The innovative video game studio Red 5 Studios launched Stage 5 TV to cover emerging trends in gaming and geek culture. Their YouTube channel hosts several different series including Game Changers -- a show where they take video game tropes and see if they would work in real life. In the latest episode, Game Changers wants to know if people can fly jetpacks and shoot guns. They shoot every episode on RED EPICs and SCARLETs.

We reached out to the show's director, Noah Eichen at Stage 5 TV, to ask him how they did it all from gear to post.

Could you give us a little history on Game Changers?

"The original idea started with our CEO Mark Kern wanting to do something similar to Myth Busters or Top Gear but for Gaming. He had seen the Jet Lev water Jetpacks and thought it was a perfect tie in to the jetpacks in Firefall and, "wouldn't it be cool to try Jetpacking out in the real world." From there I took the idea and ran with it and built a show around the concept of taking a gaming trope, jetpacks, platforming, zombies, lock picking, guns, cars, et cetera and testing it out in the real world."

How did the jetpack episode come about?

"The Jetpack episode was our first in the series, Dean O'malley and Jet Lev USA were really great in letting us not only take out their Jetpacks but also letting us strap paintball guns to them and have our hosts shoot at each other."

What gear do you use on Game Changers?

"We knew we wanted to shoot RED and capture this all in 4k to give this thing a look that you don't typically get with action/sports reality shows like this. We knew we had to get the cameras out on the water so John Frost (our DP) and I devised a plan that included 1 EPIC on a helicopter to get great aerial shots of the course."
"For those shots we hired the guys at Snap Roll Media, they were experienced RED shooters and had some of the best aerial footage I've seen. We also knew we were going to want an A Camera in front of the hosts as they went around the course so we had another EPIC on the back of a Jet Ski. Our operator, Tomi Skarica, did an amazing job on that camera as he was shooting with a RED zoom and had no AC but he got some great shots and kept everything in focus."
"We then had a SCARLET on a boat getting the 2 other hosts reactions and a SCARLET on the beach capturing take off and landing. We shot the whole thing with RED zooms and Cooke s4 primes. All of the hand held work (on the beach and Jet Ski was done with gunner mounts). The day was so tight that we couldn't re-do things, everything had to be one take if we were going to make the day which was a real challenge but we were able to cover our bases and get some incredible footage in the process."

What was the post process like?

"For post we cut the show from the native R3D files in Premiere Pro utilizing RED ROCKET cards. We did have to kick out proxies half way through as the load was just starting to kill the 12 core Mac it was being cut on. We finished the show at 2k which we found was a happy medium for our motion graphics designer as well as our scaled up go pro footage. The show was graded in by our colorist James Wong in DaVinci Resolve."

Check out the behind the scenes photos from the shoot that Stage 5 sent over and watch for the 'copter-mounted EPIC in the video. Enjoy this episode and more of the Stage 5 series at youtube.com/stagefivetv.