Last week, we spent 48 intense hours in Boston making a short film about the thinkers of the New Media Consortium. Every interview turned into a wonderful conversation, with such a great group of minds to listen to and learn from. Authors. Auteurs. Filmmakers. Musicians. Educators. Photographers. Historians. Librarians. Scientists. We asked each person who sat for us to expound on one central topic - Ideas that Matter. We worked in a hotel suite in Cambridge. The room was approximately 20 x 18, with 8 foot ceilings. The entire length of the room featured large, uncovered windows, which we promptly covered with blackout curtains.
Our main light was an Arri 2K that we put through a triple baffled and grided Chimera Quartz box. Gorgeous light. We used Chimera triolets with various boxes for the accent lights. We turned the air conditioning off to keep the sound clean, and the lights, are, well… they are called hot lights for a reason. Not to put too fine of a point on it the room was very quickly scorching. So hot in fact, that when my friend Don Henderson came into the room he announced in his unmistakably Texas style that it was so warm that he saw the Devil running out the door looking for air conditioning.
We shot the entire piece on Nikon DSLR's. D4's and D800's. Taking advantage of the clean HDMI out we saved hours by letting the machines do the transcoding for us. We recorded the entire audio session on four recorders. Backup, and more backup. Four cameras running constantly. All in all, a lot of data.
As always, our friend Bob Trikasis came through with a networking solution that allowed us to make maximum use of our computer power and ultimately got us through just in time.
Ideas that Matter is now available on iTunes U.
