Last fall, I shot a video for URWA, an organization that works to protect and preserve the Upper Raritan Watershed in New Jersey. I was hired by my friend Bill Parker (of Hindsight Media) to DP the project. We went down to NJ on two trips for 2-3 days a piece, shooting interviews and beauty shots of the area. (I was, in fact, blown away by how stunning this area was. Being from Boston, I thought that NJ was basically a big strip mall or gross industrial plant.) This was the kind of job that did not really feel like work; walking around with my camera in late summer/mid-fall getting beauty shots of landscapes, rivers, animals, etc. It felt more like a vacation (I guess I shouldn’t let the client hear that).
We hired a guy from NYC who had a remote camera copter for a day to film some aerial footage of the area. He pulled up in a small-ish hatchback and pulled out this pretty amazing rig. It was basically a custom fitted remote control helicopter, with maybe a 5-foot wingspan, that had a camera mount that held a small Sony HDV camera. He had a small monitor that was being fed a wireless video feed from the camera that he could watch on the ground, as he operated the copter and camera remotely. It seemed to take quite a bit of concentration (in fact he made it clear that we were to keep our chit-chat to a minimum while he was flying), especially since he had two things to control at once. It was a pretty cool thing to watch, but in the end I found the footage somewhat unremarkable. Part of it was that the copter was made for a small camera, much smaller and lighter than our Sony EX-1s that we were shooting the rest of the project on. The interlaced HDV footage from a single chip camera just did not seem to look nearly as sharp or vivid as the progressive XDCAM footage we were getting. (He has since built a larger copter rig to work with an EX-1, so that would certainly be nicer). The camera moves WERE pretty cool though and he did get some stuff that we used in the longer video, but in the end, I am not sure if it was totally worth it. Our clients were happy with it, though, so that is what matters.
The only really big issue we had was that we shot a lot of our interviews outside and had to contend with god-awful cicadas. They would come and go, and sounded like a 747 flying by at times. We remarkably were able to clear up quite a bit of it with some noise reduction plug-ins in Pro Tools, but it was definitely a challenge.
Bill cut a 10-minute video for URWA that was used for an event that they had in the spring, and it was a huge success, and helped them to reach their fundraising goals. Last month I helped Bill cut together a little 90-second teaser that they could use for their website. You can check it out here:
http://www.vimeo.com/6531875
