Over the past week I've been on the road filming interviews based out of Bellevue Washington. This project posed quite the challenge, as I was the single production production guy. Pre-production, production, lighting, audio, camera, interviewer - all me. Doing this makes you stop and really think "do I really need that extra piece of gear. With 4 trips from the car to location for every set-up, I wish I had thought through that a bit more.
It was a turbulent week. I'm located in Spokane and the production was to take place in Bellevue (260 miles and 4 hours away). I drove over Tuesday for preproduction and again Thursday for the two day production, thus returning Saturday to continue post-production.
My view during the morning commute to Bellevue.
"Call-Time" Thursday was 7:00am ~ meaning a 2:00am departure from Spokane. "Surely", you no doubt ask, "why not leave the night before and or just stay there?" ~ to which I say, that's simply how it worked with family. Family first.
Production was long - monitoring every input and feed from various kinds of technology can be exhausting ~ but boy was it fun.
I utilized a Nikon D750 and D3100 (more as a behind the scenes camera than anything else). A 24-70 tokina lens was my primary ~ never needed to swap actually. A dolly was also used for some sweeping shots of the room.
For all the stress it brings, "mobile media" gives the maximum experience ~ not to mention a work-out hauling gear to and fro.
Returning to the hotel after each production days I began post-production, first backing up the days work and then tagging clips for later editing. I'm normally a Final Cut Pro-X editor, but this job required me to break out the Adobe suite.
Needless to say, I still prefer Final Cut Pro-X ~ despite what mainstream editors say.
Anywhere can be a desk during mobile productions.