Discover Hunter-gatherer Tanzanian Tribes with Documentary Director Nicos Argillet

Nicos Argillet

Director & Cinematographer

Freelance Director and DP living between Paris & Reykjavik, Nicos Argillet is driven by the need to tell stories and, to quote, the desire to make the real world look as good as cinema. During the last 10 years, he has been working in Europe, Asia, Africa, Pacific, North and South America and directed more than a dozen feature length documentaries for French TV channels such as ARTE, CANAL +, FRANCE 2, FRANCE 5, M6 and TF1. He spends most of the year shooting abroad in all kind of conditions, from the Icecap of Greenland to the forest of Amazonia. The latest of his feature work in 2018 « Circus off Track » received the prize for Best Cultural Documentary from the Lauriers de la Télévision et de la Radio, a French award delivered by leading professionals in the industry.

“I had been impressed by both the quality and the reliability of wise products.”

- Nicos Argillet

Equipment

Cameras

Canon EOS C200

Video Codecs

4K RAW

In February 2018, Nicos started his new adventure to shoot documentary series named « Adventurers & Photographers » for French and German national TV channel ARTE. He headed to tribes that his photography partner Christophe Ratier met twenty years ago-The Hadzabe of the Eyasi Lake, one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa, and the Massaïs from the Kisongos clan living at the feet of the Ol Doinyo Lengaï volcano, “the mountain of god”. Nicos chose Canon EOS C200 as his main camera and recorded cinematic 4K RAW supported by Wise CFast 2.0 cards. “For me any piece of equipment should be hassle and worry free. And the best compliment I could give to any product is, and my quote is gonna sound familiar, it just works, “commented Nicos.

The length of recording time is what concerned Nicos especially being in the difficult shooting environment all time. “I always tried to make sure that I would have enough cards for my shoot and not have to format anything to get me going, would it be for 2 days or a 20 straight days shooting scenario. That meant of course bringing a lot of them and preferably in big capacities. I’m able to work with a set of 6 x 512Go CFast 2.0 cards.”

About media, he never underestimated its importance. “I think that medias are maybe the most important part of a kit. Back in the days we would treat our tapes like they were made of porcelain because we had no way of backing up anything of the field. And we had to carry as much tape as was needed for the shoot, whatever that number was. Nowadays, with cards so small and light, we might forget that they are in fact what everything else is relying on to bring back what we spent so much energy to make happen. For that reason I’m only using media that I 100% trust and would always integrate the cost of plenty of reliable medias to whatever camera system I decide to invest in.”

Related Link >> The Nicos Argillet Website