Filming in Maine with LL Bean Part 1
In mid October 2018 I had the opportunity to film with LL Bean and Qualtrics on a cross promotional piece of work. The major lesson learned in the shoot was how difficult it is to be a great DP without being actively involved in preproduction. The week and a half that we had for preproduction I spent the last 5 days of that week in Seattle helping my mother with her back surgery. Because I was long distance from the Director and Producer it made it very hard to get all of the information. On top of all that we had to set up another crew to film at the same time in Park City Utah as we were filming in Maine. There were so many pieces and I just didn’t get the full download of everything due to being so long distance and only getting to Maine 18 hours before we filmed.
The Interviews
One of the big pieces that change while I was in Seattle was shooting all interviews outside. LL Beans big push was Be an Outsider. So because of that the CEO of LL Bean wanted all the interviews we did outside. I hadn’t fully planned for that as I had added a bunch of lights to the grip and electric package thinking we would film those inside. This posed a big challenge. Every DPs worst nightmare is sporadic cloud cover. And that is what we had for the majority of the interviews. So I had to constantly have my monitor on false color and be changing the aperture on my lens to compensate for the change in exposer. But in the end we it worked out. Plus we had some of the most amazing location for the interviews. Just beautiful stuff. We had 8 interviews and 3 locations so it was a lot of interviews.
The Gear
I used C200 and Ursa Mini 4.6K with Zeiss CP.2 Cine lenses. We had 2 small HD 7” Bright monitors and a 17” directors monitor which was fed through the teredek 500 wireless system. For all of the b-roll I used the ronin 2 and readyrig but more on that later. I wanted the C200 because of its small compact size and weight. Also for the built in NDs as I knew I would be using it for all broll and wanted the ronin 2 to be as light as possible. But I didn’t bring matte box and NDs for the Ursa Mini 4.6K because it was my B camera for interviews which I thought we were filming inside. Lucky for me our sound guy knew a guy who lived 10 minutes from our locations and durning lunch ran and got it for me. Which saved my bacon hardcore. This is why it is super important to be in all prepro meetings you can to get all this information as early as possible