McMinnville 2010

Ok, so my first post for 2010 will be talking about the 26-part evangelistic series I just got done directing in McMinnville, Oregon. We started January 8 and finished February 6, with Wednesdays and Thursdays off. Two weekends we produced four programs in 26 hours (Friday night, two Saturday morning, then Saturday night). The crew held up very well, and we still had our sense of humor at the end of it. :)

I'll get to my regular posting schedule next week, but I thought you might enjoy some images from the series. For you technophiles, here's the raw equipment information: we shot with four Canon XLH1 HDV cameras connected to a Ross Video Synergy 100 MD (Multi-Definition) switcher. Genlock is supplied by a Ensemble Designs unit run over Canare multi-core cable, which also carries HD-SDI, Timecode In, and Timecode Out, with one spare conductor should one of the others break. Tally is run over a custom-built system on a Cat5 cable, and connects to a Marshall 7" LCD monitor that sits atop the camera. Tripods come from Sachtler, and custom-built camera and tripod stands allow for maximum flexibility in positioning in both horizontal and vertical axes.

My directing station consisted of two shallow racks, side-by-side, with a 3-screen LCD Marshall HD-SDI monitor and a Marshall 17" LCD multi-input screen in each (one 17" for Preview, one for Program). The 17" monitors also served as the monitors for the Mac Pro capture computer. Capture is handled through a Kona 3 running into Final Cut Studio 3 using the ProRes 422 HQ codec. The data is captured to an Apple XServe RAID unit with 4TB of storage, I believe.

Ok, now to the pictures. : )

This is Camera 3, one of the two center cameras

The speaker, Jac Colon, stands in front of our "window effect." The Producer and I, in designing the set, wanted to take a strong departure from traditional "Adventist" set design and have something other than a fake plant sitting outside the window. In our case, we designed with a Tuscan theme, so why not have a Tuscan landscape outside the window? We also wanted a late afternoon/early evening color temperature, hence the orange glow.

This is how we achieved the effect-we purchased a stock image of a real Tuscan landscape with very particular lighting parameters. The Producer wanted to have a "sunlight streaming through the window effect," so once we found the picture that matched that, we had it printed locally and our set builder constructed the frame for the image. I then lit the image with two Selecon Acclaim fresnels (lamped at 575w) and gel'd with some extra gels I pulled of a gel string from a color scroller. The third Acclaim, with the same gel, is mounted up above the picture, shooting through the window. The purple on the rock is provided by Elation Opti 30 LED fixtures.

This is what my directing station looked like. My lighting director is in the foreground. We ran the show on a PC desktop with Jands Vista app as the show control. Our lighting rig consisted of: 16 ETC Source 4 Jr. fixtures (lamped at 575w), 2 Elation Opti Tri 30 LED fixtures, 3 Selecon Acclaim fresnel fixtures, 4 Elation Opti 30 LED fixtures, and 2 Elation PowerSpot 575 moving head fixtures. A relatively small rig, but it had pretty good punch. If I had to do it over again, I would have put my backlight truss span over the top of the set, instead of behind it-it would have allowed for separate lighting of the set vs. the speaker...of course, my front light truss hangs were about 4 or 5 feet too low anyway. :( I'll do better next time!