Breakfast Shoot With The CEO

Camera and light setup.

My friend and fellow Clock Factorian Paul Jaffe had a video to create for Cooley LLP - a major San Francisco law firm with offices on both coasts - and needed me to cover an interview with Joe Conroy, the CEO. The interview was to take place in their offices in downtown San Francisco in one of the conference rooms, commencing around 9 a.m.

I arrived about 7, giving myself plenty of time to get the gear upstairs and set up. The conference room was located on the southeast corner of the building. The structure is unique - it has a square base from which rises a cylindrical tower which means that a lot of the rooms on the lower floors are unusually shaped. The room we were shooting in was triangular.

I was shooting with 2 Sony FS700 cameras. One was locked off and the other was on a slider, though I didn't keep the slider camera moving throughout the shoot. I feel the slider look has already gotten a bit tired, but it was useful for repositioning the camera over the course of the interview.

I used 2 1x1' Litepanel LED lights for illumination and a Sennheiser shotgun mic mounted overhead on a boom along with on-camera mics for syncing. I shot him against the window, so the city was visible in the background. I used zoom lenses and had them at around 100mm, so by keeping the light relatively low and opening up the lens I was able to make the background go soft, separating the subject from the background.

Joe Conroy, Cooley LLP CEO

 Mr. Conroy is a charming, funny, confident man, but like a lot of people he is a little uncomfortable when he is in front of a camera. Rather than try and have him speak extemporaneously or read from a teleprompter we had him interviewed by one of his colleagues. This worked well. He was relaxed and articulate and we wrapped up the interview in about half an hour.

The only difficulty we encountered was in light management. About 20 minutes before the interview was due to start the sun suddenly cleared a building and blasted in through the windows along the south side of the room. The blinds were adequate to prevent direct sunlight from entering the room but because they were white they were visible reflected in the window behind the subject's head. You can see what that looks like in the picture at the top.

The solution came in the form of black tablecloths and bulldog clips. By clipping the tablecloths onto the blinds we were able to control the light sufficiently. It definitely falls into the category of, "it ain't pretty but it works."

Many thanks to Rob Corwin from Cooley LLP, whose help and good humor were invaluable.

The final video is here:

http://www.cooley.com/68931

Cutting Mozilla 2

Paul lived about 10 minutes away and had a reasonably fast internet connection, so my assistant, who I had originally assigned to logging in the footage as it was downloaded, instead ran back and forth between Paul's house and The Clock Factory with hard drives.

We started to get the Toronto footage by about noon on Thursday. The Santa Clara footage came later that afternoon. I was hoping to have the Brussels footage ready to download when I arrived that morning - they are 9 hours ahead - but for some reason the cameraman was having a hard time uploading to our server. It was going so slowly that he had only managed to upload one clip by the time I looked in the Brussels folder.

The math was ugly. We would have 100 of hours of footage and our deadline was 52 work hours away. There was no way it would be physically possible to review all the footage myself. Fortunately we did have some decent notes, so it was possible to decide which pieces of footage had the most promise and start there.

The first day was frustrating, because there really wasn't enough material to start editing and the deadline was fast approaching. We finally told the Brussels team to upload to Dropbox in the hope that it would work better and that turned out to be a good solution. So on Friday morning I finally had enough material to put something together.

There were problems with some of the footage, however. The Toronto team had recorded their audio too hot and it was clipping so badly it was unusable. Some of the footage from Santa Clara hadn't been white balanced properly. It could be corrected but it was really orange and it always looks a little odd to me after correction. Still, it was usable in a pinch. The time-lapse shot from Toronto was good, but we got nothing from Brussels so we ended up using a bit of free footage we found online. It was pretty compressed and it was a sunset but I reversed it and did a little post-magic to it and it worked fine.

In spite of some of the difficulties, by 3 on Saturday afternoon I had a rough cut together. The team came back from Santa Clara and we spent a few hours adding some of the new material and trimming the overall piece back to time - about 2 minutes. The intention was that there would be a longer piece to be cut at a later date so there would be plenty of opportunities to put more of the footage to use.

This is where the post production gods smiled on us. We had limited internet access through a neighbor who let us use their wifi. Usually the service was sporadic and undependable but it decided to behave on Saturday night and Sunday morning, giving us the few minutes of extra time that would make all the difference.

At 9 p.m. we uploaded a cut to the client and waited for their comments.

By midnight we had them. We had done exactly as they asked but after looking it over and conferring with their colleagues they felt it was too generically corporate and didn't really reflect the Mozilla Culture. There were some things they liked - could we expand those things and make the whole video like that?

This is the time in any project where you have a choice - pound your head against the wall in frustration or hunker down and get it done. We chose the second option. We had about 3 and a half hours to recut, color correct, do a mix, render and upload.

No time for tears.

We got it done and uploaded by 3:30. We waited for their OK, got it, did a high 5 and left for home.

Done.

Almost.

About 5 minutes after I left my phone rang. The client noticed that one of the last pieces of video we had dropped into the cut was out of sync. I raced back to the office, somehow managed to slide the clip back into sync and got it uploaded with a couple of minutes to spare.

The client felt we had nailed their culture and were very happy with the video.

Cutting Mozilla

We started our new company The Clock Factory about 2 months ago. For now it's a loose association of like-minded creative people. If all goes well we'll formalize things in the months to come.

The first project we did together as "Clock Factorians" was for Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser. Mozilla were having their annual meeting which was to take place simultaneously in Brussels, Toronto and Santa Clara over a four-day period. Our job was to create an inspirational video that reflected the flavor, energy and values of Mozilla and the "Mozillians" which was to be shown on Sunday during the wrap-up presentations.

This was going to be challenging. We were going to have camera crews in each city - one each in Brussels and Toronto, two in Santa Clara - uploading their footage to our server over the course of the event. With 4 crews shooting 10 hours a day I knew there was a good chance we could be looking at over 100 hours of footage by end of day Saturday. Creating a way to manage this tidal wave of media was going to be absolutely necessary if we had any hope of succeeding.

Additionally we knew we would need graphics - lower thirds and titles - to identify the various Mozilla senior staff and so on. These would need to be designed, approved and animated before we began the process of editing.

So as the editor, the first order of business was generating naming conventions for the project. Naming conventions are a series of 3-letter codes that are strung together separated by underscores that make managing media a lot easier than other haphazard systems. It makes organizing and searching easy, because if you understand the conventions you can spit out a code - say, "moz_bru_fri_int_ceo" (which would mean MOZilla BRUssels FRIday INTerview CEO) and everything in that category will appear. It's much better than the haphazard approach that most people take with descriptive names, since if you forget the description you end up having to scroll through hundreds of shots to find what you're looking for.

Once that was out of the way I developed several designs for lower thirds and titles based on the graphics Mozilla had developed for the event. We shared them with the client who liked one in particular and after a couple of tweaks I rendered out lower thirds for all the senior people we knew would be attending and saved the After Effects project so I could add more lower thirds or revise existing ones for whatever reason.

Meanwhile my friend and fellow Clock Factorian Paul Jaffe was shooting time lapses of the San Francisco skyline at sunrise. Our plan was to get time-lapse sunrises from each city as a way to start the video. After a couple of tries Paul got what he wanted and we were set.

On the eve of production start we were feeling pretty good about where we were. Aubrey, another Clock Factorian had set up the server; Amelia, also a Clock Factorian who was the director for this project had organized our shot list for the 3 day period, scouted the location thoroughly, gotten together a great crew and we were confident that we were well prepared.

There was just one small problem: we had no internet.

We'd been in the space for a month and we'd been promised repeatedly by the giant monopolistic cable corporation that we would have internet service "soon" but the date kept slipping and here we were faced with a project in which we absolutely, positively HAD to have internet service.

What to do?

Part 2 comes next week.