DP Hausen captures Chili Peppers documentaries with AG-HVX200 camcorders

The Red Hot Chili Peppers, renowned for their explosive theatricality, chose director/DP David Hausen to produce documentaries of the making of three music videos from their album “Stadium Arcadium.”

Excerpts of each, shot with Panasonic AG-HVX200 P2 HD camcorders, appeared on the MTV and Fuse networks and formed the basis of the feature-length documentary “Red Hot Chili Peppers: Untitled Documentary,” with Hausen once again serving as director/DP.

The documentary was an official selection of this year’s Zurich and Warsaw International Film Festivals, a winner of an Angel Award at the Monaco International Film Festival and is scheduled for a full slate of 2008 festival showings. Rocky Ziegler and Hausen’s company produced the documentary.

All of the discrete documentaries were multicamera shoots with a minimum of two HVX200s on each set. “Dani, California” was the first assignment, shot in early 2006. Hausen, a longtime Panasonic DVX100 shooter, had his new HVX200 for less than a week before the shoot. Despite working with a new camera and working in a new tapeless environment, the shoot was successful. Hausen used two 15in Apple PowerBooks on the set as well. “We’d take a P2 card and import on one of the PowerBooks to verify and check footage; then we’d take the same card and copy the raw data on the second PowerBook to a 500GB external drive,” he said.

On the subsequent shoots, Hausen used the AJ-PCS060 P2 Store portable hard disk unit, and used a MacBook Pro with duel systems adapter.

For more information, visit www.panasonic.com/hvx200.