Field Production:
WKU-ETV had the opportunity in April of 2009 to travel to Harlaxton College near Grantham, England to shoot an HD overview of the facility and grounds. The Manor House was built in the 1830s for a wealthy Nottinghamshire businessman. Built in Ancaster stone, it is a blending of Gothic, Jacobethan and Baroque styles that contribute to a fairly dramatic appearance—especially at sunset. Our crew consisted of five people: location producer, dp/ld, associate producer, videographer/editor, and videographer/grip. According to our carnet, we traveled with 138 individual items of production related gear. Among those items were 15 – 50 GB Professional Discs, 12 C-47 clips, 11 Rosco gels, 10 voltage converter plugs, and 10 voltage appropriate bulbs for lights. Our equipment compliment also featured a Sony PDW700 XDCAM HD422 camera with a Canon HJ11ex4.7B (4.7-52mm) wide angle lens. We used Gitzo legs attached to a Sachtler 20P tripod head. Audio was acquired via Sony ECM-88B lav mics and Sennheiser ME66/K6 shotgun mics. Our lighting kit included a Kino Flo Diva-Lite 400, an Arri 650 watt fresnel, an Arri 300 watt Fresnel, two Lowel Tota-lights, and two FlexFill reflectors. We tried to pack light but still be prepared for any possible situation.
Shooting that location posed several challenges. We had to plan time slots for each location and had limited back and forth communication ability among the crew. The location was such that we could be shooting in one area and setting lights in another. We shot from sunrise through sunset so keeping batteries charged and the crew fresh was a challenge also. The location provided several beautiful angles and colors. Some of the visuals ended up being stunning—it is a tremendous setting with the building, garden, and grounds. We were fortunate to have four days of sunshine. We utilized three different videographers’ perspectives and took turns bringing our own individual “looks” to the piece. The biggest challenge we faced was sound. It amazed us how in such a large building there were very few quiet rooms. We ended up shooting most interviews in the atrium both during the day and at night—some as late as 11:30pm. It gave us the most privacy but provided its own set of issues being constructed mostly of glass.
We had no technical complications during field production and enjoyed getting to know the campus at Harlaxton and the people in nearby Grantham. They were all very helpful.
Post Production:
We knew that there would be some challenges in the post process of the Harlaxton video right from the start. The fact that we had one week to get every single shot required meant that just about every bit of space on all of our recording media we brought with us was used. When we returned we had 15 XDCam discs full with 50 Mbps video, which amounted to a ballpark figure of 18 hours of footage. Even when imported into our Avid edit system as proxies (1.5 Mbps MPEG-4, 352 by 288 recordings) the amount of storage required was staggering. We allocated one terabyte of our AVID Unity SAN (Storage Area Network) to the project and after ingesting all the proxies we were looking at the drive space being at about 65% capacity.
Careful media management was important to ensure a smooth workflow. All footage was logged and interviews transcribed by members of our student staff. The proxies were then sub clipped and additional metadata based on the logs was attached. I had the footage organized into designated bins; all external building footage had its own bin, as did what we called “internal beauty shots.” We also had bins for all class room footage, campus activities, and of course interviews, which were divided up into staff, faculty, and student. The Avid bin headings and search feature really helped in organizing and locating that one specific shot that was hidden among the 18 hours of footage.
I was also tasked with writing the project which even with a co-workers help was a daunting task. With over twelve interviews to work though we decided to give Avid ScriptSync a try. The process was fairly simple, ensure that the interview was transcribed properly; link the text file to the clip, and the Avid did the rest. From that point on all we had to do was double click a line of text and the Avid immediately loaded the clip cued to that exact same line. This meant that instead of scrubbing through a 30-minute interview to find a specific sound bite, we simply selected it in the script, and dropped it in the time line.
The entire project was a great teaching tool to help our student staff learn the concept of ardent metadata management, and consideration of the post process during pre-production and production to help ensure a successful completion of a project.
Harlaxton College: WKU in England from WKU ETV - PRODUCTION on Vimeo.
