Shooting on location can often be a little tricky. Shooting on location 800 miles away in a town you donʼt know can feel almost impossible. That is the challenge Matt Gibson and I were facing when we traveled to Pittsburgh earlier this year. We had the opportunity to share the story of a family that had moved from all the familiarity of their hometown of Atlanta, GA to Pittsburgh, PA. A big part of their decision to move to Pittsburgh was the presence of a familiar church home–NorthBridge Community Church–which is a local Strategic Partner of North Point Ministries in Pittsburgh, PA.
First of all this shoot would have been impossible without a lot of planning and some serious help from the good folks at NorthBridge, who manage to transform a school into a church every week and are doing an incredible job at reaching their community. It was encouraging to see their staff & volunteers breathing fresh life into their adult & children environments. We’re grateful to have spent some time with them!
Before Matt and I left Atlanta we put together a pretty extensive tech sheet and shooting schedule and while formulating our plan we decided that we should travel light and rent our heavier gear on location. After some searching we decided that View Point Production Services was the video rental company to go with. The folks at View Point were extremely helpful and they had really good quality gear. From there it was just about executing the plan and trying to capture the environment & spirit of the story with the limited time that we had. The finished video is above and our shooting schedule/tech sheet are below.
What are some of the things that YOU guys have learned about shooting on location that you would want to share?
February 12th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Hey! This is really useful, love the approach and attention to detail. Any chance of seeing the attachment that details the B-roll?
February 12th, 2010 at 2:28 pm
Just going to pick your brains a little about location shooting.
I am interested in how you use the flags - I am guessing on the outside shots and also how you place the lights for the inside interview shots.
We have an ME66 and we also use a Sennheiser lav for our location shooting. We have the wind covers for the lav and the shotgun (with the blimp). Unfortunately we still get a lot of ambient noise that ends up having to be processed out in post. It seems to be most obvious when we shoot inside (air conditioning noise I guess). How do you minimize that ambient noise?
February 16th, 2010 at 11:48 am
Thank you for the replies.
I will see if I can get the B-Roll list uploaded to the site. Honestly it is just a list of 1-10 of the things that we felt we needed to get footage of that iconically said ‘Pittsbucgh’. I can tell you without looking at my list that #1 was the wide shot of Pittsburgh from the top of Mount Washington- that shot was near the beginning of our video.
By way of using Flags on video shoots. We had a small flag kit for this shoot and that was mainly for making sure we had the most control possible for the lights that we were using. We knocked down the intensity of the back light by placing a 1/4 stop scrim flag in front of it. The Key light had a slightly opaque flag that we placed in front of it. We did not end up using any black flags to carve out light but it was nice to know we had the ability to do that if needed.
For audio-we just tried to bring back the cleanest audio possible. The guys did have to work out some ambiant noise in post but the house we shot in was pretty quiet for the most part so we did not encounter to big a problem with that.
Thanks for the replies. I hope my repsonses were helpfull. Keep the questions coming.
Dave
February 16th, 2010 at 11:15 pm
Cool. Thanks for the advice. Sometimes the best way to learn is trial and error. For instance, I can ask you how you used the flags, but the best way is for us to do a lot more on location shoots and try out different combinations of lighting and filters. I now know what doesn’t work for capturing the audio - next time I will use your advice and cut A/C to the room, maybe get mics a little closer to the source.
The biggest thing that a blog like this does is to put out there a standard to reach for. That is inspirational because it makes guys like us want to do better next time.
Thanks so much.
Paul