Corporate Interview with A1

[Bill Grant]

Hey Gys,
This is an extremely boring clip, but I figured I would share my first real corporate job with the A1. I did this for AIG retirement as an interview with one of their biggest clients which is a local hospital. It is also my first lighting job. I used 500 watt JTL everlights. 1 at about 8 o'clock and one at 2 o'clock (I have the camera at 6:00 right?) anyway ,they were very pleased, and even though it is boring, I am pretty proud of my first time job. This was done in his office which is a 10' x 10' box. with 8 ft ceilings, and a very loud air conditioner. Thanks in advance for any responses.
www.grantphotovideo.com/AIG

[Richard Gooderick]

Seems like a perfectly good job to me.

If I was going to try to improve it I'd try to make the sound better. Perhaps by turning the air conditioner off if that was possible. Or booming him from overhead.

[Bill Grant]

Richard, I was stressing about that AC, but it is a huge hospital system and I called maintenance about it. They said that they couldn't shut it off. I think it came out ok, and the customer seemed happy, so no harm no foul I guess. I used the sennheiser G2. Th only thing I don't like is they way he's sort of slumped in the chair. I had to make a decision on postion because his desk was so messy, and we didn't have time to clean it up. We had 30 minutes to do everything, and he talked for about 15. Thanks for the comments.
Bill

[Paul Leung]

Bill,

Great job. The only improvement I can think of is that light is a bit flat. I would like to see more highlights on his faces. How did you find the JTL lights? Good value?? Did you have the softbox on?

Have you tried clearing the a/c noise using noise removal filters in your NLE? No harm to give it a try.

[Bill Busby]

It's fairly easy to remove/reduce that AC noise with an audio program that has noise reduction capabilities such as Adobe Audition, etc. All you need is about a 1/2 sec or so of just the noise & then create a noise profile out of that & use that setting for the actual noise reduction.

[Bill Grant]

Actually,
Embarrassingly, I did remove a good bit of the hum in Audition. I got it right to the point where it started to sound robotic, and stopped. I did not use the softboxes on the JTLs I bounced them into umbrellas. I acutally burnt up 3 bulbs just playing with the lights, so that made me wary of encasing them in sofboxes you know? Anyway, Thanks for hte comments. I guess it will improve with practice...
Bill

[Don Ward]

Looks good. I might have used a couple different camera angles to go from segment to segment. That allows you to eliminate the the black fade transitions as it looks as though the speaker is just going from camera 1 to camera 2. Have the speaker do an imaginary turn from/to the other camera at the beginning and end of each segment. It also makes it look like you own multiple cameras :^)

[Bill Grant]

That's an interesting point Don, actually I do own two, but neither they nor I really knew what we were going to do with this, and If I shot with two cameras, or changed the angles, I would have complicated a very simple situation. Does that make sense? Also they just requested one camera, and I quoted them on one.
Bill

[Don Ward]

Makes sense. I'm a rookie so please take my observation through that filter. I do have some experience working in thrown together situations where no one knows what to expect, and I agree with the K.I.S.S. principle. Nice work.

[Bill Grant]

Hey I have both of your only dvinfo posts in my thread. Welcome!
Bill

[Richard Gooderick]

Hi Bill
I think that if you only had 30 minutes you did a great job.

[Jerome Cloninger]

Hey Bill! For a 30 minute for everything shoot, I think it turned out really good. The only other thing I could point out is framing him differently... maybe tighter on his face and not show his gut at all. Looked very unflattering for his sake.

[Bill Grant]

You know J,
That was my first thought. Actually, I framed it in 16x9 with the 4x3 guides but once he started talking, I had to just keep it going. I figured I would rearrange it once I got it into vegas, but they seemed to really like the framing, and everything, so I ran with it.
Oh well.
Bill

[Shahryar Rizvi]

There seems to be some good simple advice here shooting a documentary. Thanks guys, when I get around to purchasing my XH-A1 hopefully soon, I'm sure this info will come in handy.