Shooting HDSLR Video as a One Man Band

I’m fairly new at shooting HDSLR projects as a one-man band. Being in charge of sound, picture, and subject is tricky stuff. Some people fear this is the future. Cutting costs equals shrinking crews, and ultimately you’ll have one person doing everything. I don’t think this is the case. When a production company can afford a crew, they should have enough experience to know that they’ll have a better project if they put a good crew together. Shooting as a one-man band isn’t something that should be frowned upon by the production community. Rather, it should be embraced. It’s hard work to do everything yourself, and it’s totally amazing that it’s even possible.

The power of this production technique was highlighted again this week with the release of Andrew Wonder’s Undercity documentary. I originally read about Undercity on Philip Bloom’s blog, and I was impressed with this piece. It shows you the raw power of this production approach. To be able to capture HD footage with excellent sound with a completely inconspicuous amount of equipment is nothing short of revolutionary. It allows documentary to squeeze in where it hadn’t fit before, and its high-def resolution plunges the viewer deeply into that world. If you have any doubts, check out this first five minutes of this Frontline footage. It was shot by Danfung Dennis who was armed with a Canon 5D mkII, a Beachtek XLR adapter, a shotgun mic, and a Sennheiser wireless system (his portion starts at 1:38):

Thankfully, the one-man band DLSR production I embarked upon last week was the furthest thing from being on the battlefield of Afghanistan. I was shooting a reality TV application video. I wasn’t being shot at with IED’s exploding at my side, I was mostly filming in a shower curtain design studio. I learned a few things about shooting video this way, and you can bet that the next time I take a project on, I’ll do a few things differently.

I opted to use most of my location sound bag for the shoot. Oftentimes solo shooters will skip the field mixer and just plug their audio directly into the camera, or into a portable audio recorder. Since my bag is small and light, I just strap it on with my harness and get to work. I shot double system (I didn’t plug my sound rig into the camera). My main reason for doing this was that I was borrowing a Nikon D90, which doesn’t have an audio input. It worked out well for this shoot. If I had to climb into a manhole cover, or run across the desert with the Taliban shooting at me, having my audio bag on might have been a bit too bulky. But for this project it worked out fine.

We shot one scene in a local Target store. This was really the first time I felt the true power of the non-attention-grabbing DSLR form factor. We didn’t have permission to shoot video in the store. We just went in guerilla style and shot it. In the parking lot I grabbed a shopping cart and put my location audio bag inside of it, and covered up the gear with our coats. This is where having the DSLR untethered from the audio really paid off. My on-camera subject was already wearing a wireless mic as we stepped into the store. We just went in, found our location, and started shooting. It worked out perfectly. Several Target employees passed by our aisle as we shot, but I just looked like a dude with still camera. No one bothered us or said a word.

What will I do differently next time? Well, this time I used my Joby Gorillapod as a makeshift pistol grip for the camera. It worked, but it really wasn’t suited for the job. I’ve gone over the choices, and I think a Cinevate DSLR Camera Grip is the way to go next time. I did have my shotgun microphone on a pistol grip, but it really wasn’t necessary this time. I should of had it mounted to the camera. I will still keep the pistol grip for the mic in my bag, but only bust it out when I need it. It would’ve been nice having a free hand.

We used a clapper slate at the beginning of each take. I downloaded the demo of Plural Eyes to help sync the audio and video in Final Cut Pro. But, since this was the first project I tried to use the it on, I didn’t do it right. I had cut together most of the video by time time I got around to trying to sync the sound. Plural Eyes didn’t like that. From what I could tell, I believe I was supposed to sync the sound before I started editing the video. I still have a week or two left in my demo, so I’ll try to make a point of using it again. I’ll let you know how that goes. I’d really like to see Plural Eyes in action. I ended up syncing the sound by hand, which wasn’t too hard for a five minute video. I mean, it was work, but it was doable.

The last thing I would do differently is adjust my post production pipeline. I’m still cutting my teeth with DSLR shooting. I still haven’t fully shaken off my miniDV training wheels. I’ve got the transcoding thing down. I can now open Compressor and transcode footage perfectly without having to refer to on-line tutorials. However, I’m still doing something wrong in the settings of Final Cut.

I did the post production sound mix in Ableton Live. I exported the sound mix from Ableton, and imported it back into FCP. However, when the mixed sound came back into FCP it was a little bit longer somehow, and after thirty seconds the sound sync started to drift. It was ugly. I had performed sound design in Ableton Live for years with good old standard definition MiniDV footage. This time it didn’t work. I looked into figuring out a solution, and started to get somewhere when I read the FCP assigns a timecode to audio that doesn’t have it, and likely assigned timecode to the imported audio that didn’t jive with the 24p video footage. But time was running short with the application project, and I needed to have it finished. So I ended up just using the video export from Ableton Live, which isn’t ideal, but fine for the needs of this project. Next time I’ll have it all hammered down.

I think this solo run-and-gun video thing is really exciting. I’m looking forward to watching all of the wild projects that people are making when shooting this way. Hopefully I’ll be able to contribute an interesting video or two myself. First I’ll need to buy my own camera! I’m tired of borrowing them from people. The GH2 is still not in stock anywhere. And I’ll tell ya, after watching that Andrew Wonder video and seeing the way the 5D mkII picked up those blue lights in the subway tunnel, I was second guessing myself. Maybe it’s worth it to save up for another six months and plunk down for a 5D. Oi vey. I dunno.

Anyhow… My hat’s off to anyone out there dealing with the technical challenge of shooting solo audio and video. It’s a really intense way to work (and really tiring). You’re not taking jobs away from production people. You’re going places and shooting things that a crew of people can’t get away with. Cheers!