Commercial Shoot

Last Friday I shot a commercial for BPS Marketing for the Ft. Wayne Home & Garden Show. That in itself isn't too big of a deal, but there were some rather extra-ordinary occurrences, at least form my perspective. First off, this shoot had been rescheduled three times. Yes, we were on plan D before we got to shoot. Actually there was another plan in there at one point - shooting part or most of it on green screen - but that was nixed due to budget. Mother nature was the culprit for the delays. A snow storm, and ice storm, and simply too cold of temps were the exact causes. A bump in TV air dates helped make the rescheduling a little easier to bear, but last Friday became the only day left we could do it in order to meet the dates required to get it on air. Last Friday's forecast, on different days the week prior, varied wildly, from highs of teens to upper 20's, from sunny to cloudy, and one day even with a chance of snow.

It was cold, to be sure, when crew call time came about at 7:30am - with wind chill it was in the single digits. Thankfully the first part of the shoot was scheduled to be in a garage. Once we got gear unloaded and started setting up, I finally got warm, and really wasn't cold again until we were finished loading everything back up at the end of the day.

The second occurrence was one of the cameras we used. We wanted a humorous, goofy vibe for the commercial, so I recommended shooting with a wide angle lens for the distortion. CLients liked that idea, but it is something I can't achieve with my Panasonic HVX200, unless I rent a screw on filter. The cost to rent one though was beyond crazy. BPS had just purchased a Nikon D7000, so I recommended shooting on it with my Nikon 10.5mm fisheye. They were hesitant at first, but after doing some camera tests with it, we were both convinced that it could be done and done well (I had to convince myself as well).

 A still taken from the Nikon D7000 video. Click to view full size (1280 x 720).

The D7000 performed really well overall. We ended up shooting with BPS's Tamron 10-24mm lens rather than my fisheye - you could see too much with the fisheye, and we were operating in close quarters where we couldn't hide all the stuff that would have ended up in the shot. Having a histogram is really nice, although it would be even better if you could access it while shooting rather than only in playback mode. I relied on it a number of times to make sure our exposure was good. The wider angle lens made it a little easier to handhold without all the shake, although we were locked down most of the time. I didn't have a follow focus, so we worked around that with the shots. Thankfully, it never became a problem. To shoot all day, you are going to want at least two batteries. We went most of the way through the second one.

From what I've seen of the shots on the computer, I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. There's one shot that sounds like is going to need some finessing, but I'll help with that. I'm anxious to see an edit of the spot (which should happen tomorrow). Once I get the okay, I'll post it here, or at least a link to it.