We often featured the Canon ME20F-SH specialized camera, and wrote about the impressing low light capabilities. New footage adds to the set.

The Canon ME20F-SH does ISO 4,500,000, and that definitely opens some possibilities. The ME20F-SH was used for the Awavena documentary by Emmy awarding-winning artist and director Lynette Wallworth.

For the Amazonian Yawanawá, “medicine” has the power to transport you in a vision to a place you have never been. Hushuhu, the first woman shaman of the Yawanawá, uses VR as medicine to open a portal to another way of knowing. Awavena is a collaboration between a community and an artist, melding cutting edge technology and transcendent experience so that a vision can be shared, and a story can be told of a people ascending from the edge of extinction.

Awavena contains some night scenes with fluorescent luminance of plants and insects in the Amazon.

The challenge of shooting documentary footage at night in the jungle is that any lighting you may use will disrupt the activity of the creatures you’re trying to capture. In the award-winning documentary Awavena, Director of Photography Greg Downing used Canon’s ME20F-SH camera to showcase the remarkable fluorescent luminance of plants and insects in the Amazon. The project, which chronicles the Yawanawa tribe and its first ever female shaman, utilizes mixed reality to give viewers the experience of a vision quest. In this video, Downing describes how the incredible 4,500,000 ISO of the ME20 helped to create the stunning visuals to simulate a vision quest.

The Canon ME20F-SH does a pretty well job, as explained and shown in the video below. All our Canon ME20F-SH coverage is listed here.

Awavena trailer: