Behind the Scrubs

The first thing you'll notice on the set of a shoot are the vehicles. Surrounded by Ford Explorers, Expeditions, and even the occasional Honda Odyssey, I realized that people in the Arizona film industry were more concerned with the amount of trunk space they had to use rather than the amount of horses their engine was comparable to. This is because every member in the small film crew that I worked with on this shoot brought their own equipment to the shoot. Unlike the biopic that I worked on a few weeks ago, there was no large U-Haul van parked out back with all of the equipment anyone would dream of having access to concealed within it's depths. Instead,Fred, the production sound mixer, had to bring his own boom, stand, and slate and Nat, who was in charge of all the lighting, had to bring all of his own lights and stands. Both Scot, the main camera operator and organizer of the shoot, and Nat had to bring out carts to carry the necessary amount of equipment for each of the shoots. Though this observation has very little to do with how we actually set up for the shoots, it does reveal the logistical challenges of film making and how they uniquely impact small filmmakers.

However, my project isn't about carrying more with each cart but instead telling more with each frame. Again, this shoot was commercial in nature. We went to to both Northwestern Medical Centers in the Tucson area to interview both independent physicians and corporate officers for a promo that would be shown internally throughout the hospital network. Many of the interviews took place in the work environment of these professionals which allowed us to get some b-roll of the hospital at the same time.

Though we were filming interviews, the cameras were not simply put on a tripod to record the whole process. Instead, both Evan and Scot put the cameras on dollies that they smoothly glided from left to right during all of the interviews.

Because there were two cameras, Evan and Scot tried to match up which direction they were pulling the camera towards to make for more fluid transitions between the footage on both cameras. Because of limited space, they would also have to make sure that they didn't cross over into each other's line of site. This was especially important when Scot brought out a larger, homemade dolly early on in the first day of filming.

The dolly was so large that it took up most of the space in the waiting room that we had transformed into a little film studio and Evan had to set up his pocket dolly within the range of motion of the first camera.

But why was all this set up necessary? If they were just shooting a clip of someone talking, why go to the trouble of using a dolly to add camera movement?

The simple answer: it makes the footage more interesting. By adding camera movement, the footage becomes more dynamic and it manages to hold a viewer's attention for longer than a straight on shot would. This gives the editor the freedom to use a longer shot of the interviewee talking without sacrificing momentum that may have already been built up. It subtly makes the shot more engaging without bringing automatic focus to the cameras movement. In fact, using dollies and sliders has become a common practice in documentary film making that has lead to the invention of automatic sliders with rotating camera heads that can be programmed to move from side to side while keeping the subject in the exact same framing.

Setting up on the other side of the camera was just as laborious and fine tuned. After determining how tight the camera would be on the subject, Frank would drop the boom nearly a centimeter above the frame and Nat would readjust the lights so that there would be no dramatic shadows falling across the interviewee's face.

Here is a quick shot of the interview with the CEO of Northwest Medical Center that shows both one of the lights and the boom looming over his head.

The women in the picture's foreground is Kim, who was in charge of the shoot and provider of food. Kim is amazing. She would ask the questions during the interviews and make sure that the interviewees were looking at her and not into the cameras.

Some interviews took place in larger areas like when we interviewed the head nurse in the ER area:

In large spaces like this, the side-to-side motion of the camera revealed a lot of the background behind her. The alcoves containing patient's beds were equipped with lights that were not as aesthetically pleasing on camera as Nat's equipment, so he had to go into them with light stands and throw light on the walls. Furthermore, we drew the curtains of nearly all the rooms and moved over anything on the counter tops that didn't look like it should be there.

To capture what may amount to 5 minutes at most in a promotional video, Scot and his crew would sweep into a room and completely alter it's appearance to make it read well on film. Then we would pack it all up and do it all over again with the next subject in a different environment.