Harlaxton College: WKU-ETV in England

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.

An Inside Look at Outlook

WKYU-PBS's public affairs program, Outlook is currently in it’s 22nd season of production. Although Outlook is a professional studio production, many viewers do not know that most of the production is done by students. As members of the student crew, we were asked to produce a piece designed to show the viewer a side of Outlook not seen before, an inside look.

Shooting was a fairly simple process. We used two Sony PDW-700 HD cameras with Canon lenses. In the control room we used a wide angle lens to capture 2-shots and 3-shots in a confined area. In the studio a telephoto lens allowed us to not interfere with the production but still capture close-ups and details in the studio.

The control room was dimly lit, so we used two Lowel Tota flood lights, bounced off the ceiling from about three feet away. We placed the lights in opposite corners of the room in order to evenly illuminate the small control room without causing any harsh shadows.

To shoot the interviews, we used an LEDz Trio Kit and the Outlook set as a backdrop. The Outlook set has a lighting system with the capability to change colors, so we used this to our advantage and switched colors between interviews. We shot most of our subjects in front of the Outlook set to show that they are a part of the production, but not on the show itself. When interviewing the director, Josh Niedwick, we set him in the control room to reflect his role in the production.

Post Production was a more difficult and tedious process than expected. We put together a three minute rough cut, but decided that the content focused on too many aspects of the show for that short amount of time. We found that we couldn’t provide enough details for each point that we had outlined so we scrapped the idea completely. Starting again from scratch, we directed our content in a way that focused more on the students' role in the production and less on the show itself.

Throughout producing this three minute piece, we learned the importance of using lights to separate the subject from the background. This is key to showing the details of the hair and shoulders of the subject. We also learned that you can never shoot too much B-Roll which is a problem that arose as we were desperately searching for more footage near the end of post. Also, we learned something that we feel is crucial to creating stories: Know what you want, but always be willing to change. We had a thought of what we wanted the piece to look like, but after all the interviews we realized that maybe it would flow better going a different route. We hope you agree.

Austin Anderson, WKU Junior & Cameron Epperson, WKU Sophomore

An Inside Look on Outlook from WKU ETV - PRODUCTION on Vimeo.

WKU Admissions Video

It was a no brainer to use our recently acquired Sony PDW 700 XDCAM HD Cameras on WKU’s new admissions video. WKU’s campus is perhaps one of the most beautiful in the region and the HD format really allowed us to showcase the campus throughout the video.

We were going to need a wide variety of footage since one of the goals of the video is to give prospective students a really good sense of life at WKU. This meant that we would need locations on campus at different times of year and all the different events, activities, and academic prospects that take place on the hill. This created an interesting production workflow, since some of the footage could be acquired in more controlled set ups, while other shots were more “grab the camera and go” types of shoots when we would spot something on campus that we felt would fit perfectly in the project. The end result was footage that really illustrates WKU’s wonderful campus, while also giving the audience a real sense of daily life at the university.


WKU Admissions Video from WKU ETV - PRODUCTION on Vimeo.