Yes, you read that title right. We received a lot of messages over the last few days about the Behind the Scenes segments we shot at the Global Leadership Summit. Many people wanted to know about the gear we used, how we turned the projects so fast, etc. So I thought it might be nice to break it all down, and give everyone an inside perspective.

Concept

Dave first approached me with the idea a few months back. He had been throwing around the thought of shooting some behind the scenes content at the Summit, doing a quick turn around, and then playing the footage in a matter of minutes. As you can imagine, I was stoked about the idea. 

Ok, not really. This kind of project is the reason I got out of the news world. All I could think about was the 2 straight days of high stress, non stop shooting and editing, and the fear of not having anything good to put out there. I reluctantly said I was on board, and we began the process of figuring out how exactly we were going to make this thing happen.

Equipment

First off we had to decide on a camera. I made what I consider to be a wise “stupid” decision. I chose a Canon 5D mkii. Why is this a wise, “stupid” decision? Well, anyone that shoots on a DSLR will tell you that the native files coming straight out of a dslr are not fun to work with. They usually require a painful conversion process which takes time, something I did not have to begin with. But, I was convinced that the depth of field and wide angle I could shoot with on a DSLR would make the pieces really stand out.

Somewhere along the line I was going to have to make up time. I knew that at most I was going to have 20 minutes to cut the piece and export it back out. That sort of time immediately threw out any use of filters in post. Black and white 16mm film was my inspiration from the beginning. I wanted something that would feel similar to Martin Scorsese’s “Shine a Light” concert documentary. To get that look I knew I would have to shoot in black and white instead of converting it later in post. I played around with black and white settings I felt would look best given the indoor shooting situations I would be faced with, and ended up bumping up the contrast and sharpness just a bit.

So the other nightmare situation with shooting on a DSLR in a situation like this is audio. Typically when we shoot with a DSLR we use a two piece audio setup. If you would like to read more about it check it out here. But again, with only 20 minutes to cut these pieces, that simply wasn’t option. Dave went to work, and built us a rode boom setup that we could directly plug into the 5D to ensure solid audio on the fly with no post work needed. 

For the edit I needed a program that could handle DSLR workflow efficiently, with no background conversion needed. Lucky for me I had made the switch to Premiere recently, and knew that Premiere was the right solution for an edit like this. I would like to point out that neither Final Cut Pro 7 or Final Cut Pro X could have turned the edits in the amount of time required. I’d love to jump into how much that depresses me about Final Cut, but we can leave that for a later date…

Process

And so, after a few weeks of planning, we were ready for the Summit to begin. I had the best camera assist in the world (I hate even calling him that, he’s an amazing director that just happened to get roped into being my assist…) Corbyn Tyson. Corbyn held the boom and flagged down the speakers backstage while I chased them down, got the camera rolling, and got into position.

We only spent about 3 or 4 minutes with each speaker that we interviewed. The vast majority of them were gearing up to go out on stage, and honestly didn’t have all that much time to spend with us. With such a small amount if time to pick up soundbytes, it was important to ask good questions right off the bat. Corbyn was awesome at this. A few times we were able to team up with Dave, and he was great as well.

After shooting for about 30 minutes I would run back to the Prolifik booth in that back of the auditorium. I would transfer the media over to a macbook pro, and begin the edit. After about 20 minutes the edit would be finished, and it was time for a mad dash out to the broadcast truck. Most of the time it was our good friend Joel Clare that made the mad dash. He’s faster than he looks, we learned during a late night 100m dash (I’ll have to tell you that story later) Most of the pieces got to the truck within about 2 minutes of the time they needed to run coast to coast. By the time they ran I was already out with Corbyn picking up content for the next session…

Final Thoughts

It was an absolutely incredible experience. I was extremely tired at the end of the two days, but was ecstatic for the opportunity. I mean I was able to spend time with Seth Godin, Patrick Lencioni, Erwin McManus, Mama Maggie, Wess Stafford, Craig Groeschel, Steven Furtick, and on and on and on. It was a fantastic few days.