Ready, Set, GoPro!

17th November 2017 by CH

What a lovely video brief to fall into our inbox!

Shoot, edit and deliver a video that follows a week long architectural build of a giant wooden structure. Nice!

As you can imagine, we were very up for this but there was a catch… The budget only covered 2 x half days filming, but we needed to capture the whole thing being built.

We’re pretty good though, so of course we made it happen.

Our Recipe for Success

Ingredients needed: Piers Taylor (TV personality and University of Reading Lecturer) a team of 1 ^st year students, and a streamlined crew of two of CH’s finest (just a producer/director and cameraman was enough).

Behind The Scenes

First of all, a clear brief meant our shot list and voxpops questions were quickly approved, so we could plan the logistics and maximise our time on the shoot days.

To make the most of the budget, we split the filming time between the workshop on day one and the final build day, with half a day spent at each.

Problem was, the main aim of the video was to capture the wooden structure coming to life in real time, which would take days! So, we prepped a person from the University to record the structural build using two of our GoPro cameras for the days we couldn’t be there. We shared ‘how to’ guides to help them check the footage each night and reposition the cameras at different places every day, which gave us a range of angles that would better capture the scale of the project.

This approach allowed us to stay within budget but collect lots of content, including interviews with Piers Taylor, vox pops with students, workshop planning of the build and even a timelapse to add more excitement to the big reveal.

The Final Touches

To achieve such a fast turnaround, we edited the footage from both shoot days in two parts. Once we had a narrative edit in place for the first half of the film, we knew what we needed to film on the last day and we had time to prepare for that.

Then as always, we polish and perfect. We find a music track that fits the tone and topic and then grade the video to enhance the visuals and colours.

We also repurposed the content into a second video featuring the whole timelapse of the wooden structure coming to life.

Great Results

All this goes to show that anything is possible (within reason!).

Not only did we get awesome feedback from our client who was delighted with the finished video, but so far, it has also gathered over 700 organic views on the University of Reading’s official YouTube channel.

Need a video project FAST and on a tight budget? All you need to do is say hello@ch-video.com