This week was entirely spent shooting with a crew from lynda.com who came up from California to record our newest course in my studio in Ashland. Which was so cool!
We're generally asked to not reveal the title of the course before publishing, but you can definitely get some ideas of what were doing from all these behind the scenes photos. We had two different "locations" in the studio, and each one of those had multiple setups. Then we finished with some software recordings in my new recording studio. Monday to Wednesday were pretty much 12 hour shoot days, as we were trying to get as much done as possible before the rains came on Wednesday. My metal roof doesn't lend itself to recording audio in the main shoot studio, so we were really cramming. But we did it!
Here's a selection of behind the scene photos from the week…
It doesn't take long to turn all that open space into a total disaster area!
Some of the lights you see were for the video set itself; some were part of the content. As you can imagine, it can be a little tricky showing anything to do with lighting on video and not having the lights that light the set interfere with the demo setup.
Using the Atamos Ninja Asassin, we were able to capture the camera interface from my LUMIX GX8 throughout the course. This means in the final video, viewers will get to see exactly what the camera sees during setup, which is very, very cool.
Tony, director/shooter on the right, and Ben, as second shooter on the left. You can see Brittany in the background as well. Lots, and lots, and lots of notes taken per shot help the editors later assemble exactly what we want from the video.
That's me, reviewing notes for an upcoming shot or maybe playing with a photo we just made.
Here's one of the photos created during the course. Everything you see (or will see) was created in realtime, meaning the setups were all done live. Yes a little pre-planning helped speed things up, but setups were quite simple to illustrate individual, specific points. What I'm saying is if you see something here that isn't "perfect" (like the statue in front being in shadow), that's probably because that wasn't the focus of this video. What was the focus? Well that I can't tell you yet… ;-)
This is a cool setup, which we used for course and some individual video introductions. Basically if I had a lot to say without much to do, (show vs tell), it happened here. I love how my studio looks in the background!
One more shot created in the course. I'll give you a hint… the background is created with a Fiilex LED light and barn doors.
Westcott Lighting was kind enough to send out a big pile of gear for me to use in this course as well… thanks guys! Now, you didn't want this back or anything, did you?! ;-)
The week ahead
Next week is planning head, playing catchup, and recording videos for PhotoApps.Expert. I got the final approval on a really big project to entirely shoot, edit and deliver this month, which I'm still waiting to hear how much I can share about in advance. I hope I can share a lot because it's going to be super cool while in production! If I can't, then there's going to be a lot of silence from me. And maybe some fun travel photos.