negative would create significant set extensions and backgrounds. And Banks wanted to give them the purest, cleanest images possible to start with and let them match the look of their completed shots to the lower-end footage after completing the composites. Footage from the Viper or F23, laid down to HDCam SR tape, would ensure the most flexibility possible in post and yield the most believable composites.”

Here is a Sony press release on the subject of the F23. And you can find out a lot more behind the scenes information in this extensive interview with Director Matt Reeves. Here is an interesting excerpt:

Also, in most films you have all these shots that are like a small shot here, a few seconds there, and it would all be very containable and the visual effects people would know exactly how many shots they’d be working on. But, with this film since we were doing everything in continuous takes, we’d shoot a scene and I’d ask them “How many effects shots is that?” and they’d say, “Well, we don’t know.” Instead of doing many shots, we did one long shot that would basically take in all the effects of many shots.

It was also really different for the crew, because I was having the camera operators run the cameras as unprofessionally as possible. And the focus pullers as well… focus pullers lose their job if they’re not dead on when someone walks into a room and hits their mark. I’d be saying “No! You’re too dead on! This is autofocus on a handheld consumer camera, it has to go past them, and come back.” They’d say, “Well, this is the kind of thing that gets me fired.” I told them, “Not on this movie!”

And for those that have already seen the movie (spoiler alert), here’s a tidbit on the message at the end of the film.

Update: Here’s J.J. Abrams on the subject of Mystery at Ted Talks.