Studio in a box. Kind of.

I am lucky enough to enjoy the autonomy of freelance work, but also have good working relationships with other suppliers within the industry. The Marketing Cafe provides a wide range of promotional services, from print and web, to video, when they are at capacity in house I sometimes get a call to assist with a job, and this was one such occasion. The job was to shoot some online marketing content for a UK based electronics company. I had to create a temporary multi-camera white box studio within a showroom, wrestling with natural light and adjoining factory noise. I used a calumet backdrop stand with white roll, a cfd softbox on Simon, the talent, and two daylight filtered reds on the paper. By dipping the main fill light slightly I was able to get the clean pop effect, and a black studio roll was used to shutter out the natural light. This shoot also required a prompter which could be controlled by the producer (Ian Palmer from The Marketing Cafe) all of which I was able to provide and rig. Sound was taken care of courtesy of a Sony ECM-77 tie-clip mic, small, discrete, clean, the close pick up mitigating the background noise. I do like a wee challenge and the set up for this job had a few to keep me on my toes. A different kind of gig for me, one where I hand over the rushes rather than deal with any post, so the pressure is on me to make sure I'm happy with everything in camera on set, as I can't hide any mistakes by self-editing.. not that I would ever dream of doing that... Thank you to Ian at The Marketing Cafe ( www.marketingcafe.net ) for the gig, and to Simon Robertson for his patience as I got all the cutaways right. Ian's careful work in pre-production and post meant that the end client was delighted as well.