the men were wearing was too far away from their mouths and would also be a very tricky place to attach it to! Thankfully, in my audio bag I have my Rode NTG-2 shotgun and boom pole! Julian locked his wide shot off on the A7s and held the boom. It worked great! Crisis averted!
Arrival time Before we even set foot in each destination we had most of the interviewees and locations set up. You can’t just turn up in places like these and hope for the best.
Research and planning is key. We had a very short period of time filming in most of the episodes. In the Alps episode, we did it all in three and a half days, but in the Everglades one we amazingly had eleven days. On average there were six days of filming per episode. That’s not a lot of time to shoot an hour-long documentary, especially with the size of crew we had and the amount of production I wanted to put into each episode. What was key though, was the ability to be flexible. You never use every interview you shoot
or every location you go to. You need to have space in the schedule to be flexible. The story can often change whilst filming and on every episode we filmed we met people who were not prearranged who were amazing and we had to use them. Over stuffing your schedule before even arriving is a big mistake. Finding that middle ground is very important. When using kit and techniques that can raise your production visually you have to be wary of a couple of key pitfalls. Overuse and time management. With a schedule as tight as we had, and without anyone dedicated to prepare kit like Movi and/or the drones, you needed to factor in
set up and technical problems. I am very experienced with the Movi M5, especially after using it so much for this season and I can set it up within about 5 minutes easily, but that does mean stopping doing anything else and you need to be prepared for the times when things don’t go according to plan!
Tricky situations Because of the way we were working and the nature of the tool itself, the Movi couldn’t be left set up. There weren’t enough hands, or even a place to put it. It had to be packed away into its Peli case to protect it while it wasn’t being used. Not ideal, and
Mac Stone Photo
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Digital FilmMaker
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01/06/2015 15:18