Bencredible

This shoot is for an upcoming SuperNerds interview. I won’t mention who is in it until I pass that by Cringely, but I will talk a little bit about the challenges of shooting outside.

As you can see, we didn’t need to break out the light kit, but we did need a lot of light reflection. This was a very hard shoot and the first time we did a SuperNerds episode outside, which Bob is not a huge fan of. I hate having walls as my background. Plain walls with maybe a picture and a plant is very, very boring and shows no character. We don’t need to have a castle behind the talent, but something that shows where we are is a good thing. At Yahoo! we were not only pressed for time but also didn’t have any good places to shoot indoors. Since the HVX200 does a great job outside, that’s what we went with.

There are several problems with shooting video outdoors. The first and largest problem is that the sun moves. A lot. From the point we started recording to the point we stopped (not including setup) I would estimate that the sun and more specifically the shadows moved 50 feet. When using the sun as a backlight and using that to fill in the face, that becomes very hard. What ended up happening is that at about 30 minutes into the interview Bob’s reflector didn’t have any light on it anymore and at about 45 minutes into the interview our guest lost his. The sun didn’t set, but it did cast a shadow. This was very easily solved by flipping down a neutral density filter or two as well as tweaking the iris. Made for very complex camera work, but really good looking video.

The second problem with shooting outside is power. Finding enough power to run two cameras, two laptops, two hard drives and anything else we may need (no lights though) can be a challenge. We had to run a special box outside and even that was 50 feet short. We always bring 200 feet of extension cables with us, so it was no issue.

The last big issue we ran into was sound. With cars honking their horns and people yelling on their cell phones, it makes audio very complex. You’ll hear me state this a lot: video is 80% audio. To compensate for this we used head worn mics that have a very narrow pickup pattern. This worked great and we ended up with awesome audio.
Fun stuff. While shooting outside would seem easier than setting up a full light kit indoors it’s actually very complex. Hopefully the episode will turn out well and everyone will like it.

Ed, Jeremy and I were driving back to SFO to catch a flight home after taping the latest SuperNerds episodes.