Location shoot

While I wouldn’t say that it was an unqualified success, yesterday’s fête promo shoot went pretty darn well. Call at seven, wrap at eight. Edited the afternoon of. Location picked the previous morning.

Lessons learned: (1) The old Bogen 3020 just doesn’t cut it for shooting video on uneven terrain. Time to buy a Manfrotto 546GB. (2) Cheap glass is as cheap glass does, after all. But not because the Vivitar wide-angle lens pincushions. I actually like that effect. It’s the uneven focus that I can’t abide — sharp at the center, soft-ish at the edges. (3) It might have been better to use a lavalier instead of a shotgun for the talent. Residential side streets one block off North Main can be a bit … um … acoustically rich first thing on a weekday morning.

Lessons confirmed: (1) It really is good idea to do a dry tech in situ the day before. Had I known exactly what the light was going to be, I’d have gotten there an hour earlier and brought supplemental lighting. (2) FreeSound.org totally freakin’ rocks. There was birdsong aplenty during the shoot, but raising the gain enough to capture it would have pulled in traffic noises that we didn’t want. Also, the cat we hired to walk through the background of one of our shots, while quite graceful, forgot his line. We didn’t notice this until post-production. Fortunately, FreeSound has that line in several cat languages. We chose French. C’est meow.