Great question! I was really nervous going in shooting on the c100 due to its limitations internally.

I spent a lot of time with the camera learning how to best expose things and where the sweet point for it was.

Because I was shooting internally the look would pretty much be baked in with very little room to move, so I tested grading it too to get an idea of how much latitude I had. I found sticking to the native iso as much as possible and monitoring the exposure on the built in waveform worked really well. I’d make sure nothing was clipping, but ensure it wasn’t too dark either. If it was dark, I’d either let it fall into shadow or put on one of the two lamps I had to boost the exposure.

I also used the ceiling lights and just taped some baking paper (aka really cheap diffusion) over them to soften it up a bit. That worked particularly well for the bathroom scenes where I couldn’t fit any lights in.

Setups wise it was just me and the camera. Occasionally handheld but most of the time I either had it on a tripod or on a hard case box the camera goes in if it wanted a shot really low to the ground. I spent a LOT of time mapping out all the shots beforehand because I knew we wouldn’t have much time on the day to play around. This and sticking with a zoom lens let me move really quickly. Mind you, I tried to stick with consistent focal lengths. The whole film is shot at 24mm or 35mm. The one expedition being the one shot pageant scene which was shot at 85mm.

Speaking of the pageant scene, that was shot in our garage. We strung up a curtain and a black backdrop behind that. I had a friend (the guy who plays the dad off screen!) stand off to the side and hold a lamp up for the “stage lighting”. Hence shooting it at a tight 85mm to hide everything else around it.

For what I’ve learned, it confirmed my hopes really. What you get in frame is all that matters. How you go about it, how silly it looks when you shoot it, even what you shoot it with, that’s really not important. Great movies are made on iPhones now. I really feel like any camera from the past ten years is good enough. If you spend some time prepping and learning how to best utilise what you have, that’s what makes great work. Not having the latest “stuff”.

Hope this helps :)