Yet another whirlwind couple of weeks at 515, but we don’t want it any other way! 515 was contacted by a client about shooting a campaign commercial for Iowa Congressman Bruce Braley. Campaign commercials have always been on our list of things to shoot seeing as Iowa is full of them. So we jumped at the chance.
While gathering the 515 team for the shoot I got an email from the client asking “are you available for a campaign event on tuesday in cedar rapids?” Now 515’s rule of thumb is the answer is always “yes”, it wasn’t till after I set it all up that I found out is was for President Obama and we would be traveling in his motorcade all day. Not a bad gig! The plan was to follow the President to 3 stops during the day and get footage of him for his next campaign commercial. I have to say, it was a very surreal moment driving down the highways, and neighborhood streets in a motorcade, all the on and off ramps of the highways are closed, no cars in sight, and the neighborhoods are in full lock down mode. The logistics that must go with what should be a simple task (driving from point A to point B) are just mind boggling! The producer, sound op and myself got to sit in on a discussion between the President and a family, then we followed the entourage to his next stop which was a rally at a high school. After the rally, we headed to an ice cream shop and at that point the President may, or may not have offered to buy me ice cream. replaying the moment in my head I am pretty sure he was looking at me when he asked. I could be wrong though.
I get asked a lot after gigs like the trip to China, or the shoot with Bear Grylls, or this most recent shoot with the President, “was it amazing?” of “what was it like?” These are hard questions to answer, as any cameraman will tell you. Our job is to stay in the shadows. To get the best possible footage while not getting in the way. To not miss a nano second because that nano second will probably be the best part of the whole video. So your eye is glued to the viewfinder the entire time. To the cameraman, its a very detached feeling when you are shooting these events. So the answer is “yes and no” and “I have no idea”. You never really get to experience the actual moment or atmosphere when you are shooting these things, but its truly an honor to be there none the less.
The following few days were filled with location scouting, and prepping the team for the campaign shoot. When I say location scouting, I mean it. We were never more than 20 miles away from Waterloo (the site of the first shot) yet we put on 100 miles driving in circles. Always fun! Shoot day started at 5am with the temp at a cool 83 degrees. It was going to be a hot one. The convoy consisted of the 3 ton grip truck, the 515 crew/camera truck loaded to the gills and one more vehicle to bring the Gaffer, Grip and Makeup artist to the location, gotta love convoys! The crew pulled off some amazing things on a pretty tight schedule. lots of resets, and re-locates. They never missed a beat, and everyone had a good time despite the 97 degree heat.
As for the tech side of things, we shot this commercial using our F3 in S-log mode, recording to the Atomos Samurai in ProRes HQ. That codec isn’t ideal for AVID, but for now its all that was available to us. Everything worked great, no hiccups and S-Log never looked so good!
After the shoot wrapped, we hustled back to Des Moines to re-pack the gear for our Whole Foods shoot. They were opening a new store in Iowa and tapped us to handle shooting profiles on some local growers, and then to cover the grand opening of the store itself. The heat wasn’t going away either. Needless to say it was a long week of production for the 515 team, but as I said before, we wouldn’t want it any other way!
-
- Viewfinders galore!
