SouthBrook has always done a few special things for their easter services and since I’ve been a part of the team I’ve had the opportunity to be there the week before these services for all of the fun, non stressful, and super relaxed environments. Luckily, we were able to get the video for this years services shot 2 weeks out so it wasn’t too hateful. This was however, one of the first times in sometime that me and my buddy Josh Rhodes had shot and edited a video like this. Turns out, we learned a lot about pre production perpetration and post production organization and time management. We also learned a ton about how to capture in the first place and some things to have locked down before you begin recording. We also broke a 3000 dollar lens but we won’t talk about that… We began this project with a concept of testimonial type interviews that would feel like the “I am second” videos that are pretty recognizable across the interwebs. Going into it originally we had little forethought for what we wanted to get out of our footage and more importantly out of our subjects. Rhodes and I were mostly worried about having all of the gear together and having the right gear in the first place, what we were going to do with it was the last thing on our minds. That being said it was still on our minds and we had some rough ideas of what we wanted. Looking back now we both agree that some sort of a script or basic story board will be a part of every pre production meeting we do for a project of this type. A script or storyboard isn’t necessarily something that would lock us into a narrow route in the moment of shooting (for now) but more serve as a map of things that we had planned on accomplishing. For instance, in post we lined up all of our audio and got all of our clips in place and started looking through things to begin our edit when we realized that some of our interviewees had killer establishing shots while others had decent ones that could still be used but weren’t as compelling as what we had seen out of the first 2. Now we had some killer video and we a few angles to choose from so it wasn’t difficult to go a different route but had we only had 2 cameras and not 4 we might have been a little screwed on this one. This taught us something important. Think ahead. Plan out how you want things to look. Try and imagine your video before you’ve even shot it so you can go into your shoot knowing you need to get the same clean good looking shot of everybody. This idea of thinking ahead opened up a bigger door for me personally. Videography and filmmaking are really cool and you can buy a bunch of lights and nice cameras and lenses and tripods and you can even take all of this nice stuff to some really cool venue to make your movie. You could even have some really awesome props or maybe a really cool subject there to film. However, if you don’t have a good story to tell, you’re wasting your time. My boss Jason had taken care of that side of things going into this particular project as the whole thing was centered around our subjects testimonies but I can’t imagine how much of a failure it would have been to go into any other type of shoot without already having in my mind what I wanted to convey to the eventual audience of my work. A story is a powerful thing and being able to tell stories through film is going to continue to be a really fun thing for me and my friend Josh to learn how to do. We plan on shooting some videos this summer for fun but also to learn more about the process and how to improve it. Josh has to shoot a couple of important videos for school and I am going to try and help and learn as much as possible with him. For this shoot we used a Canon 5dmkII, a Canon 6d, a Canon S110, and a Nikon D7000. We had a 70-200 on the 6d and a 85mm on the 5d. The D7000 had a 50mm 1.4 on it. Audio was recorded using 2 wireless lapel mics and a motu audio interface into my laptop. Heres our video…
MICHAEL MONGIN 