Filming Volkswagen Australia
Filming overseas is always more difficult and super rewarding. It is twice if not three times more pre production work but you get to see a totally new place. When the project Volkswagen Australia project spun up of course it was right when our director and producer Janssen was going to have his first born so it complicated things dramatically. Because of this we hired some extra help in Australia Sarah Cloutier from cloutierfilms to handle a lot of the UPMing on the ground. She was amazing. After the experience we had with her we decided it was worth their weight in gold to hire a UPM for all project that are abroad.
But enough about the pre production lets get into the best day of the whole shoot. The car filming day. This was my first time ever filming something at this scale. We had a drone, a follow car, a movi to a car rig and an amazing location. The crew had 15+ years more experience than me and where well older than me. To say the least it was very intimidating. I remember sitting in my hotel room the night before making sure all of my batteries were charged and just sitting there thinking this is it they are all going to know I’m a hack, that I have no idea what I am doing. It was the first time in my career that I truly felt so out of place and way out of my league. However the next day came and I did what I always do. I shot awesome footage the best I could. The crew although far older and more experienced than me were just super supportive had no egos and just help make the day as fantastic as it could be.
The shoot started at 3am in order to get sunrise which unfortunately wasn’t super epic, it was nice just not as pretty as we were hoping. We had the C300 Mark ii on the Movi Pro rigged up to the back of a follow truck. I used the mimic to get the shots from the front seat as the VW Golf followed behind. All in all it was a very successful day. I loved it. One of the best shooting days I have ever had.
What I learned from the whole thing was if I am going to do a shoot like this again. I am going to push harder to get the budget to close the road because it was difficult waiting for traffic and the drone wasn’t allowed to ever fly over the road. But we had limited budget and time so we opted not to close the road.