The last six days had me in dress blacks and wearing a robot while filming teenagers play video games for a living. I was back at it with HSC.tv and their client shooting a documentary about the Fortnite World Cup here in New York. This was in addition to the Fortnite ProAm event we shot mid-June out in LA. Not sure when the documentary comes out, but the producers took a TREMENDOUSLY DEEP dive into all that went on to make the event happen.
The numbers and scale of everything involved in this project are absolutely mind boggling – especially to someone (me) not even close to being a gamer. Something like 40 million Fortnite players from around the world participated and 300+ qualified for the event. Each qualifier earned $50,000 and competed for even more money. The winners in the Duo and Solo events took home a combined $6,000,000.
Not surprisingly the New York Times was out in force at the event and released a whole slew of articles about the Fortnite World Cup event, winners, and also into the business side of whether or not the genere has peaked.
You up to talk about gear? Well, I'd mentioned wearing a robot for six days on this job. The HSC.tv crew was shooting on two Arri Amiras along with an Alexa Mini. Most the time the DP was shooting handheld on an Amira with a Canon 17-120 zoom lens; I was on Movi duty and wearing a Ready Rig with the Mini and a small handful of wide Zeiss CP2s and another 11-16mm lens.
The interviews were shot on the two Amiras and CP2s and a couple of the interview setups had me operating on the assistant side of the camera seeing as how there wasn't enough space on the operator side. In flipping the ARRI viewfinder to the other side of the camera, the flip out monitor self-corrected, but the image in the eyepiece was upside down. Surely there's a fix in the menu side of things, but we didn't have time for that nonsense. Absolutely a mind blow trying to frame up and focus a shot upside down.
Side note: I couldn't tell you how many times I got asked something along the lines of "How much does that weigh?" or "Is that heavy?" Yes, for the most part but that's why the Ready Rig was there to help take the strain of carrying the Movi/Mini setup off my arms. As any normal person would do, after the third or fourth day I ended up making tally marks everytime a stranger mentioned it. The picture below was right after I got started tracking it, but by the end of the shoot I was using two pieces of tape.