When you get the opportunity to shoot a job in Hawaii, you make it as epic as possible.
For the re-branding of Turtle Bay Resort in Oahu, the agency representing the hotel wanted the new campaign to have a punch.
The whole concept was for everything shot to be in the point of view from the person having an experience.
First stop: ziplining
Our job was to capture all of the experiences that the hotel offers from a first person point of view.
This allowed us to discover some thrills that many of us haven’t done before!
Expensive gear in the water? Check. Lots of liability insurance? Check.
Can you say helicopters, shark diving, zip lining, mopeds, hikes higher than the clouds and lots of drone footage?
As 1st assistant, my role was really broad. Because we had to capture motion and stills, I had to make sure we were prepared every day for each set-up we needed to capture.
This ensured making sure cards were backed up, batteries were charged, gear was clean and ready to move, and everything stayed organized.
You should have seen my room! I hardly had enough space to walk to my bed.
Because we had so many different types of set-ups, the prep every morning before the shoot was vital to how the rest of the day would go.
Later in the day: boating on the beach
Somedays we would start off on a Ronin on a golf course, and by mid-afternoon, we had to be ready to go in an underwater housing, surrounded by 45 sharks.
On top of making sure that our camera op had everything that he needed, I also waist charge of making sure that we had strobes that could be rigged up to shoot outside on a golf course, or to go underwater, or to withstand the rain in the rainforest.
We needed toys. ALL of the toys.
One concept we were shooting was first person mountain biking. We knew that we needed to have a Canon 5D mark iii rigged to the cyclists chest with the focus pre-set on the handlebars in order to get his point of view while he was riding up the mountain,
What we ended up doing was using a GoPro chest mount with an intervolometer attached, shooting every second so that the cyclist only needed to worry about bicycling.
This job ended up being extremely rewarding and exhausting at the same time. It was engaging trying to figure out ways to shoot “out of the box” ideas, and walk into different situations at every turn. While we all had a crazy hectic week, we can definitively agree that this is what makes our business interesting. The constant of pushing forward, always coming up with solutions, always doing something different and laughing our way out the other side.
Till next time, Hawaii.
