Under Armour and Qualtrics
The Situation
This is a project that the team at Qualtrics has been trying to get off the ground for three years and for good reason. The story is very understandable and just a cool subject matter. There were two locations we needed to film the first was in Baltimore MA and the other in Portland OR. To get this project done we had to film in Baltimore in mid December than in Portland mid January. So things were a little spread out. Sadly for you the reader I had to sign an NDA that prohibited me from taking any pictures outside of the video I was shooting in the facility. This was because of the secrete techniques and development they were going through for their upcoming products. So my documentation is limited on this project. However for all the b-roll I was able to get some shots.
The Interviews
We wanted a very direct and powerful approach to the interviews so we decided to have each interviewee look directly into the camera. To accomplish this we used a piece of equipment called an eye direct. Which is basically a two way mirror so the interviewee sees the interviewer directly in the view finder rather than a lens. This helps them be more genuine in their delivery.
Under Armour had a fantastic in house team and studio in Baltimore that they let us use for the day and was the one place they allowed me to take some pictures. Now our mood boards called for a dark background so we had to use a lot of solids and negative fill to get the look we wanted and I think it turned out pretty awesome. We used the Alexa Mini as our A cam and the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K as our B cam and second angle of the interview if we ever needed it. However the plan was to stay on the wide as much as possible.
The B Roll
Because of the NDA I can’t show any of the B Roll we got in Baltimore however we did hire some actors and booked a location in Portland to film some B Roll there. The story was all based around Under Armour’s new development of their cushioning platform called Hovr. So we filmed a couple running in the shoes and getting ready in the morning for their daily run. We got super lucky with weather. We filmed the running outside first thing in the morning and than everything inside in the afternoon. And in the afternoon it started raining pretty good.
Now I do need to point out that while we were in Baltimore we were given access to 23TB of Under Armour footage and told flat out that we needed to use that footage for the majority of the video. Which to be honest was awesome because we were crunched so much on time to be able to film all of it. So the majority of the B-roll we focused on was running and people giving feedback through Qualtrics which Under Armour really didn’t have.
The last piece of the puzzle was making the story feel as big as possible and since we had already planned a trip to Japan and Sweden we decided to film extra b roll while we were there to make the story feel more global. I will be posting about that one in a separate post because I want to be able to go into a little more detail.