Normally the first part of the year is dreadfully slow, but thankfully January is looking to be a busy month. This past week I spent a couple days in Baton Rouge, LA with HSC.tv shooting an interview for the 2020 College Football National Championship.
HSC had two crews shooting different content at the same time at the LSU football practice facility. The main crew was shooting multiple interviews in the LSU Football Trophy room while we were covering an interview with ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit and LSU's Heisman Trophy winning quarterback Joe Burrow. Pretty sure we all flew with a carry-on of HSC gear (camera bodies & batteries) plus something like 18 checked bags.
We shot the interview with two Arri Amiras, a Mini on a Movi setup, and the reverse angle was on a Panasonic EVA. Not sure of the lights we used, but they were HSC's and the local gaffer and key grip were great. Originally we were supposed to only have 30 minutes total with Joe Burrow and needed to shoot the interview, a walk and talk down a hallway, and footage of the two talking and playing catch on the indoor practice field. Our main DP, Brian (TwZ) Brousseau, had us set our color temps to the lighting on practice field and then gel our main HMI light for the interview to match the color. Pretty sure that was the first time I'd gone that route and it worked out great. We ended up getting a bit more time, but I'm crazy glad we planned and rehearsed ahead of time to find and work out potential problems ahead of time.
We did have an issue getting enough exposure in the interview without going above 800 ISO on the Amira and Canon 17-120mm lens pair. The lens for the wide shot was able to open up to T2.95, but the lens ramps up to a T3.9 and we were at the end of the zoom for the tight shot. We were maxed out on the light output to begin with considering how high it had to be in order to not be in the reverse shot. Then we lost more output considering the gels we used to match the color temperature in the practice facility. We were able to dial in the setup to get the exposure we needed then had to add a black wrap scoop at the bottom of the light so we'd not blow out the seats directly in front of our interview.
It's always crazy to me how many views these projects get. By the time this post goes up this video will already have had nearly 106k views. Absolutely grateful I got to be a very small part of it.