Far from the oil-centric town portrayed on the eponymous ’80s TV show, Dallas is a vibrant cosmopolitan city quickly making a name for itself. It’s home to the largest contiguous urban arts district in the country as well as some top-notch restaurants and museums, which many people don’t know.
Working with SC Pictures, we were hired to do a broadcast and print shoot for the Dallas Visitors Bureau (Visit Dallas). Our goal was to photograph three billboard setups and shoot two live action spots in two days.
Whenever there is motion and stills built into a single job, production and everything that goes along with it grows very quickly - as does my role as 1st assistant. At SC Pictures we do these sorts of jobs regularly, where the photographer is also the director, so we are able to manage it the right way.
As 1st assistant my role is about four times what it would be if we were only doing a stills campaign. Because we had a really tight schedule on this job, we decided to bring in two camera operators so we could maximize the amount of coverage we would get in a day. One challenge we ran into in pre-production was that the motion shots called for a snap zoom / snap reveal. This technique is when you start tight on a subject and quickly zoom out to reveal the surroundings (as you can see in the first shot if the final images below). After evaluating the script the director and I decided that the best way to achieve this look would be to have one camera operator on a tripod with an Angenieux 30mm-90mm using a zoom stick to manually snap zoom when necessary. Since one camera was going to be limited to a tripod we wanted to have the second camera on a Ronin as to give us some nice tracking shots.
My role on this shoot was varied. Because it’s a still and motion shoot, I have more than the typical amount of people and equipment to manage. Not only am I Stuarts right hand man and talking things over constantly, but I also have to manage both motion cameras, making sure they are set and ready to go on command. On top of those jobs, lighting is one of my biggest roles. When shooting stills and video together, our approach is different than just focusing on one. What we typically do, is block off the shot and light specifically for video first, and after we then bring in our strobes close to where the video lights are and set up for stills. This way we use our motion lights to help bring up our ambient light when shooting for stills. Now that both stills and video are both ready to go at the exact same time, one camera could always walk onto set and shoot while clients and the director are reviewing images from previous shots. This method saves us a lot of shooting time, and enables production to move quickly.
We also had an underwater element to this shoot, where we brought in a professional underwater camera operator. Yup, this job encompassed everything you can think of and more.
