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Behind-The-Scenes with Deep Look: It’s Not Easy Filming Minuscule Mosquitoes (Patreon)
Content
Our subjects are often really, really small, so we’re often faced with some daunting cinematography challenges during video shoots. In our episode, "How Mosquitoes Use Six Needles to Suck Your Blood," we zoomed in to show why they’re so good at biting us. Here’s Josh Cassidy, our Lead Producer and Cinematographer for Deep Look, on why it was so tough to wrangle these tenacious blood-suckers for our video.
Josh Cassidy films our six-needle superstar
Those mosquitoes can be elusive prima donnas
"Really the hardest part was filming the actual bite. You kind of have to guess where they’re going to bite, and set up your focus to that area. But if they don’t bite there and they bite just a centimeter away, then you missed the shot. For some of the shots, we ended up taking the mosquitoes and putting them in a test tube, and then putting it on the person’s forearm waiting for the mosquito to bite them. Then we’d pull off the test tube and film them. Because once they’re actually sucking the blood, they’re not easily distracted.
Another big problem is that they’re so small. You have to zoom in so much that any movement of the person’s arm will ruin the shot. For example, you could see the person’s pulse in the camera. The whole arm would just raise up and the mosquito would just raise up and down, and that made it very challenging. So we had to stabilize the footage afterwards."
Sometimes you have to make literal blood sacrifices during video shoots
"The person that we filmed the most was probably Shannon Bennett, the Chief of Sciences at the California Academy of Sciences. She’s been bitten by like a million different things, and is super enthusiastic and very knowledgeable on this topic. These were mosquitoes that she had grown from eggs, so she was sure that they would not be infected. I, of course, as the camera operator, have to stay on the other side of the camera, and sadly cannot volunteer my arm for that or any other biting insect episodes.
Shannon Bennett, the Chief of Sciences at the California Academy of Sciences, donates blood to Deep Look via mosquitoes
She had these mosquitoes in what looked like a box made out of mesh filled with mosquitoes. And there was a flap. She would just stick her arm in there, wait for a mosquito to bite her, pull it out, and we’d film it. But we found that sometimes they’d bite her in the wrong place, like on her hand, or something like that. We really wanted it on the flat part of the forearm, the underside of the forearm, so that’s when we decided to switch to a test tube method.
Gabriela Quirós, the producer of the episode, also volunteered. She’s very fearless. And sadly, the mosquitoes were less interested in her blood than in Dr. Bennett’s."
Deep Look producer Gabriela Quirós patiently waiting to get bitten by a mosquito (Photo Credit: Josh Cassidy / KQED)
On not accidentally cooking mosquitoes while filming
"For this shot, since we were filming stuff that was very small, I used my most powerful macro lens: a Canon MP-E 65. It’s basically a microscope. And we also needed to slow it down, because this is all happening very quickly. So we have a Sony FS-700, which can shoot at high frame rates, and we used that to slow the motion down so you can actually see what’s happening.
The other thing with gear is the lighting. For macro you need tons of light, because you’re only filming a very small area. Cameras will often struggle to get enough light to get a nice picture so we used LED lights, which produce a cool light, because otherwise we would cook the mosquitoes before we got a chance to film them."
And since it's summertime, don't forget to apply mosquito repellent
"Different mosquitoes can harbor different diseases, so in the episode you’ll see several different species. Some of them are more important for human health than others. But as we say in the video, this is the most deadly animal in the world. So it’s important for us to pay attention to it, not just the itchy bites."
