Women in Business - Cash Flow Videos - How to travel to shoot a video
We just finished a video production we are very proud of and I’d like to tell you about. One of our very good customers is Susan T. Spencer, an author, entrepreneur and successful business women. She felt that women often don’t understand the concept of “Cash Flow” when they start a business and needed something to help. She designed a 5 part video training series to augment her website (www.breifcaseessentials.com) and asked us to produce it for her.
Susan lives in Las Vegas but during the summer goes to Jackson Hole Wyoming. She didn’t want to wait till her return and asked us to fly to Wyoming to record her. Now we’ve traveled as far as Brazil to shoot in the past and had a pretty good idea of what would be needed for this assignment. Because extra baggage is expensive to fly with, the first trick is to minimize equipment and weight. Susan wanted us to record her in front of a fireplace with natural light coming through a high window. She sent us a picture of the room so we could plan better. From that we knew we wanted to do this shoot with low wattage light to give a textured, diffused look matching what light was available from the window so we decided to place diffused lights close to the subject and would use a 300 Watt hair light, a 300 Watt key light and a 200 Watt fill light. We brought gel diffuser and also blue gel to balance with the ambient light and set each light to medium wide and gelled with diffusion and blue color correction.
To augment highlights in the background we used some of her built in directional lighting and arranged her mantle in the background with items of interest but not distraction. We had extra lights and neutral density gel with us in case we needed to add more lighting in the background and control the intensity.
For audio, we felt a lavalier mic would distract and therefore chose to use a mic on a boom pole.
For the hair light and also for a stand to hold a mic boom pole, we knew we needed C-Stands with booms to keep the stands out of the picture but also knew this would be a problem to fly with because of their size. Our solution was to buy compact folding stands with folding booms from a local mail order company here in Las Vegas, www.imagewest.tv. These stands also come with fillable “sandbags” for counterbalance which we filled with bottled water at Susans house. The stands folded to less than 4 feet long and didn’t need us to bring heavy sandbags; a perfect solution. Our 300 Watt lights were also from Image West.
Susan requested a teleprompter and fortunately we have one that we built several years ago out of a LCD monitor and a beam splitter which folded to a reasonably small size and together with a small Acer laptop is the perfect telepromter for travel. This we had in a small footlocker with spare lights and other small equipment.
For a tripod we knew our shot would be just about static with the telprompter which had its own stand so we decided that we could bring a light weight tripod and any moves could be done in post. The booms, our lightweight tripod, a boom pole for the mic and several other stands fit nicely into a 4 foot hard plastic tripod case. In the past we had one of these wrecked in transit so knew the key to avoid this was to pack it tight. Once we had all the stands packed we filled in the gaps with lights in padded bags and other small equipment.
We asked Susan to buy extension cords so we wouldn’t have to bring them as they are an easily bought commodity but take up a lot of case space.
We packed our Panasonic HMC 150 HD camera in a small camera case in a regular small suitcase with other small needed equipment and this was our carry on piece.
Equipment such as gels, the mic, the rest of the lights plus spares and extra bulbs in bubble wrap (On a shoot like this it is better to have spare lights and bulbs because if something goes bad, it’s unlikely you can replace it) were in another small suitcase.
One of the biggest items we brought was a 23 inch LCD unit which accepts a HDMI cable from the camera. We use this for monitoring what we are shooting rather than relying on a viewfinder and also for letting a client review footage in a realistic manner; again rather than looking at a small viewfinder image. This way there is not question as to what is recorded. We packed this monitor in it’s original box with the original styrofoam. Sometimes we hope to use the monitor a client may have at a clients location but hesitate because we need to be comfortable with the accuracy of the picture. This required that we use a large suitcase. In here I also packed my clothing and other personals.
All together we had our carry on small suitcase, the 4 foot long tripod case, a larger suitcase, the footlocker (to protect the telepromtper parts) and one more small suitcase for a completely transportable studio. We weighed each bag and shifted a few things around to keep each bag under 50 pounds so as not to incur overweight charges at the airports.
Susan changed clothes for each of the 5 segments and the shoot went perfectly. Go to Susans website www.briefcaseessentials.com to see the videos.
We pulled up to the curb at McCarren Airport in Las Vegas and checked all the baggage, we did the same thing in Wyoming so carting baggage wasn’t any problem at all. We flew out on a Friday, shot Saturday and returned to Las Vegas on Sunday.