In T.I.Rs – Canon 5D MkII two camera shoot
First corporate shoot on Canon 5D MkII.
Shooting my first corporate film on this camera was a challenge. I acted as a shooting Director of this film for a HGV training company and was ably assisted by my photographer friend Mark Kensett and another photographer, Glenn Blackburn. These guys had the cameras and some exquisite lenses but very little moving image experience.
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‘Green Energy Miracle’ in Sri Lanka
“Have Your Cake Eat Your Cake” became the catchphrase in the team throughout this trip.
The reason? Well, we were filming a project about renewable energy. Having your cake and eating it. Except the Sri Lankan guys couldn’t quite get it right. Hence – Have Your Cake Eat Your Cake!
I was fortunate enough to be in a position to be asked to take the place of good friend, Claudio von Planta He’s out in the Far East filming Charley Boorman’s latest TV show, By Any Means 2.
I was shooting a pilot episode of a TV programme about renewable energy in Sri Lanka. An amazing place where I was privileged to meet some amazing people who are working to make the country one of the world’s first fossil fuel free economies. It’s a story of business and science working together to try and create a new way to power a country.
I’m working on the edit now, so in a few weeks, I’ll be able to post something here for you to see. I went with my photographer friend, Mark Kensett. He’s let me have a few photos for you to look at. Mostly of the back of my head! Thanks Mark.
Doing the leg work
Here’s another promo film for a prosthetic company called RSL Steeper. They have a cool new way of measuring patient’s limb shapes using a laser camera gadget. This makes the limbs they make much more comfortable for the wearer and they can store the shape in case the patient ever loses their leg or damages it. They also use a computer controlled milling machine to make the moulds and a fancy computer system called Meditech IT, to hold all the patient records in.
For those who are interested in the technical stuff. I shot this in HDV and transcoded to SD resolution ProRes 422(HQ) for the edit. I knew I wanted to grade the sequence so I tried ProRes to keep the colour gamut as wide as possible. The final piece was output to H264 for inclusion in a Powerpoint presentation. ProRes 422(HQ) was good to use, but heavy on storage and heavy on processing power when rendering. Managed OK with it though.
It was fun to shoot and to make something creative out of it. However, throughout the entire shoot the temptation to crack the “you’re pulling my leg” gag proved almost irresistible…
I’m washing my hands of it
Today’s events were slightly bizarre. I arrived at 2.00pm at the design studio where I was told to go. After a brief meeting, a group of us drove to someone’s house where I later found myself standing in that someone’s bath, filming a girl washing her hands…
This isn’t the script to a shady movie. The reality couldn’t be further away. In actuality, I was filming a short film for a web site about hand washing hygiene for the NHS. We needed a set and a model, pronto. So one of the guys in the office volunteered his house and one of the girls in the office volunteered her hands.
We had to work really quickly, so I shot it on the Z7 compact flash card to speed up the ingest. Also, I was using a couple daylight temperature lights. I bounced these from the ceiling to increase the overall ambient level of light and give the room a nice soft light. The voiceover was made by the medical professional stood to my right (just outside the bath!) during the shoot. After 40 minutes, I was on my way back to the office to start the edit.
Log and Transfer using Final Cut Pro is very easy to use and before so very long, the edit was underway. Aside from cutting, the biggest decision to get right was the grading. I generated the look you see to clean up the image and focus your attention on the hands. I added some appropriate music and top and tailed the piece with some nice motion graphics in After Effects.
The following morning, the clip was on Vimeo ready for client approval. They loved it (always a relief) and the master was encoded to Flash video ready for delivery to the client via FTP. Less than 24hrs from start to finish and not a tape or silver disc in sight…
In the chiller…
The day after I arrived back from Uganda, I find myself in a meat slicing company dressed in hygiene clothing ready to shoot a corporate about their hygiene regime. Talk about sublime to ridicules! The temperature shift alone was 30 degrees, never mind the sleep deprivation. Still, we spent a short time amusing ourselves by filming a factory full of meat slicing operatives.
Funny thing was this. They are super strict about their hygiene policy and insisted on testing all our equipment for ‘bacterial loading’ before we could take it into the factory. This entailed swabbing various parts of our cameras and putting the swab into a testing gadget. Of course, my camera failed miserably but after a light dusting down with a alcohol wipe they were happy to let it in the factory. If only they could have seen where my camera had been just 24 hours before! I’d been filming cows in a field and shaking hands with numerous people in the surrounding areas of Nakaseke in Uganda, Africa and then handing my various parts of the camera. But just a light wipe with the alcohol wipes and they were satisfied. Crazy!
Here’s a nice picture of myself with the Fairview guys all dressed in our fashionable gear.
Adult Services in Lincolnshire…
Don’t worry, I haven’t decided on a new type of film making. These are Adult SOCIAL Services. I was conscripted into the Cavewood Productions team to go and win a tender for this particular job. It was a new Council initiative to tell the public of North Lincolnshire about how the adult social services of the region will be changing to make things… er… well, better.
It’s complicated and one it’s also one of those corporate council things. It’s called Fit For The Future.