After several months of adjusting to fatherhood (and believe me I still am), I accepted a job to shoot and edit a promo for a new Gardener’s Supply Company product called MyGreens Light Garden. It was a great experience and the perfect shoot to get my feet wet again after more focused attention on my new daughter.
The idea was to create a 3 minute web promo that demonstrates how easy the product is to use. Fortunately, we had a great team to pull this off in a day. The Gardener’s Supply staff, led by Susan Romanoff, chose a good location at a model home in South Burlington. Susan, Lizzy, Ryan, Kate and others dressed the set quite nicely, transforming the otherwise fine kitchen into something a bit more lived in and welcoming. We were fortunate to have Fran Stoddard as the producer and talent, as she’s always a team player and understands both sides of the camera. Assisting me directly was Peregrine Productions‘ Vince Franke, who served as my Grip and Gaffer. His lighting suggestions saved the day at a few key points.
Though I’m woefully short on production stills, I can at least describe the gear we had in tow. I was quite psyched to have along my new Sony Z5U HDV Camera, which shoots a beautiful 1080i image and a stock 20X G lens with decent depth of field.
We laid 10 ft PVC pipe and a door dolly made by James Valastro Productions. The dolly performed well and gave us just enough movement to walk with Fran and engage the viewer. Mounted to the dolly platform was simple 16:9 LCD monitor for the client and dolly grip (Vince). It did the trick though I didn’t have an HDMI cable with me to view HD through it. Since the Z5U has HDMI output, I’ll be sure to bring that along next time. Fortunately, the Z5U has a super high rez on-board LCD monitor for sharp focus.
Sound was achieved with a wired Milli Mic, which saved us after our Evolution series Sennheisser picked up significant interference in all frequencies that we tried. It could be that WCAX-TV3 is nearby and caused the disturbance. At any rate, hard-wired was the way to go and Fran adjusted to some restricted movements.
Finally, the lighting was a mix of 420 and 220 Peppers with diffusion. But the hero light was a large array of diffused outdoor spot-fluorescent lights that covered a wide area of the kitchen. Balancing the light was a little tricky with daylight flooding in a bay window off camera, however the final image looked great. I did hardly any color grading in post, so we must have done something right. Vince noticed the product itself was throwing off unbalanced light on the “Greens” themselves, so he covered the bulb (which was hidden in most shots) with some 1/2 orange gel.
Overall, I was quite pleased and thank everyone involved for a solid showing.