Based in San Francisco’s Bay Area, ambitious young cinematographer Kenzen Takahashi has already grabbed the creative community’s attention with his arresting showreel shot on the Sony FX9 full-frame camera. His own route into film-making has been through a slightly unusual route, as Ken relates: “I was an extra on the Netflix teen drama series Thirteen Reasons Why, together with my now-girlfriend who’s ended up being my producer partner. On set I constantly watched the crew at work, asking questions and writing notes about everything I saw.”

Through sheer persistence Ken hustled his way from extra to the other side of the camera, first as a runner/PA and then getting his break as a grip on the set of Thirteen Reasons Why, before moving on to grip on The Matrix 4. To progress his film-making journey, Ken quickly realised that he needed to start creating his own body of work: “It was clear I needed a reel to show other people in the industry and establish my credibility.”

Self-starter Ken got straight down to the business of assembling a team to make the project happen. He inevitably wore a lot of production hats, from directing and operating the camera to rigging lights and sound. During the coronavirus pandemic he was able to call on favours with friends and connections from his days as an extra and crew member. “Covid meant there were a lot of creative people sitting around with no work and time on their hands” notes Ken. “Fortunately I was able to take advantage of that and get some great people on board to contribute.”

Ken recalls being ‘shocked’ by the quality of his first test footage coming out of the FX9. “Even shooting in 10-bit it was giving me fantastic latitude, depth and colour compared with my previous 12-bit camera.” For the showreel Ken shot mostly in the camera’s Cine EI mode, using S-Gamut3.cine colour mode and S-log3 for the greatest possible dynamic range. “Skin tones are really nice straight out of camera” enthuses Ken: “That’s why I fell in love with the image quality when I saw the test footage.” Using Sony’s efficient XAVC-I codec gave Ken sumptuous image quality from the camera’s 6K sensor with the added benefit of compact, easy to manage files.

The FX9’s Fast Hybrid AF was another key feature that helped Ken produce Hollywood-standard results with less effort. “I knew we weren’t going to have a first AC for a lot of the time so being able to use autofocus accurately was huge to me. We were doing a dolly move, and my first AC was pulling focus for the entire day. We were on a 50mm at f1.4 and he was getting really nervous about it. So I said ‘don’t worry, just fake it and we’ll put it on autofocus’. It was hilarious – someone came up to him afterwards and was saying ‘it’s so good, you were sharp the whole time’, and it was all autofocus.”

Ken is in no doubt that the FX9 has played a major role in his continuing creative journey. “Seeing other people’s perspectives, they were like ‘the grain looks so natural, it looks like film’: that’s something that was really eye opening to me as well. Never have so many people been up to the monitor and been like ‘this looks so good’. A big part of that is full-frame, I really think that’s the future. That’s a huge part of why I chose the Sony FX9. It’s just that depth of field – people love that – but also the colour science. I mean, it’s just a full package.”

“People ask me all the time ‘what camera should I get’?” reflects Ken. “Most importantly it’s about image quality. You know a lot of people end up looking at the specs of cameras – how much resolution it has and all that. It’s talked about all the time, but I want to see the footage in the hands of a really good cinematographer. That’s what will determine if this is a really good camera.”