Making "AlBot" Pt. 4 - Shoot (and Rough Cut)

Everything went according to plan.

At the last moment I decided to frame for a square format with safety for vertical, so it can work for both - similar to how TV shows in the mid '00s used to frame 16:9 safe for a 4:3 crop on older TVs. Just a little insurance policy!

It might sounds overkill, but for the moving shots I opted to use a crane. Ultimately it's more efficient than setting up a slider and allowed us to do the vertical ascent for the opening shot.

I used a Kessler PocketJib with a Ronin RS2 mounted on it. I've never combined the two before but it's a great way to work. I pre-programmed the Ronin pan/tilt move so Emily just had to trigger it and push the jib arm at the right speed. Human-assisted motion control!

Ever since the AG shoot, I've been doing "dual system" sound, meaning the audio is recorded on a separate device. It's a bit more fuss syncing everything in editing, but the quality of the Zoom F6 preamps and 32-bit recording is just way better. Also, having the camera completely untethered from any audio gear makes filming easier.

Since I was in a controlled environment and moving my body a lot, I recorded with a boom mic mounted on a stand. For any shots where I travel a lot, I made sure to grab wild (audio-only) takes staying by the mic, so I have a clean version.

I tried to capture coordinate reference for each angle. Filling the frame with rectangular objects of known dimensions will help me recreate the exact angle of the camera in 3D rather than eyeballing it for each shot. While recording these reference clips I said out loud the height of the camera from the floor and the focal length of the lens.

Ended up with about an hour of material. The rough cut of it edited down to the 1 minute is at the top. Pretty close to the animatic, don't you think? It looks washed out because it's shot with Blackmagic's film gamma. I typically don't bother applying a LUT (quick correction that makes the colors look normal) while editing.

Next comes the hard part...