As I mentioned in the previous blog post, I did an interesting job last week with Charlie Burnham. While the content itself was not extremely compelling (it was a video to educate participants and practitioners in a medical research study on the effects of placebo), I enjoy working with Charlie, who always put’s an emphasis on high production values for his clients. I was brought on to shoot second camera and be on-set EX-1 guru, for the DP, Regis Becker, who Charlie has worked with on these jobs for years. I actually really enjoy working with people like Regis who have been in the business for at least a couple decades, as there is always something for me to learn. Charlie assembled a modest size crew of about a dozen people, including our actors, for the three-day shoot. He rented location space from an office building in Wellesley, MA that had some available offices, and we did our best to make them suitable for the different locations we required. Charlie had brought a van full of prop materials including furniture, computers, artwork, etc. to help turn our bland locations into something a little more inviting. (I have learned over the years that taking the approach of bringing props to customize a bland space is often much simpler and more desirable than searching for that “perfect” location.)
Our first big challenge, though, was the location, in that the room we had to work with for the first two days was tiny. Like, really small. We had to fit two cameras (with operators), three actors, and Charlie directing, with his monitor setup. The clients were in an adjacent office, watching on a second set of monitors, and we had a script supervisor (to make sure the HIGHLY technical script was stuck to), and a teleprompter operator. We used the teleprompter off the camera, which fed an LCD screen on a stand that we could move into the eyeline of the actors. The script was so long and technical that the actors HAD to to stay on script, so having the prompter was essential (as memorizing would have been out of the question). Fortunately lighting was supposed to look like an office (which we were in), so we could supplement the existing fluorescent lighting with two Kino-Flos mounted to the ceiling. These work great, as they are smaller and much cooler than typical fresnel lighting (which would have turned the tiny room into a sauna). Between the two Kinos and a large piece of foamcore for bounce, that was all we needed.
On the third day we were in a much larger conference room, and this is when we took advantage of all the props and furniture Charlie had brought. We lit this space with a mixture of Kinos, Arri fresnels, and China balls (again, to supplement the existing overhead lighting). We had two setups in this room, but the bulk of the shooting on this day was the on-camera narrator/host. This could have been our second challenge. There was A LOT of script for him. And it was very technical, but thank god we had a fantastic actor who blew threw this stuff, and was very good at reading off the prompter. Regis suggested a technique I had never done, which saved us a lot of time. We setup the second camera right next to the main camera (which now had the prompter mounted ON it) to film the wider shot, and keep the main camera as the tighter shot. Even though the actor was not looking right down the lens of the wide shot, because it was wider, you couldn’t tell, and it gave us two angles at once, which saved us at least a couple hours. Great thinking, Regis.
The videos that Charlie produces for this client are primarily for an international market (often getting subtitled in dozens of different languages), so the output is Standard-Definition PAL format DVD. For this use, the client prefers 4:3 (instead of letterboxed or widescreen SD) so while we were shooting in 16:9 HD PAL format, we output 4:3 to the preview monitors. After offloading all of the footage and archiving it in it’s HD original format, we downconverted all the footage to PAL SD (DV) for editing. Even with the format conversion, it was still faster than capturing tapes in real time, so working with the EX-1 made sense (plus the image quality is so nice).
Overall it was an enjoyable shoot to work on. I really appreciate working with someone like Charlie who puts an emphasis on quality production values for ALL of his clients, no matter who the client is.
Tags: corporate video, EX-1