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.

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Superdome Slider

 

We are practically living in New Orleans these days.

For the past couple months we’ve populated countless hotels (and Airbnb houses) as part of several features we’ve been involved with for Super Bowl game day.

Getting to tell stories that will be featured on Super Bowl sunday on CBS? You know we are all over that!

The largest project we are working on is a 44 minutes feature story set to air a few hours before the actual game itself.

*****

NOTE: Thanks to everyone who tuned in to watch this live. If / when we receive permission to share the recording, we’ll post it here on the blog. 

In the meantime, check out this emotional feature that also aired on Superbowl Sunday, which focuses on the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting.

*****

It’s a 44 minute show – that’s nearly half of A Game of Honor - and have shot this all in just a matter of months.

Shooting such a long feature with a limited number production days means we need to be really efficient.

Many people mistake efficiency for “not taking risks” or “being sure to stick to the script” or “doing what is expected.”

But that’s not the Stillmotion way.

Through the course of putting this piece together there’s been several times that we’ve done things in an unconventional way because it fits the story as opposed to what was right or what was expected or what’s been done before.

You know that scene in the Matrix, where Neo meets the boy that can bend the spoon?

Stay with me…

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photo courtesy of Marc Bryan Brown Photography

We’re back from a much needed holiday break – and ready for a kickass 2013!

Who’s with us?

Each New Year, to really amp things up, we have a little process we go through.

First, we look back at the last year – in this case 2012.

We ask ourselves:

  • What were our biggest accomplishments?
  • How far have we come this year? (relish in how far you’ve come)
  • Where didn’t we do well? (It’s ok to outline this too).
  • What do we want to do more of?
  • What do we want to STOP doing?

Each of these questions can yield powerful brainstorming sessions.

Grab a notebook and go through each one. Be honest with yourself.

The amazing things we accomplished in 2012!…

When we sat down to reflect on the first two questions above, we knew there would be a pretty decent list of moments.

But it wasn’t until we started writing that we realized how much we had achieved. There were times that we had to stop writing just to take a breath and grasp how intense this year really has been…

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We’ve had one heck of an amazing year in 2012!

And as the team sat around talking recently, we knew we wanted to do something equally amazing to give back.

After all, without the support from you, our readers, fans, attendees, and supporters, 2012 wouldn’t have been one of the most engaging and rewarding years of our lives.

So, to thank you properly – we’re tapping into the holiday season of giving.

We’re making all of our premium tutorials on SMAPP (our iPhone app) completely free – starting right now.

That’s right, all the tools, all the tutorials, have been made 100% free!

If you have the app installed, simply make sure you update it on your device. Or if you’ve yet to download it, well – there is no excuse now (getsmapp.com).

Note to Android users: We’re actively working on an Android version for you as we speak. Stay tuned, it’s coming! :)

If you purchased a few of the tutorials from us previously this year, we really appreciate your early support – and hope you’ve applied those lessons and benefited already from access. You’ve now got access to even more to help push your storytelling to new heights!

If you purchased a handful of tutorials recently on the app, over $20, please click here and fill out this quick form. We’d love to talk with you directly. (Unfortunately, Apple won’t give us your contact info, but it’ll be worth your time to fill out the quick form.)

Cheap Interview Lighting: Grab a few bucks and get resourceful!…

To celebrate two new updates to SMAPP, we’ve created a tutorial we’ve been wanting to shoot for a long time now (scroll up and click play).

Seriously, you should have seen Patrick when we gave him $26 and sent him to Home Depot – he was like a kid on Christmas morning! ;)

We wanted to show you that great interview lighting can be achieved on almost nothing (you can judge for yourself in our example).

This can really happen to you, too.

We’ve been on sets with our luggage delayed, inadequate resources (we weren’t given all the information correctly), or random wrenches thrown in our best pre-production plans (let’s say the location changes suddenly).

We work our butts off to make sure we minimize these major issues – but they still happen – all the time!

Resourcefulness (and a positive attitude) have saved us more times than we can count. :)

*****

Once again, thank you for an amazing year – and I hope you enjoy the dozens of new tools and tutorials you have access to on SMAPP.

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In a few short years we went from 40-50 weddings to working for a bunch of really cool companies on TV features, documentaries, and even some amazing things like an Olympic campaign and the Superbowl.

How did we make that leap?

What tricks and mindsets helped make our transition quicker and more smooth?

Throughout KNOW, at nearly every stop, we got several questions about how we made the move from weddings to commercial work. Our story of the NFL seeing a wedding film on Vimeo makes for quite the story, but it certainly doesn’t act as useful advice to rest your hopes on.

We want to break down our transition into commercial work and make this tangible. Something you can apply immediately to your work if you find yourself wanting to make the same transistion.

Even if you aren’t working in only weddings, these lessons continue to help us push our work forward – and expose us to even larger stages (we still use these lessons in our non-wedding work).

Here is our ‘secret sauce’ if you will, about how to use your background in weddings to gain traction and get clients in the commercial world.

Key #1:  Make Wedding Films for the World, Not your Couple

From the beginning of Stillmotion, we’ve always said that we try to make wedding films interesting enough you could show the mailman.

We’ve seen many people fall into traps where they let the stigma of wedding videos get to them and they lower their standards, or they aim most of their creative vision at trying to please the couple.

So many times we’ve been asked to offer feedback on a clip and when we ask ‘why’ a certain decision was made the answer, all too often, is something along the lines of ‘the bride asked for that’ or ‘they’ll be upset and ask me to change it if i didn’t include that’.

We like to say, as harsh as it sounds, forget the couple.

If you can make a film strong enough to keep a stranger’s interest, then the couple and their family will surely love it.

When we say “stranger” we do not just mean other soon-to-be-married brides (stop making films for brides altogether).

If you aren’t making a film for brides, how do we then justify hanging the dress in the window or rolling the rings on a table? Try showing that to somebody without the context of it being a wedding film and see just how quickly they get confused or bored.

In making this clear choice to tell a story above all else, all of a sudden the fluff falls away and we need to find something deeper and more meaningful to drive our film.

Said in another way, showing you can make a good film about the wedding day says you can cover an event.

Making a strong film about who two people are shows that you can tell a story.

If you can tell a story about people that is interesting to more than just the bride and groom, you’ve developed a strong sense of story for other genres of filmmaking.

And, in the end, your couples will be blown away by your work when it stays true to their actual story – and not just a play-by-play of their wedding day…

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