sirius thoughts

Just returned from a week in Phoenix at the A’s spring training facilities shooting commercials for the 2010 Oakland A’s season. I had a great time working with director DJ O’Niel of Hub Strategy, and brought along Joe Mendoza to light and Aaron Meister to AC. I was thankful that I could bring in these key players as it proved pivotal to handling our super tight schedule. We scouted for a day and a half, picking angles, calling lenses, figuring blocking and light placement. It’s always nice to have a firm game plan going in to battle … especially since we had about two hours to shoot each spot.

The combination of key players worked together very well, including the producers/creative team from Hub and local hire keys as AD and Key Grip. So well that we were able to grab an extra spot one day and finish early every day (except the last day when we were just on time).

I’ll also have to give big ups to the A’s players who were wonderfully humored and let their natural talent come through. We ended up with some pretty funny stuff in the can.

Working with multiple players can always be a challenge as their time is tightly scheduled. Add in such variables as live bulls, firecrackers, tight restrictions on what can go on a baseball diamond and you’ve just opened a whole can of worms. But at the end of each day, and the end of the week, it was smiles all around. I’m looking forward to the next time we get together.

Early on in the process we talked about what camera to shoot on. Hub has an EX3 they’ve been using for the bulk of their work. We knew the schedule was going to be tight so we explored using a DSLR with video (like the 5D Mark II) as a light weight rig that would be easy to move around. Two things made us go in a different direction …

When we explored the scripts closer and crafted the shot list we saw we were after between 3 and 5 shots each spot. And I received a quote for a kitted out Canon 5D Mark II package with the proper accessories to shoot our setups (multiple lenses, focus rings, matte box, etc.) the quote wasn’t significantly less than a Red package (at least one in SF). I had a talk with Joe and Aaron about the different setups and we decided the best too was going to be Red.

I am no fan of carting large camera packages through airports, mainly due to the horror stories that I’ve heard from boxes tossed around spilling out. I usually open them and find both a TSA notice and things mispacked after they pawed through them, most often with something sharp resting against something it shouldn’t. Turns out, however that the price/packaging from our source in Phoenix wasn’t matching up. They were much too expensive/wrong equipment and it was cheaper to fly my package out even with USAir’s excessively stupid baggage fees.

The results are often what matter most, and the camera Red was the right call for this gig. And we kitted out their EX3 with a Pro35 adapter so the Red Prime package would work on both cameras. On set, I wasn’t terribly crazy about how they were matching up. But I’ll reserve my judgement until I’m sitting in the color session and it starts to get pushed around.

HackingEthics