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Jeremy Hack: Producing the Catfish Festival Video
July 1-4 in our county often represents a time of celebration, reflection, fun and community. For most citizens the Catfish Festival is a yearly period in which they make wonderful memories with their family and friends, but to your friendly neighborhood video producer it represents something quite different. This article is meant to lay out at least a portion of what leads up to a production of this nature. I'll break the different processes into individual sections.
Early Stages: Feeling and Finding Music.
The production of the Catfish Festival begins around the end of May, when I begin hearing rumors of new attractions and I conduct searches for adequate music to back the production. Before the festival, there are only a few things that I know. Banking on what is certain, I look at what I lacked last year and consider unique ways to break that mold. I start placing shots into my minds eye and conjure up a jumbled sense of what I may need in music. I feel that having a proper mood for the video is most important. This year, I sifted through hundreds of songs before nesting upon the one you hear in the video. While I admit that 80% of the deciding factor in choosing music is jean ne sais quoi, the other 20% depends upon structure, timbre, dynamics, and tempo. There is a very small habitable zone in the music I choose for such events. It must have one or more dropoffs and a choir, it must have an uplifting demeanor, have a structure that contains powerful impacts to serve as dynamic cut points, and it must be at a length of 3 minutes or more. Combine all of that with the jean ne sais quoi, and you can begin to see why it's such an exhaustive search. Being that this production was non-commercial and was intended to serve as dynamic journalism, I could choose from more potential songs. (USUALLY, artists only get upset if you plan to make money off of a production that utilizes their music. Seeing that this production was conducted as a volunteer community service, the particular artist I chose allowed the use of their music.) The song I chose was entitled "Wars of Faith" by Audiomachine, composed by Ivan Torrent.
Early Stages: Securing Equipment.
I own a fair amount of equipment, but occasionally I will rent equipment to boost production quality if the budget allows. In this case I had stowed away money to ensure that I could acquire ample equipment. The best way to determine what you need in terms of equipment is to visualize the shots you have in your mind and logically interrogate the scenario until you arrive at your equipment loadout. It is much more difficult to do this when an event is unpredictable (such as the Catfish Festival.) So in this case, I had to take my event list and bank on what few certainties I had. I knew I would have only one assistant (my girlfriend) and myself, so that told me to not gather more equipment than two people could carry in a single trip. When covering something like the CFF, the last thing you want to do is make a specific shot list. This is because shot lists are often intended to guide a production based on a controlled environment.
Following my evaluation of owned equipment and the projected events, I contacted my regular rental company to secure payment and the additional equipment I would need. The rental equipment loadout included: (4) T/1.5 prime lenses at various focal lengths, Zacuto shoulder support system, 15mm rod extensions, follow focus system, front end balancing handles, Zacuto EVF, O'Connor mattebox, Sachtler tripod with quick release, 2 GoPro cameras, and additional memory cards. All this combined with a Sony FS700, DJI Phantom w/controller, Canon 5D MIII, sigma 10-20, and 70-200 F/2.8. It wasn't easy, but 2 people CAN carry it all in one trip. The equipment arrived 1 day before the festival began, giving me one night to assemble the final rig, check components, calibrate the primary camera, and charge all 12 batteries.
Early Stages: Tying Loose Ends
With equipment secured and music selected, It was time to stare the event down and begin to actually sweat and get my hands dirty. A few days before the Catfish Festival, my assistant and I drove to the boat ramp with the quadcopter to gather shots of the Green River. We chose to go in the evening for more vibrant colors and more dramatic lighting. Two days later, we went to the boat ramp once again to get shots of the fish being tagged. I had made arrangements earlier that week with my friend Jacob to meet us down there with his girlfriend and some fishing poles so I could also get shots of her casting her line out. That's right, the shot of the young lady fishing was in fact staged. The reason for that was that many people get offended if you simply show up at their fishing spot with a huge camera and stick it in their face. With the aerial shots of the river and a shot of someone fishing, the only preproduction article remaining was to contact my voice actor and have her working on the inspirational voiceover. I sent the script to her in California and had a finished reading back within 24 hours.
I have worked with Nikki Schaeffer in the past. She has always given a quick turnaround on any job I've had for her. She does very well on her own instincts, but is also extremely subjective to specific directions. I often direct voice actors by sending them a string of trigger words to represent the mood I'm going for. For this job it was: Dark, sophisticated, deep, precise, loving, powerful, conversational, inviting. I believe she pulled it off.
Zero Hour: on Location
It never really hits you until you round the hill by the park and see the carnival rides and busy pavilions. In 30 seconds, you go from a wrenching gut and trembling hands to a deep breath. After that it is all business. You don't have time after that to sit and worry about things. You have the equipment you have and nothing more, you have a list of events, the festival is here, and you have to make magic happen. Maybe you as the reader are expecting some sort of poetic description of how my assistant and I swept in with precision and purpose to systematically gather one priceless shot after another. But the truth is that it doesn't happen that way. For every shot on screen in the video we had 50 shots that didn't make it. It's impossible to be everywhere at once, and it's guaranteed that you will miss more great shots than you capture. We just went to events when they were scheduled and filmed at the midway between events. We missed some events, mostly because we had one camera operator, and many events conflicted with others in scheduling. I wish I could be less vague in describing the actual filming at the Catfish Festival, but it's just something you pick up on when you do it.
One thing I kept in the back of my mind while filming was that in a time of such social, economical, and political turbulence, it is required to see that people can still assemble and exhibit love for their community and for others around them. Too many people focus on slandering and never make light of anything. One thing I knew I wanted out of this production was to help people see how full of life our community can be. It's not all smoke and mirrors; what you see on screen was filmed right here in Morgantown. No professional actors and no special effects. The people on screen are all professional Butler Countians. Each night after working the festival, my girlfriend and I would come dragging in the house half dead from heat exhaustion and sore backs. I would beeline directly to my workstation and back up all of the footage from the day. I'd plug in all batteries to make sure they were charged for the next morning. I would review the raw shots with the music in the background to make sure it was working before passing out, sometimes fully clothed.
The remainder of the Catfish Festival was a rinse and repeat scenario. We would set our call time based on the earliest events and go. Sometimes the pageants would interfere with other events, but we made our best attempt to work around it. The biggest problem was that the pageants were across town this year at the high school and it wasn't something we could constantly run back and fourth to.
Nothing much changed until the night of the fireworks when I set the primary camera up on the midway with my assistant and waited for the show to begin. After the first shell exploded I quickly started rolling on the primary camera and repositioned myself off the midway with the quadcopter where few people could see me. I launched it from the dark side of the Ferris wheel and flew it across the amphitheater and the city pool, facing the fireworks display. I gained altitude until around 400 feet and gathered numerous stills and video clips. Then I flew in closer to the Ferris wheel to gather shots with the fireworks exploding in the background behind the rides. After this, I flew the quadcopter above the midway and up into the fireworks. After landing, I handed it off to my assistant and repositioned the primary camera a few times to get more angles of the fireworks from the ground. After the grand finale, the midway erupted in applause and we were officially wrapped. Then the second realization of the production hit me; there were no more shots to get. If I missed it, then it was missed. It wasn't like I could just come back the next day and get the shot. The events were over with and what I had gathered over the past few days would have to work.
Post Production Stages: The Hard Part
I had roughly 291 shots. Some were 15 second snippets and others were 20 minute longplays. I had less than 4 minutes of screen time to tell the story of the 2015 Catfish Festival and inspire the community. This is where the actual work came into play. Similar to the process of filming, I can't really walk you through how the edit went and how I came to choose shots. I try to be fair and give equal coverage of the places I went because I know every event was someone's baby. Each event had someone in charge that was solely dedicated to making that event happen and I wanted to be fair. As I said, I couldn't be everywhere. I wanted a powerful crescendo in the production where the viewer would be wowed. I ended up having a few good crescendos. The biggest and most powerful of which was at 1:52 in the finished video. The edit took me along the lines of 50 hours to complete, including review, pre renders, and final encoding. Add another 4 hours for the upload.
Describing the technical process is pretty straightforward. After choosing good shots, I'd nest them into a sequence, strip the audio, apply tonal and color corrections, set the aspect ratio (for this production I chose 2.35:1), apply visual noise reduction where necessary, and conduct a pre render. After assembling a few dozen pre renders, I nested them into the master sequence to complete a fine edit with the music and voice over work. Following a few test renders of the master sequence, I made adjustments and inserted the credit plates at the end. I conducted the final render and began the upload. After the upload was processed the video link was shared on social media.
In Conclusion
I've had several people contact me with concerns about approaching or making conversation while they see me working. I'm very approachable. There are only a few things I'm not comfortable with. I don't mind talking before filming, and generally when I'm filming for something that will have stripped audio. It's not a very good idea to talk to me while I am controlling the quadcopter, as it's important for me to be able to hear it and it could be dangerous to fly it while distracted by conversation. I rarely fly it for more than 10 minutes at a time so it would be better to discuss it after I land it. It's also not a good idea to ask how much my equipment costs, mostly because people can overhear conversations like that and it can put myself or my crew at risk. Not to mention that some of the equipment I use is rented, and if stolen would put me in a lot of trouble. I don't film to show off expensive equipment- I film with what I know will produce the best results within budget. Even if someone I trust is asking, I never know who would overhear the conversation. I've worked with $200 cameras and I've worked with $80,000 cameras. What matters most is the quality and content. I'm always up for talking about how many doohickeys it has, what that thingamajig does, and especially about technical things, as I'm a camera geek. Thanks for reading!
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