We’re proud to say that over 72 people submitted short films (all created inside a week) to our recent Storytelling Challenge in partnership with Vimeo Video School.

For those of you that missed the tutorials/challenge, here’s a quick recap:

• Part One: The Four P’s of Storytelling
• Part Two: Discovering your Keywords
• Part Three: Storyboards, Schedules, and Gear Selection
• Part Four: Our step-by-step case study (example) of Coava
• Downloadable Workbook to help you tell your stories
• The Official Challenge Vimeo Group (see all the entries)

Our challenge to the community was to use the storytelling lessons we outlined (People, Places, Plot, and Purpose) to tell the story of a group or person who is actively doing what they love in their work or life.

As we said above, 72 entries were submitted – and over the last week a panel of judges from Vimeo, Cinevate, and our own team helped whittle down the entries into ten finalist and the eventual top three winners.

Without further ado…

1st Place:  Footprints [A Farm Story] by wvmotionworks

Footprints wins Atlas FLT Camera Slider with Moco from Cinevate, a $199 music license from WithEtiquette, and a Vimeo Pro year membership.

The film nicknamed simply “Farm” internally was popular with almost everyone on the judging panel. In particular, we thought the opening immediately hooked us into the story and the layered introduction of characters through audio kept us engaged.

Great diversity of visuals, great pace – and while the voiceover felt a little like a read – it also felt very warm and it was effective and succinct. Would have loved to go a bit higher level with why it matters to me (the viewer) and a little deeper into the importance of the topic to us (the general population) as a whole.

That said, this film left us really enjoying the characters and we felt connected to them and their journey. Job well done.

2nd Place:  26 Club Sandwich by Thibault Gregoire

26 Club Sandwich wins Atlas FLT Camera Slider from Cinevate, a $199 music license from WithEtiquette, and a Vimeo Plus year membership.

We loved the fresh and energetic feel. And we’re instantly thrown into the journey of lovingly crafting a sandwich.

Very cute ending and a nice way to connect us to him – would have been awesome to feel that way earlier in the piece. The idea of traveling and bringing back flavor combinations is really interesting – and we would have loved to see this plot point pushed even more throughout.

The best thing about this piece is it makes you hungry. We actually wanted to take a bite out of that club towards the end! Yum.

3rd Place:  Levassuer Woodworking by Nicolas Levasseur

Levassuer Woodworking wins Simplis Quick-Release Plate with 2 Universal Accessory Mounts, a $199 music license from WithEtiquette, and a Vimeo Plus year membership.

What a strong visual feast. One of the most beautiful submissions in the challenge.

Very strong story relevant transition into the reveal (though the lens choice felt a little wide and distorted for the emotion of the scene). Throughout the light looked a little flat, and in terms of visuals, getting more shape out of your light could have really pulled us in even more as the boxes are being crafted. We also wonder which of your keywords the soundtrack was trying to convey – as it felt a little out of place at times.

Those tweaks aside, we loved the strong journey of using the left over pieces to build something meaningful, especially with the tie in of somebody seeing it and then the boxes in different places in houses.

The combination of craft, strong visuals, and clear plot made this another very popular choice among the judges.

The Rest of the Finalists…

Along with the top three listed above, the following 7 made up our top ten finalist (in no particular order):

• Tharg by hannahness
• connect.ability by AubreyN
• An Artist’s Heart by Beverly Woodworth
• CHAR by Vision 2 Visuals
• Ninpo Taijutsu by Harry Papavlasopoulos
• The Love of Engineering by Gwyn Cole
• The Crossmen Drum & Bugle Core by Valley of Vision

Congrats to all the finalists – and truth be told – many of these finalists each got different votes for the top three from at least one of the judges (it was very close among 5 or 6 of the finalist for the top three spots).

Each of these finalist will also win a $99 music license from WithEtiquette – go and check out each of the finalist and let us know what you think?

Remember, only films that were 1-2 minutes in length (we had a few submission over 2 minutes) were eligible to be a finalist. Also, we limited it to people who centered their story and film on a person or group doing work they loved.

Thanks again to everyone who squeezed in the challenge during their busy week!

What did you think of the winners?

Which was your personal favorite?

Let us know in the comments below!

Today is an exciting day around the Stillmotion studio – we’re unleashing our two most advanced filmmaking classes into the wild!

Run free, classes! Run free!

We’ve decked out a couple pages – one for each – where you can find all the details about whether or not the curriculum, schedule, tuition, and timing is right for you.

(NEW) The Take Action Filmmaking Challenge…

The Take Action Filmmaking Challenge is a new 11-week online filmmaking course.

Registration is open NOW and available through NEXT FRIDAY, May 17th at midnight!

You can participate along more than a hundred like-minded filmmakers from anywhere in the world.

Click here to see everything included in the Take Action Challenge…

We’ve got a week-by-week schedule of events, and first-hand reviews from a private class that went through the challenge at the beginning of the year.

The first challenge (Week One: Lighting Without Lights) will be issued the morning of May 20th – it’s going to be crazy.

EVO is finally coming to Portland, OR…

Wanna come spend time with us here in Portland?

This is your chance – EVO – our most intimate, in-depth workshop experience that we offer. We’ve hosted around a dozen EVOs in cities around the world – and we’re really blowing off the doors to welcome people to our new home city.

For 5 nights and 4 full days, we’ll completely shut down our studio to make short films for charities. EVO is limited to only 15 passionate, like-minded participants (with a dozen Stillmotion staff on hand to help you).

This is as hands on as hands on can get. These are real charities – and we’ll go from concept to premiere in less than 72 hours. Every step of the way, we’ll be in trenches with you – fighting for the best story possible – and completely unveiling the curtain behind our filmmaking process.

It’s an intense experience, but one we are proud to say truly changes lives and businesses for the long haul.

Click here to read a day-by-day breakdown of what our EVO workshop is like – and what’s included in the tuition…

We have a few seats left for one in early June (just a few weeks away) – and are also filling seats for Late July too!

Our goal with any workshop or training we offer…

These courses and workshops are our most advanced and premium education.

We realize that it’s a big investment in yourself – and in your business – and we don’t take that for granted.

Our goal is simple: blow your (filmmaking) mind.

And more importantly, change the way you approach every story you tell – from this day forward.

Between the new Take Action Filmmaking Challenge and our next EVO workshop(s) in Portland – we hope you can join us in making a huge splash in the filmmaking world.

If you’re at the point in your journey where you want to take things up a notch…

We’d love to be the ones to show you the way.

 
This is our friend, Marshall Jones. He’s a poet, performer, author, songwriter, and all-around badass human being. He’s also a walking example of how a strong human connection with someone is far more beneficial than any typical business connection could ever be.

Marshall wrote the beautiful words you hear in our Stillmotion reel. The narration is powerful, effective, and it’s 100% us.

We spent only a few short days with Marshall before he wrote this, but he managed to compose something that perfectly translates who we are as a company, and who we are as people.

See for yourself — here’s the Stillmotion reel:

Marshall did such an amazing job with this, but it wasn’t because we wrote him a check. We did a favor for him, and he did one for us in return.

In our experience, it can be so beneficial to go the extra mile like this to make unique connections. There is no business as usual at Stillmotion, and we’ve found that creating a solid network of people doing what they love is the best business model for us as filmmakers.

Doing what you love is no joke.

In this industry you will hear a lot of advice. Often it’s going to be helpful, and occasionally it will be revolutionary.

We really can’t stress enough how important it is to share ideas and experiences with other filmmakers. Stillmotion firmly believes that you get what you give, and we live our lives through sharing and iterating ideas.

That being said, once you actually get good at what you’re doing in this business, you might hear a lot of advice like this:

 
While Heath Ledger’s Joker is legendary… we’d advise you to ignore that piece of advice.

If you’re really good at making films, it’s probably because you love it.

As you continue to improve and produce more content, you will inevitably encounter some opportunities to go the extra mile and work for free (or almost free). Maybe you won’t even be asked to do it… you’ll just kind of want to.

Our advice would be, if it feels right (deep down), put yourself out there and go for it.

Show up. Hustle. Work your ass off. All for free.

Why?

Well, we’ve had some really great things come our way simply from sharing our love of what we do with others. The NFL and CBS came into our lives and changed everything, because they saw a film we’d made entirely for free.

Our amazing Creative Director, Grant Peelle, came to our company by not only volunteering his services for free – but literally paying for his own travel (we didn’t know at the time) to show up and work for free.

And – not surprising – working for free is also how we met Marshall.

We want to share Marshall’s story with you because these are the kinds of things that can make or break your company. If you listen to the Jokers of the world, telling you to limit the amount of work you produce because you’re good at it, you’ll not only miss opportunities — you’ll miss the whole point of doing what you love.

Here’s how the magic went down:

We were hired by BioBeats in February of 2013 to do the Live Your Life Out Loud spot that they would screen at SXSW, and they brought Marshall Jones aboard to write the piece.

Our friend Nadeem at BioBeats showed us some YouTube videos of Marshall performing spoken word poetry, and we instantly recognized what an incredible performer and writer Marshall was.

This performance of “Touchscreen” particularly resonated with us:

We knew right away that we wanted to film him doing what he loves.

When he flew into Portland to shoot the BioBeats piece with us, we used this as an opportunity to shoot some of his personal spoken word pieces as well. Being that he would only be in town for less than 48 hours, this meant it would be a long night. But it was worth the extra time and effort.

In exchange for the extra work we’d be doing for him, he wrote us a narration for our reel.

This trade of artistic services was technically costing us more dollars than it did him, but what the hell did it matter? We were trading our talents to help each other improve upon those very talents we were exchanging.

But we got so much more out of the experience than just trading of services.

Marshall was here for less than 2 days, and in that short time we gained such a better understanding of how we want to connect with the people we work with here at Stillmotion. And we can honestly say we became better people for having met him.

How?

When Marshall speaks to you, he really bears his soul.

He doesn’t hide who he is underneath the layer of awkward small talk our society has designed for meeting new acquaintances. We went to dinner with him in the short time that he was here, and we shared things about ourselves that you normally wouldn’t share with someone you only just met.

He has that kind of infectious energy about him. Because he transferred that energy to us, we completely opened up and gave him the opportunity to understand who we really were in a very short amount of time.

 
After Marshall went back home, he gave us a call.

He wanted to re-write the piece he’d originally written for our demo. It wasn’t a perfect vocal illustration of who we are. What’s so amazing is that he really recognized that, after spending only 48 hours with us.

What’s more amazing is that he took the initiative to rework what he’d already written for us, because he knew we’d do the same for him.

This is what it truly means to invest in your work and the people you’re creating art for. He made the conscious decision to go the extra mile for us, because we made a true connection with him.

This is what we try to do on a daily basis with the people we meet.

Obviously Marshall is an exceptionally open individual, and he makes it easy for everyone. It’s not always going to be easy to get people to open up to you, but we found that Marshall’s openness is what made it so easy for us to bear our souls to him.

This means that whenever possible, you need to break down those walls of awkward and polite client communication and let them see who you really are.

When you’re trying to tell someone’s story, you need to get to the heart of who they are — otherwise, what are you doing? You’re making something that is good, but it’s not them. You’re essentially making the first draft that Marshall made for us, instead of the final draft.

And the thing that is going to take you from good to the perfect is the commitment and love you have for what you do, and who you’re creating it for.

The game changer…

JC and Esther’s wedding highlights film is another great example of the magic.

This is the film that was noticed by the NFL, the film that inspired them to call us, and eventually ask us to film A Game of Honor — which completely changed the game for us. Major stuff!

But remember, we made JC and Esther’s wedding highlights film entirely for free.

A free film?! That’s crazy talk!

We were at their wedding for a different reason entirely — the photographers, Justin and Mary, hired us to do a promotion video for their photography company.

We had just gotten our hands on two pre-production Canon 7D cameras, and we saw an opportunity to do something cool. We figured that we’d make a highlights film since we were already there at the wedding. And now JC and Esther would get a wedding film for free, just because :)

It was an opportunity to be as creative as we wanted to be. We weren’t working for anyone but ourselves on this highlights film, the possibilities were endless!

And they’ve been endless ever since.

Our documentary A Game of Honor went on to win three Emmys, but we never would have even made it if we hadn’t been contacted by the NFL. And the NFL wouldn’t have called us in the first place if it weren’t for JC and Esther’s film.

We put energy into JC and Esther’s highlights film. A lot of energy actually — it was made with only one shooter!

We did it expecting nothing in return, purely out of our love of storytelling and our excitement over some new cameras. Look where it got us.

Marshall Jones does a beautiful job of illustrating this concept of human networks, love, and connectivity in his 2012 TEDx Talk:

 
Right?

What he’s saying here is that serving someone else, even when it poses no foreseeable benefit to you, is a transfer of love and energy.

By transferring that love and energy to them, you’re creating a network — and you never know where that network will take you.

When you ask this industry for advice on “free” work – you’ll get a lot of strong responses to both sides.

And honestly, there is a time and place to charge premium for services. We certainly do most of the time.

But occasionally there are moments in life that can change everything.

Put yourself out there.

When an opportunity feels right to you…

Barter. Trade. Work for free. Take risks.

Go for it.

Whether Mr. Hitchcock is really a kind-hearted family man or just an old pervert, we may never know.

But this simple demonstration of the Kuleshov effect does a great job of illustrating something we do know: what people actually see on screen and what they think they see can be two very different things, and it’s the ability play with the latter that will really allow you to work some magic as a filmmaker.

Now, if you know anything about Stillmotion, you know that we don’t often aim to “work magic,” but rather to document magic as it naturally unfolds, without having to fake anything.

We’ve trained countless hours to avoid using intervention as a means to tell great stories — instead, we get in front of things as they are happening. This is a beautiful thing when you’re telling a real story — but what happens when you are trying to tell a story that you can’t physically access?

Sometimes you just *have* to fake it.

So that’s exactly what we did in this piece that we filmed for AT&T during the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Wow, it’s like we were really there!

But we definitely weren’t.

Not even close.

The spot was for the AT&T series called “My Journey,” and we were basically asked to make something that would capture the three minutes before an Olympic athlete approaches the starting line, climbs onto the diving block, steps onto the court, etc. Essentially, we had to illustrate the enormous amount of pressure and anticipation that goes into those three powerful minutes that four years of training have led up to.

We had to shoot this spot in various locations around the United States, roughly 1-2 months before the athletes even left for the London Olympics.

While this was a tremendous challenge, it was also a huge opportunity. Shooting for AT&T and the Olympics was incredibly exciting, not to mention that we’d have access to half a dozen world class athletes for about a day each.

As we read over the list of athletes that would be featured in the spot, we started to feel the pressure ourselves:

• Ryan Lochte – 5-time Olympic Gold medalist swimmer
• Allyson Felix – 4-time Olympic Gold medalist sprinter
• Alex Morgan – 2012 US Soccer Female Athlete of the Year, Olympic Gold medalist
• Misty May and Kerry Walsh – 3-time Olympic beach volleyball champs
• Jordyn Wieber – Olympic Gold medalist gymnast and 3-time world champion
• Steven Lopez – 3-time Olympic medalist in Taekwondo
• David Oliver – 2-time Olympic medalist in hurdling

So how’d we make a fake Olympics?

In a sea of little details that made this shoot come together, there were a few especially crucial factors that we want to share with you, so that you’ll be prepared when you need to fake your own Olympics someday.

Here’s what really made this shoot happen for us:

• Set details/props
• Lighting
• Contextual trickery

In every frame of this video, one or more of those factors was absolutely essential to its success. It didn’t matter how we assembled a shot to make it look real — so long as it looked real to the viewer within the confines of the screen.

On your marks… get set design…

We wanted to show Ryan Lochte preparing in the locker room before heading out to the pool. Seems simple enough… all we would have to do was find a college or high school locker room and do the shoot?

Eh… well… we couldn’t find one that looked right.

Real locker rooms are often way too confined and dark for anything like what we were trying to do, so instead we decided to make our own. In a hotel ballroom.

Our director, Shawn Robbins, had a vision. In order to to turn a ballroom into a locker room, we would need all of the right equipment. He had rows of lockers shipped in, benches, towels, we even had to build our own “locker room” floor to cover up the ballroom floor.

But it’s the small details that are going to make all the difference when trying to make your fake setup seem real.

For this scene we piled towels in between the lockers, wheeled a laundry cart into the corner, and kept gymnasium lights hanging just above the lockers so they could occasionally enter the frame.

These little things make all the difference — you don’t necessarily notice they’re in the shot when you watch the video, but you probably would notice if they weren’t in the shot. The viewer won’t be sold on the scenery if the elements that help them mentally establish the context are missing.

The same was true for our shoot with Misty May and Kerri Walsh on the beach in Santa Monica. All we really had was sand and water — no volleyball nets, no fans, and no walls.

So to make our fake beach volleyball court we got two big, square wooden frame structures that we covered with the “London” banner, and these would be our walls surrounding the court.

We had people stand on ladders and bang on the banner and flags from behind to simulate wind movement — without that one crucial little detail, this scene would not look real.

Details, details, details….

The real selling point is the little things: lines-people with flags and matching uniforms, broadcast camera men with press passes, the small scoreboard, etc.

We also utilized camera angles. We got some very crucial wide shots with as much of the beach and set as possible in the frame, so when you look at it you don’t question its realness. With a big outdoor thing like a beach volleyball court, the more you see the more you believe:

Let there be (plenty of) light.

Getting the pieces in place was a part of the sell, but an even bigger challenge was getting the lighting just right so that it really felt authentic.

Our gaffer, Dale (from MidWest Grip), drove a 5 ton truck from Ohio all the way to Florida just so he could light this shoot. In event work we usually work with natural light or bring 3 to 5 lights for an interview. At this particular shoot we often brought in a dozen lights for a small scene and over two dozen for some of the larger ones.

When we first got started in the business, we wouldn’t even know what to do with a dozen lights in a single scene.

What really sunk in throughout the shoot was just how little each light did, yet still it made a huge difference.

In other words, each light would be responsible for so little — perhaps just adding a little touch of color to one pile of towels — but that little touch added so much depth.

And in some of these scenes, the lights were the whole sell.

Look again at the shot of Allyson Felix riding on the bus (0:33) — you don’t actually see anything around her, the shot is very close-up and shadowy.

The way the light flickers simulates what we know to be passing streetlights…but really that light comes from two dudes with beards moving shiny boards around above Felix to bounce the light off of her.

We bobbed the camera back and forth ever so slightly to simulate that bumpy bus ride movement, added a pair of headphones to the talent, and a very believable bus ride scene was born.

Once again, we absolutely could not have pulled this scene off if we weren’t thinking about context.

Nothing about this scene is real, but everything you see — the flashes of light, Felix’s sitting position, the headphones on her head — all of it is there to help you establish the context of the bus ride, and so it becomes real.

Top it off with a little fog…

In Ryan Lochte’s locker room scene, for example, we were having some issues with small gaps in between lockers or just random little things in the background that made it look less real. We brought in a Fog Hog, and presto— the gaps were filled in, and the fog added just the right amount of drama.

We used fog again in our shot of Alex Morgan walking out to the field, with some of her teammates behind her. The fog helped to disguise the faces of the extras we had playing her teammates, and added a dramatic touch to the shot.

In the shot you see below, we used fog for Ryan Lochte’s shadowy exit out of the locker room.

The fog really helped to fill in some of the gaps we were getting with this particular shot — we had all that bright light coming in from the doorway, and Lochte’s shadowy figure going toward it, with nothing in between.

The fog added just the right amount of depth, and helped sell the image of Lochte walking out of a locker room rather than through a doorway in a rented airplane hanger.

Basically, with a simulated environment like this it’s great to use something like fog to cover up all the nooks and crannies and make your scene look real.

Fake it ’til you make it.

If you’re gonna fake it all the way, you really shouldn’t limit yourself.

Think out of the box on some of this stuff and remember that Alfred Hitchcock had a point with the whole bikini thing. Once your viewer establishes context, you can really get away with a lot and it can save you a lot of time in the end if you utilize some trickery within that context.

For example, the shots you see of Ryan Lochte swimming aren’t actually him.

We used his roommate (also a swimmer) as a body double for these shots because our time with Ryan was limited. Once the viewer sees Ryan and establishes that it’s him, it doesn’t really matter if it’s actually him swimming in the pool — no one is going to question it.

No one is going to question Alex Morgan’s soccer ball kick either.

We shot her running at the ball and bringing her leg back, and that was enough. From here, we could record the shot of a foot (anyone’s foot will do) kicking the ball, and the ball going into the net (why not just throw it in?). Without question, you have a quick series of shots that add up to Alex Morgan making a goal.

But we had shot that soccer ball scene a few times before we realized we didn’t have to actually kick the ball in the goal, we just needed the shot of the ball flying into the net. Throwing it in would be easier, and more controlled.

As a whole, Stillmotion really is committed to capturing true emotion, and authentic moments as they naturally occur — this is how we tell the best stories.

Being that natural footage is our forte, this particular shoot was a really fun challenge for us. With a shoot like this, we continually had to remind ourselves that nothing actually had to be real, as long as the scene would feel real to the viewer in the end. With this in mind, we were able to think outside of the box on multiple occasions, and get creative with the shoot to get the results we wanted.

To recap…

So… does Alfred Hitchcock like watching happy babies interact with their mothers, or hot babes in bikinis?

It’s entirely up to you and your vision for the piece — and as we found out, there are a ton of ways to create that vision.

Our vision for this shoot came to life through creative set design, lighting and fog, using tight or wide angles to sell a shot, and some good old contextual trickery.

******

Have you ever faked an environment in one of your films?

If so, how’d you pull it off? And how’d it turn out?

Alright people, it’s all come down to this! You’ve learned all about the Four P’s of storytelling in Episode 1, developing keywords in Episode 2, and storyboarding and gear selection in Episode 3 of our Vimeo Video School series.

Now in our 4th and final episode, we’re issuing a filmmaking challenge to YOU.

Your Challenge: Using the storytelling techniques you’ve learned in this series, make a 1-2 minute film telling the story of a person or group of people who is actively doing what they love.

If you’re having trouble visualizing how everything we’ve talked about in this series comes together to make a film, here in Episode 4 we’ll show you how.

In this tutorial Patrick walks you through each step of the process with a short film we made for Coava Coffee Roasters here in Portland.

• Monday, May 6th – Challenge closes to all participants at 11:59pm EST.
• Thursday, May 9th – Vimeo selects top 10 contestants (Each will receive a $99 license from WithEtiquette – sweet!)
• Friday, May 10th – Cinevate selects final 3 winners.
• Saturday, May 11th – Prize winners will be announced on this blog!

To help apply this new pre-production process, we’ve created a spiffy 7-page workbook that’ll help you select your People, Places, and Plot!

To enter the contest, be sure to join the “Storytelling The Stillmotion Way Challenge” group on Vimeo, and upload your final video to the group!

In addition to music licenses for the top 10 finalist, Cinevate is pitching in some amazing prizes for First, Second, and Third place:

1st place prize: Atlas FLT Camera Slider with Moco

2nd place prize: Atlas FLT Camera Slider

3rd place prize: Simplis Quick-Release Plate with two Universal Accessory Mounts

We’ve had a ton of fun putting together this series. We hope you’re walking away from it with a better understanding of our storytelling process, and more importantly a new approach for your own storytelling process.

Now it’s time to take the leap yourself!

Get out there, film a 1-2 minute video, and enter it into the contest.

You have until 11:59pm EST Monday, May 6th – don’t put it off (you know who you are).

We’ll get the popcorn ready – can’t wait to see what you come up with!

(Leave a comment below if you’ll be entering the challenge – we’ll be looking for your submission!)

 
Hang on to your hats people, because Part 3 of our four-part Storytelling series for Vimeo Video School launches today! Be sure to go back and watch Part 1 (The 4 P’s of Storytelling) and Part 2 (Using Keywords) in case you missed them.

Here’s a breakdown of everything we cover in this tutorial:

• 1:05 – Sketching out a storyboard.

• 2:30 – Using a shot list as an alternative to a storyboard.

• 2:55 – An example shot list and gear setup for shooting a golf outing.

• 3:22 – Planning a shoot schedule and using call sheets.

• 4:15 – Choosing the right gear based on your keywords, storyboard, locations, and people.

• 5:30 – How to pick the right cameras and lenses for your shoot.

• 6:12 – Adjusting camera movement based on story.

• 6:29 – Movement choices during the final scene of I’m Fine, Thanks.

• 7:12 – Choosing your lighting gear.

• 7:30 – Example of lighting and gear choices in our shoot for City Of Doers, a documentary we made for the city of San Francisco.

• 8:28 – Tips for the big shoot day.

• 10:15 – Example of our “3/1″ rule.

• 11:13 – Patrick explains the importance of getting in there!

• 12:46 – Summary of the reasons why pre-production is your best friend, and what’s coming in our next and final tutorial!

We hope that you will take some or all of our suggestions for managing storyboards, shotlists, and gear when you’re planning a shoot. These techniques have helped us immensely in the pre-production process!

And don’t forget…

At the end of the series (starting this Thursday!) we’ll propose a storytelling challenge to YOU — you know how much we love fun challenges and competitions! You’ll compete along with all of the Vimeo community to win some cool prizes (and the fame and fortune that comes with it).

All entries will be posted to a Vimeo group, and Vimeo will be choosing 10 finalists.

(Each finalist chosen by Vimeo will receive a $99 license from WithEtiquette – sweet!)

Our friends at Cinevate will be choosing the top 3 – and awarding some amazing prizes below:

1. Atlas FLT Camera Slider with Moco

2. Atlas FLT Camera Slider

3. Simplis Quick-Release Plate…with two Universal Accessory Mounts

We’re grateful to Cinevate and WithEtiquette for sweetening the competition for you all!

*****

Get your storyboarding pencils ready…Thursday we issue the challenge!

How Keywords can change everything…

Today, Part 2 of our four part Storytelling series for Vimeo Video School launches! (If you missed Part 1, check out The 4 P’s of Storytelling here.)

Here’s a quick breakdown of the video:

• 00:39 – Our Discovery process – where we research out topic and do our initial walkthrough.
  
• 01:50 – How to use research to brainstorm 5 keywords that will guide every other decision you make going forward.
• 02:33 – Keyword examples from Jess & Brian’s wedding feature.
• 03:15 – Keyword examples from I’m Fine, Thanks documentary.
• 04:01 – Keyword examples from Pulse, our feature on BioBeats.
• 05:20 – Conducting pre-interviews to finalize which people will add the most to our story.
  
• 06:53 – Case study on Kelly Moore’s adoption story – how we used pre-interviews to choose characters.
• 07:47 – How to scout your places to finalize which locations will add to your film.
• 09:15 – Case study of Old School Cafe – where we choose to film our main interview (and why).
• 10:08 – Brainstorming beginning, middle, and ends that will eventually make up your plot.
• 11:05 – Case study of AT&T: My Journey campaign – how we created tension and chose our journey.
• 11:38 – Summary of importance of keywords and what’s coming in the next tutorial.

This video details, with example, one of the most important factors that helps us tell unique, compelling stories.

It may seem like a lot of work up front – and it is – but it pays off big time (as you’ll start to see in the next videos).

Parts 3 and 4 coming next week!…

Remember, at the end of the series, we’ll be combining forces with Vimeo to issue a community wide challenge to YOU.

We’ll have two more videos next week, and the challenge starts next Friday.

Cinevate and With Etiquette are both pitching in thousands in overall prizes – and we’ll be publishing additional worksheets to help you through the process.

It’s going to be amazing!

*****

Have you ever used Keywords to help guide your decision making process?

Do you take the time to do pre-interviews, scouting, and brainstorming your plot before hand?

Let us know what you think about Part Two!

The Four P’s:

People: Who is in the story you’re trying to tell? Who will captivate your viewers? Who will they root for?

Place: Where does the story take place? What do your locations add to your characters or story?

Plot: What is the conflict, and what is the journey? How will we intrique the audience through the beginning, middle, and end?

Purpose: Why are you telling this story in the first place? Who cares? Why should they care?

How this series came about…

Sometimes a new friend can completely change your life.

When we were just a little baby of a company — making wedding films and slowly but surely learning the power of putting story first, we never would have imagined how much our Vimeo account would do for us.

While it was most likely fate that led the NFL to press play on JC & Esther’s wedding film, it was our new relationship with Vimeo that allowed us to put that film (and our company) out there for the world to see.

The NFL liked JC & Esther’s wedding film so much that they gave us a phone call that would and opened up a world of new connections and opportunities. A week later, we were on a football field in front of 70,000 fans, ready to approach the biggest shoot of our lives, all while using the very same techniques we used to tell JC & Esther’s story. Those were the storytelling techniques that put us on that field in the first place, and today we believe in them more than ever.

So when Vimeo approached us to do a guest professorship and put together a series of educational videos for their video school, we didn’t hesitate at the opportunity to share those techniques with you.

When we sat down to think about what topic we could create a feature training series for, we knew there was only one real option…

Storytelling.

We’d do a series on putting Story First.

That’s the heart of what we feel we do best – and what we’ve been told we do uniquely in many cases.

Our goal with this new series is to completely transform the way you tell stories from this day forward. To do that, we’ll be focusing almost exclusively on pre-production, planning, and the storytelling principles that guide our decision making process.

What to expect:

Over the next two weeks, we’ll be releasing four 10-12 minute videos covering what we believe to be the most important aspects of the storytelling process.

This is the process that allows us to stay one step ahead of the game, and allows us to tell deeper stories in the end. We want this series to change the way you approach pre-production, because we’ve experienced the major benefits of effective pre-production first-hand.

Over the next two weeks, here’s what you see coming from Vimeo Video School:

Episode 1 (now live!) – Stillmotion’s “Four P’s” of Story.
Episode 2 – Research and developing keywords – using those keywords to choose our characters, location, and journey/conflict.
Episode 3 – Storyboarding, shotlisting, scheduling, selecting proper gear, and the day of the big shoot.
Episode 4 – We’ll show you how we bring all of these lessons together by walking you through our shoot with Coava Coffee Roasters here in Portland, Oregon!

But wait, there’s more…

At the end of the series we’ll propose a storytelling challenge to YOU — you know how much we love fun challenges and competitions!

You’ll compete along with all of the Vimeo community to win some cool prizes (and the fame and fortune that comes with it ;)

All entries will be posted to a Vimeo group, and Vimeo will be choosing 10 finalist. A panel of people from Cinevate (with the aid of us) will finalize the three ultimate winners.

And thanks to our friends at Cinevate, you could win some awesome prizes that will help you tell many stories to come:

1. Atlas FLT Camera Slider with Moco

2. Atlas FLT Camera Slider

3. Simplis Quick-Release Plate…with two Universal Accessory Mounts

Cinevate is not only giving away prizes, but they also invested in the production of this series before anyone even knew it was an idea. Along side With Etiquette, they made all the time and effort we put into this series possible.

We’re grateful for these friendships – and their staunch belief in how crucial a role story plays in everything we do.

Can’t wait to show you the rest (…and see your submissions to our challenge ;)

*****

What did you think of the first video?

As the master of all things love and heartbreak once accurately (and a little somberly) sang:

“No, it’s not like any other love. This one’s different because it’s us.”

Although Morrissey doesn’t necessarily deliver this line from “Hand in Glove” with a tone that will give you the warm and fuzzies, it does perfectly capture the essence of being in love: Every couple has their own love, each one feels that love is unique, and every story is different because it’s theirs.

So why shouldn’t each couple’s wedding film be different too?

Weddings themselves are a time-honored tradition that generally follow a similar structure, but wedding features really do not need to follow a set structure. In fact, we find they’re a lot better when they don’t follow anything but the couple’s individual story.

Winnie and Jerry’s wedding feature is a great example of how investing in the couple’s individual story (and not so much the wedding-ness of it all) will make all the difference in their film. After meeting with Winnie and Jerry, hearing their story, and asking them all the right questions, we had all the necessary information to start assembling their perfect wedding film.

Here’s what we came up with:

We’re really proud of this wedding feature, because it’s powerful and personal to Winnie and Jerry.

But we didn’t always make our wedding features this unique. It’s true that we’ve always been dedicated to telling each couple’s story, but over time we’ve evolved into a company that makes those stories the driving force of the wedding film.

So how and why has our style evolved into what it is today?

There’s no simple answer, but we’ll do our best to keep it from getting too complicated.

People More, Wedding Less.

For a while our wedding features were long, 40-minute pieces that were very much driven by soundtrack. Sometimes we would let a classic bridal hair and makeup montage go on for several minutes, or the duration of an entire song. They were great quality, but they used the same old wedding film paradigms and, for lack of a more pretentious term — they were boring.

So we decided to start breaking through some of those paradigms. We focused our attention on getting to know the couple and what makes them special, and we focused less on the wedding.

In order to get to know your couple on a deeper level in a small amount of time, you’re going to need to ask questions that give you an understanding of who they really are.

You know they’re getting married because they’re in love — but what’s special about that love? Maybe they’ve religiously watched every episode of Battlestar Gallactica together. Maybe they love to travel. Maybe they’re having their wedding on a golf course, and that golf course is really meaningful to them for some reason.

Whatever it is that makes them special, it’s your job to use it to make a well-documented reflection of what their relationship is at this point in time — on their wedding day.

What to ask?

The questions we ask our couples often vary depending on the things we already know about them and/or their wedding beforehand.

Say if the wedding is happening overseas or an in a particularly interesting location, we may simply ask:

Why are we here?
…and then we’ll go from there.

Another great question to ask might be:

What’s a typical Sunday like for you?
This question is great because it’s easier to answer than “what do you like to do in your spare time?,” and it demands details.

After we find out what makes the couple special, we let that personality drive the feature — and sometimes this means letting go of traditional wedding film scenes and montages. If the vows aren’t original or particularly interesting, we aren’t going to show the exchange of vows in the film. There are some weddings where we don’t even show the ceremony — if it doesn’t fit in with the best story we can tell, it doesn’t need to be in the film.

We’ve also stopped relying so much on soundtrack. Now we use more natural audio and dialogue. In the end it makes for a much deeper, richer story — you’ll notice a huge difference in the emotional impact of your wedding films if you put effort into catching any exchanges in dialogue that are especially funny, sentimental, or cute (and often this means going to extra mile to mic the couple as much as possible).

In the simplest terms: find what makes the couple different, and throw everything else out the window.

If the story is more powerful in 5 minutes than it is in 20, tell it in 5. If the ceremony doesn’t fit in with the story you’re trying to tell, don’t show it. If the bridal primping montage doesn’t fit, don’t include it just because you feel like you’re supposed to.

So what stood out about Winnie and Jerry?

These two really had a bit of a fairy-tale like romance. They were roommates in college, and Jerry had pursued Winnie for years, but she refused him. At one point she bought a house and was gearing up to move out, but Jerry continuously found things that were “wrong” with her new house in an effort to get her to stay longer.

Just before Winnie was about to move, Jerry took her out to dinner and asked her to be with him one last time. To sweeten the deal, he gave her an incredibly cute stuffed animal known only as Miffy.

Winnie never moved into that new house — and Miffy is still around today, with her own lifelong companion, Mr. Bee.

It was fairly obvious that Winnie and Jerry’s story would need to showcase the deep attachment they have to their stuffed animals.

Really, it feels disrespectful to call Miffy and Mr. Bee stuffed animals — they’re members of the family. They were honored guests at the wedding, with reserved seating in the front row, and their backstory is intrinsically linked to Winnie and Jerry’s.

This cuddly fascination is something that is both incredibly cute and incredibly unique to Winnie and Jerry as a couple, and making the most powerful, most relevant wedding film meant telling the story of Miffy and Mr. Bee as well.

By focusing on Miffy and Mr. Bee, we could tell the story of Winnie and Jerry while also capturing the presence that the stuffed pals have in their lives.

So we shot the film and put it together, but the bigger idea still wasn’t coming through the way we wanted it to. Something wasn’t right…

Think Outside The Genre.

Our more recent experience in commercial work and television taught us a few things, but mostly that there are a lot of different ways to tell a story.

Before we started doing work in television, we never would have thought to use a narration like the one in Winnie and Jerry’s in a wedding feature.

But if we were already aiming to break down paradigms and avoid cliches in our films, why not just get really crazy?

In television, narrations are used all of the time to tell stories. We chose to use one for Winnie and Jerry’s wedding because we thought it would be the best way to tell the stories of both the humans and the stuffed animals. Also, the narration adds a cute, fairy-tale like quality that captures the essence of Winnie and Jerry’s humble beginnings as a couple.

So we called up a screenwriter we knew named Ross Hockrow, and we told him our idea. We gave him an outline of the story, a rough cut, and told him the history of Winnie and Jerry.

After the script was developed, we contacted Steve King, a voice over artist who we had worked with before in the Kelly Moore adoption film. We knew he’d be perfect for the job, and he was.

But more importantly, the narration was perfect for Winnie and Jerry. We couldn’t have used this narration-style feature for any other couple — we knew it was right for them, and so we went for it.

Today we’re more dedicated than ever to designing our films around each couple, and it has done wonders for our company and reputation in the world of wedding production.

We do things differently not just because it’s the Stillmotion way, but because it really does tell the best story in the end.

A Few More Examples…

Just to give you a few more examples of stories we’ve told and how, below we have some brief overviews of features we did for Jim and Courtney’s wedding, as well as Sophie and Jason’s. It’s important to note that we are unable to post either film at this time, but the information is still just as valuable!

Jim and Courtney Nantz:

At one point during his broadcast at the AT&T Nation Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Jim Nantz said to himself:

“You know, this would be a great place for a wedding…”

Turns out it was the perfect place for his wedding. Jim has been broadcasting the Pro-Am at Pebble Beach for many years, and more importantly he’s felt a connection to the area since childhood and well into adulthood.

Jim would come to the same spot on Pebble Beach every year at sunrise to sit in quiet contemplation and reflect on his life — and exactly one year to the date after his father’s passing, he brought Courtney that spot. As the two sat there remembering his father, a rainbow appeared above them and Jim took it as a sign: this was the place they would get married, the place where they would build their home, and grow old together.

To be exact, Jim and Courtney were married on the 7th tee at Pebble Beach golf course — that’s the one and only  tee that can be seen from Jim and Courtney’s bedroom. This incredibly romantic view was no coincidence, and it certainly wasn’t something we could leave out of the wedding film.

But how would could we make such a deep, meaningful history for such a famous guy come through in our feature?

By focusing on capturing the individual story, just like we did with Winnie and Jerry.

We interviewed Jim and Courtney separately, and sprinkled portions of their interviews in throughout the feature. The interviews  took about 15 minutes each, and it made all the difference each of them on screen explaining the significance of their wedding’s location, their new house, the view from their bedroom window, and the magic of the 7th tee.

We went to the same great lengths to tell this story that we would with any other wedding. We literally had someone camp out in Jim and Courtney’s bedroom for the duration of the wedding ceremony, just to get that one shot of them getting married from inside the room. We even contacted EA Sports to try and get a specific game shot that we wanted to use — it was just one shot, but we wanted it to tell the best story, so we tried our hardest to get ahold of it.

Because every little detail matters, right down to the tee.

Sophie and Jason:

Sophie and Jason are a couple that really loves to travel together, with a particularly close connection to Pearl Jam. They’ve traveled the world following Pearl Jam, and they’ve made a lot of friends along the way.

They got married in a castle (what the hell, too awesome) and among their friends they had about 30 different countries and languages represented.

We wanted the film to encompass Sophie and Jason’s love for traveling the world, and we realized that we could totally do that by cashing in on the fact that we had representatives from all over the world in attendance at the wedding.

We wrote up a very simple script of their story, and we had each of the wedding guests say a line from the story in their native language. This way, we could open the film with lines being read about Sophie and Jason in 30 different languages — what better way to capture the essence of two people united by their love for traveling the world?

In Summary…

Prepare to make something new. Go into each wedding job knowing that you’ll be doing something different than ever before. It’s going to make all the difference in your film and you’re viewers’ reception of it if you focus your energy on telling the real story, rather than following the wedding feature paradigm.

Get the story by asking questions. Once you get even the slightest idea of what it is that makes a couple unique, try to expand upon that idea and ask them questions that will open windows into who they really are as individuals, and as a unit.

Don’t be afraid to explore genres. We did something with Winnie and Jerry’s film that we’d never done before — we used a fairy tale-style narration to tell their story. We did it because it was perfect for them, but we never would have even thought of it if we hadn’t taken a good hard look at our experiences as a film production company, and decided to put those experiences to use in a new way.

Always, always, always stay true to the couple. It took a really long time for us to get Winnie and Jerry’s film just right. We didn’t develop the narration — or even have the idea for it — until months and months after we had put together the initial cut of the film. We could have thrown something together and finished the feature, but it wouldn’t have been perfect.

******

What’d you think of our decision to use narration to tell Winnie and Jerry’s story? Share your thoughts!

When you’re working with a cast full of “doers,” it’s not always an option to put their “doing” on hold so you can get your footage — sometimes not even for 10 minutes.

We were constantly challenged by this while working with some very influential (and extremely busy) people on our shoot for “City of Doers”/”Where The World Changes“, a piece that we teamed up with director Rob Baget to produce for the city of San Francisco.

As many of you know, we pride ourselves on being able to shoot lean, under pressure, and in circumstances that would normally be considered unrealistic for a production crew.

But for this piece, we really put that pride to the test!

The cast was composed of the business world’s most innovative minds — some of whom simply didn’t have the time to care about us and our agenda, because they were busy running fast-growing, multi-million dollar companies.

For the director, Rob, this was more of a low-budget project, but one that was close to him personally. We’d worked under his direction on the Callaway series (which we now hold very dear to our hearts), so we responded to his request for help on this project with an affirmative “sounds like a blast — let’s do this!”

Here’s everyone we got to spend (very limited) time with:

• Jack Dorsey – Co-Founder and CEO of Square, Founder and Executive Chairman at Twitter.
• Ron Conway – Special Advisor to SV Angel and major startup investor for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Square— basically this guy is behind everything you love about the internet.
• Heather Hiles – Founder and CEO of Pathbrite, a startup career portfolio platform.
• Lynn Jurich – Co-CEO of Sunrun, an innovative solar power organization focused on affordability.
• Laura Weidman Powers – Founding Executive Director of Code 2040, a nonprofit organization that provides opportunities for underrepresented minority computer engineers.
• Craig Dalton – Cofounder and President of DODOcase.
• Art Gensler – Founder and CEO of Gensler.
• Dr. Regis B. Kelly – Director of ¼ of the California Institutes for Science Innovation.
• David Lee – Founder and Managing Partner of SV Angel, an angel investment fund.
• Edwin M. Lee – Mayor of San Francisco.
• Kevin Yeaman – President and CEO of Dolby.

With this kind of all-star lineup, it would only make sense to break out the finest quality equipment we could find, right?

Wrong.

For this job, we specifically chose to bring our Canon 5D Mark III DSLRs instead of the Red Epic, because we anticipated set-up time and overall speed being major factors in the success of this shoot.

These people weren’t going to have all day. We had to be flexible — and match the unpredictable nature of their schedules and availability.

And boy did that decision pay off.

We encountered all kinds of challenges throughout this shoot, and they all involved large amounts of pressure and small amounts of time…

Jack Dorsey has 5 minutes… GO!

See how Jack Dorsey is standing in front of that big shiny building that is Square headquarters?

This was basically as far away from his desk as he was willing to go, and 5 minutes of his time was all he was willing to give us.

Jack was very clear about the fact that he didn’t want us interfering with any part of the company’s daily routine. We couldn’t ask the building’s coffee shop to stop working – even for a few minutes – so we could get proper audio. Jack wouldn’t allow it, he simply didn’t want his team interrupted from their normal activities.

So we had to work around them, and time was ticking.

We set up as quickly as ever, and hit record — taping our initial interview with Jack for a longer documentary piece, and getting at least the minimum amount of footage we needed.

However, we knew we still would love to have Jack in the short video at the top of this post. We had no idea if he would be willing to come outside and read from the script, and we had less than a minute of his time left to come up with a pitch that would get him to cancel whatever was next on his schedule and come with us outside.

It wasn’t as simple as, “Hey, let’s go outside for 5 minutes and shoot this thing.”

This man has a massive company to run, why should he care about what we’re doing?

The key was to show him how much we cared about what we were doing and get him instantly interested (at least a little bit) in the project. We had to give him a quick pitch about the shoot, and deliver that pitch with enthusiasm and certainty.

This was the part where we got really jazzed about the project and said something to the effect of…

“Hey, we’re doing this piece for the city of San Francisco featuring some of the country’s top innovators, and we got all of these great locations and compositions and you should see the one we have for you! It’ll just take a few more minutes, and it’s going to be amazing…”

If we didn’t deliver that pitch with energy, Jack Dorsey wasn’t going to see how important it was to us — and if he couldn’t see and hear that importance coming through in our pitch, it would have been easy for him to pass and continue on with his busy day.

And so… he agreed!

But even outside his headquarters, he was still very concerned – and passionate – about making sure we DID NOT interference with the rest of the world.

We couldn’t block the sidewalk. We couldn’t block the street. He didn’t want to delay, obstruct, or in any way negatively affect anyone’s day.

This was yet another instance where we were glad to have a lightweight, flexible, and minimal setup. Jack would’ve had no part of a huge setup with lights, stingers, and stands — it’s just not his cup of tea.

Takeaway from Jack: Time may not be your biggest limiting factor – sometimes how comfortable your talent is with the project – or their demands for giving you their time – require you to be flexible and fast!

Whatever you do… don’t break anything in here…

When we met up with SV Angel investor Ron Conway, it wasn’t so much his employees he was worried we’d disturb — it was his home!

He didn’t have time to leave his house for this shoot, so we had to bring the shoot to him.

Scouting out the inside of a billionaire’s house ahead of time is basically impossible, so we went into the shoot without knowing what to expect.

Once we got in there it quickly became very clear: don’t break anything, don’t scratch anything, don’t touch ANYTHING! Any random item or piece of furniture could easily be worth more than all of the camera equipment we brought combined.

We’re always careful when we are in someone’s home – that goes without saying. But this was a whole other world! It was like walking on eggshells…golden eggshells! ;)

We grabbed paper towels, bubble wrap, the cardigans right off of our own backs — literally anything we could find to put underneath the furniture as we moved it around the immaculate hardwood floors.

We were pressed for time, but also had to move deliberately and slowly throughout the house — especially when hauling gear. We had to get in and get out, and it needed to look like we were never there.

Once again, our minimal setup, light gear, and flexibility paid off big time. We quickly developed our plan for the shoot and executed every step without question or contemplation. There was no excess, no gear we weren’t familiar with, and nothing we couldn’t easily move around and handle.

We all let a collective sigh of relief as we exited the home with our footage captured — and without a single scratch or dent left behind.

Well, except for the antique elevator we thought we had broke at one point — but that’s a story for another day!

Takeaway from Ron’s house: Be flexible and ready adjust to your environment when you’re unable to scout the location first — especially if the couch is worth more than your car.

The sun don’t wait for nobody…

The pressure you’ll face with shoots like this one won’t always revolve around busy schedules or a billionaire’s personal home — in some cases, it might just revolve around the good ol’ sun.

In order to have the San Francisco skyline as a backdrop, we knew we wanted to shoot Heather Hiles on a balcony with buildings behind her. As we set up, we realized the shot would only work when the sun would be shining through neighboring buildings in just the right spot at just the right time. We had a very small window of time to shoot before we lost our light!

So not only was Heather busy, but the sun was giving us a limited amount of time as well…

See how crappy that looks?

If we didn’t catch the sun peeking between those buildings, we had no shot – no way to use a great backdrop for our piece.

Not only did we need to capture the light at just the right time, we had capture it in a very confined space with limited resources.

So how’d we pull off this miracle?

• We mapped out our time.  We used a sunseeker app to track the exact window of time in which the sun would be hitting between two very tall buildings behind her. If the sun went behind either of the buildings, we would have no light source.

• We used what we had. Once the light came through, we had a diffusing net on one side to cut the light down, and a 4’x4’ reflector on the other side to bounce the light back in. We didn’t have the time or the space to work with any equipment other than this.

• We used every inch of space. On a very small hotel balcony we had two light modifiers, one camera, and our talent. We had to ask Heather to lean as far back over the railing as she could just so we could get the right shot in this tiny space.

We waited until we knew the sun would come back out – and we were ready for it!…

Let there be light!

We finished just in time for the sun to disappear back behind the skyscrapers – and several high fives later, we were ready to head to our next shoot.

Takeaway from the balcony: When you’re under pressure and a problem is thrown at you, take a deep breath and consider your time, space, and resources on hand — what’s the best way to make use of what limited resources you DO have to pull off the miracle you need?

Crappy audio ruined your shot? Not so fast…

On one of our last shoots, we really wanted to get Lynn Jurich up on this roof for her segment of the video.
Lynn is the Co-CEO of Sunrun, an environmental power company that focuses on accessibility. It made sense for what Lynn and Sunrun represents to have her up on the roof overlooking San Francisco.

As with our other shoots, we had to set up quickly and efficiently. We captured a nice long shot of Lynn on top of the building… it looked great!

But there was a major problem… it sounded like shit!

There were HVAC units, generators, and other crap on the roof making all kinds of noise that we could do nothing about. We tried to find the most quiet spot we could, but it did little to help us.

Hums, beeps, boops, and hurrrrrrrs. Our audio would be ruined!

We weren’t going to find another location like the roof – especially on the timeframe we had with Lynn on this piece. We could have shot her in a room somewhere inside – but that would be the easy, mediocre choice. Shooting in a room wouldn’t fit with the vision we had for the piece. It wouldn’t be in line with Lynn’s personality or the vision of her company.

So we devised another plan.

We finished the shoot on the roof, and on our way back down through the building we nonchalantly asked Lynn if she would be willing to pop into a quiet room and re-record the audio for us.

She’s was more than happy to step inside of a room for a couple more minutes and give us one more audio-only take.

In order to get the new audio to match the original as closely as possible, we had her recreate the same posture that she had while standing on the roof. And, we didn’t fully tell Lynn what we were up to. She knew she was helping us with another read – but she wasn’t aware we wanted to dub this over her audio from the roof.

She gave us several reads – at a couple different paces – and we called it a day!

Later, we worked through the clean audio and dubbed it over the noisy audio from the long shot of Lynn on the rooftop. We even matched her clean audio to the her closeup shot from the roof!

If we hadn’t told you it wasn’t the actual audio from the rooftop, you’d never know! ;)

Takeaway from the noisy roof: Don’t be afraid to consider unconventional options and always be ready to think on your feet. Asking Lynn to quickly pop into a room as we were on our way back from the shoot and re-record her audio was quick and of little inconvenience to her – and it was the only way we could pull off the shot we needed in our limited timeframe.

Bottom Line: When limited by time… make yourself flexible.

In each of the situations during our shoots, one thing continually saved us. Our flexibility.

But what we want you to realize is that flexibility is not just a personality trait – it’s a choice.

We were shooting some of the most innovative and busy people in the world, but we CHOSE to do it in a manner that would keep up flexible.

We could have pulled out thousands of dollars worth of lighting, modifiers, and staff – but we did the far majority on one DSLR, with less than $500 in modifiers or equipment, and with a team of 2 or 3 people.

Other camera and lighting choices may have made Jack uncomfortable on the sidewalk, extra gear could have increased the risk of damaging Ron’s house, fancy lighting set-ups could have made us miss our limited natural light on the balcony with Heather.

Every choice you make to bring additional gear comes with a cost.

Sometimes that cost is worth it – you have the time, it’s low pressure, and the extra gear adds to your story.

But when you know you’re be going in a situation that will require you to shoot busy people, or be under time pressure…

…do yourself a favor:

Stay light and lean.

And be ready for anything!

*****