first paid gig!

dlevanchuk

dlevanchuk

got my first paid video related gig yesterday!

i was hanging out at home, relaxing after my 10 hour saturday shoot (still in pjs, at 1 pm.. what a life!). My friend, who works for a local production company calls me, and asks me for a favor. Due to some emergency, he needed somebody to cover him to do a shoot of an orchestra performance in Seattle Orchestra Hall. He said he didnt have much time to talk, so he game me a number of the contact person to call him and get all the details.
I phoned the guy, and he was extremelly stressed out. He told me he needs a continuous video of the orchestra performance, which is about an hour long.
I have T2i, so i thought i could stop by my friends house and get his gear, but the contact guy drops the momb on me! He says the performance starts in about 40 minutes!!!
Both of my batteries are pretty much dead and memory cards are full, but good thing i didnt unpack my camera bag with h4n in it, so i grabbed the bag, and tool my laptop as well, so i could empty out the memorycards on my way to orchestra hall!

I got there 5 mins before the start, quickly spot good place to set up my tripod, and as soon as I slapped my lens on, musicians come out on the stage. I never set up the camera this fast haha

Luckly, the spot that i picked had an electrical socket, and it was behind everybody, so i plugged in the battery charger into the wall, and swapped the batteries in between their performances.

There was one short hickup, when my t2i stopped recording after 12 mins, but i was ready for it, and lost about 2 secs on the footage, but i managed to patch it up in post afterwards...

The footage and sound came out pretty good! I had only a shotgun mic in my bag, so I was worried that the sound will be horrible, but as I was listening at home it was pretty good!

all in all, everything worked out well, and i started editing the whole thing as soon as I got home, and was done in about 3 hours. My t2i didnt record any sound, even though camera mic was on, so I had to sync the sound byv watching hands of the conductor and listening for the begining and last notes to get a good match. It was a bit of the challenge, but i got it.

anyways, that was my first actual film related "job" experience. My friend mentioned that this was a paid gig, but i didnt ask for details since everything got dropped on me so fast.

I ll show em short clips of the footage and will talk money later today. Till then will hold the footage in the hostage!



HERE IS THE POST WITH COMPLETE VIDEO:
http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?p=229114#post229114
 
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thank you everyone!

The funny thing is my girlfriend called me lazy for not taking anything out of the camera bag and putting everything away...
Who says lazyness doesnt pay off! :)

There is another event that ochestra will be performing in about two weeks, and I was asked to come back. Only this time i ll be a bit more prepared and could get a bit more coverage, rather than from a single corner..

rayw: Haha i wish i had an actual camcorder.. every 8 or so mins there were little breaks (15seconds) in between different acts, so i used that chance to quickly reset the recording.
another tiny challenge that I ran into was I only had 8gb memory cards, so as one card was in the camera, i had another one dumping the footage on my laptop, and i was swapping them a couple of times. Got me sweating!

While there was 15 mins break in the middle, i finally got a breather to swap the batteries on everything (camera, mic, and h4n), but as i was doing that, some a**hole decided to drag the grand royale piano on stage.. freaked me out, because as soon as i turned the camera on it didnt fit into my prime 50mm, so i had to do the fastest swap to 18-55mm, and reset the focus, fstop, and white balance in about 10 secs.. mind that i had to be extremely quite while doing all of this, so i wont break the "Magical Silence Before the First Chords"...

good thing i was behind everybody in the last row, otherwise they d see this crazy russian guy, running around, swapping cards, batteries, lenses, and cursing in foreighn language!

anyways, just wanted to share with this experience..
My lesson is always be ready, know your equipment, and try not to break anything haha
 
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Great story. I love reading these down to the wire filmmaking stories.

Honestly, I'm kind of shocked they didn't have their own sound recording equipment. I don't care how good you are at shotgun mic placement, there's simply no way you'll be able to effectively capture orchestra sound with a single mic. Even when I performed in the symphonic band at my high school we had our own (cheap) mics to set up. It's kind of mind blowing that a fully fledged, professional orchestra wouldn't have anything.

Good idea on holding the footage hostage. It's yo' way til pay day.
 
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Wombat said:
Great story. I love reading these down to the wire filmmaking stories.

Honestly, I'm kind of shocked they didn't have their own sound recording equipment. I don't care how good you are at shotgun mic placement, there's simply no way you'll be able to effectively capture orchestra sound with a single mic. Even when I performed in the symphonic band at my high school we had our own (cheap) mics to set up. It's kind of mind blowing that a fully fledged, professional orchestra wouldn't have anything.

Good idea on holding the footage hostage. It's yo' way til pay day.
Click to expand...

oh yea, the sound wasnt great, and has many flaws. I hoped they were doing their own sound recording, and talked to my on location contact, but they didnt have anybody recording anything.
From what i understand, the video i made was for their archival purposes, or something like that..
either way, i tried to get the best out of what i had and what i knew. Some things worked, some didnt.
 
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dlevanchuk said:
oh yea, the sound wasnt great, and has many flaws. I hoped they were doing their own sound recording, and talked to my on location contact, but they didnt have anybody recording anything.
From what i understand, the video i made was for their archival purposes, or something like that..
either way, i tried to get the best out of what i had and what i knew. Some things worked, some didnt.
Click to expand...
Oh, I didn't mean to denigrate your work, I'm sure you did the best you could do given the circumstances (which were pretty wacky). It's just that capturing quality sound that consists of so many 'parts' is physically impossible with a single mic, and I'm hoping they don't think you're a miracle worker.
 
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Wombat, Oh I wasn't defending myself :D I know what you mean the first time. I mentioned the sound issue to the guy who was running the show, just so he knew its not going to sound like a professional BlueRay audio quality. If I did have Alcove by my side with his audio set up, the performance recording fee would be deep in 4-5 digit numbers :yes: :lol:

Morris, thats the best way for me to test what I know and what i SHOULD know :lol:

Anyways, going back to my short movie editing..
 
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