Okay, time for me to start this vlogging/ blogging thing! After a few meetings with the team from RedShark News they convinced me I would look as good in front of the camera as I look behind it. Let’s find out if this works as well as they thought! In these vlogs, I’ll try and take you with me behind the scenes of shoots, review gear I use and I might talk a bit about the challenges of trying to grow a business in this ever changing industry.
In this first video, I’m taking you on a recent corporate shoot we did with Ministry of Frames for BeFrank, a Dutch pension institution. Plenty of challenges here: the brief was to produce two videos at their offices with their regular actor/ presenter. We had little space, a tight deadline and next to no budget to rent gear or hire crew. We could not change the location, as we needed the employees to briefly feature in the films.
After a quick visit on location, I decided to go for a realistic approach in terms of production: work with what we have and adapt to the fact that we couldn’t fully control the room in terms of lighting. For too many times I came into these situations with carts full of gear trying to ‘fix’ the situation only to make the situation worse by overcomplicating things. The trick is to bring ‘just enough’ and work on budget without getting a low budget look. It’s a skill I’m trying to master.
As there was only indirect daylight coming in through the windows, we wanted to create that same effect by setting up a book light. The book light consisted of three Arri HMI’s (1200 Watt D12’s), bounced onto an 8×8 Ultrabounce and softened by an 8×8 Silk. I went for the HMI’s because they deliver great output for a decent rental price. LED’s like the Arri Skypanels would have been easier to tune in, but they’re twice as expensive to rent.
Low ceilings made for another interesting challenge, as we could not put up a regular butterfly frame. In these situations I like to just grab a few push up stands to make a DIY ‘frame’ and drape cloths over it. Watch out though: these cloths are quite fragile, so tread carefully and make sure you don’t tear them apart.
The end result is a bright and clean look, with enough contrast to keep things interesting. I could have used some sort of backlight to separate the actor from the background. But all in all, I’m happy with what we have been able to achieve for a tightly budgeted corporate shoot.
A big thank you to my loyal film crew for taking the extra time to film this behind the scenes video.
Watch the final result over here.