One of the great things about being a freelance filmmaker in Korea (or anywhere for that matter) is the wide variety of challenges you face from shoot to shoot. In spring 2022, I was brought on as a DoP on a commercial shoot for Meta to help introduce their new suite of business tools to the Korean market.
The project involved working with the fantastic director, Nils Clauss, and Moktan Productions’ exceptional producer Keith Park and was shot over several days following a team of business mentors and young entrepreneur mentees in their homes, at a studio, and, mostly challengingly, on a steep hike up a mountain path in Seoul dense with forest!
We wanted to capture natural and genuine interactions between our talent along with smooth camera work to reflect the comfortable relationship between the business owners as they discussed the way that they use Meta in their daily work lives. As a cinematographer, I always want to push myself to capture the best images that I can so I had a conversation with the fantastic 1st AC, Thomas Maitland, as to how we could best rig the camera to achieve what we wanted.
This meant setting up the (already heavy) Red camera on a full-size Ronin in order to keep the shots steady and smooth throughout. Many operators would probably opt for a monitor on top of the Ronin for an easier view of the image and a follow focus for pulling focus between characters. Thankfully, our great director Nils allowed me to strip down the camera to only the absolute essentials to keep it as light as possible. We kept a Teradek onboard so Nils could monitor what we were capturing but otherwise we stayed minimal. Finally I had the v-mounts in a small shoulder bag outputing power to the camera to again lighten the load.
With the Red stripped down, I was able to get away with operating via only the Red LCD touchscreen display and, rather than add weight with the follow focus, I set the distance from the talent and maintained that while we walked. By gently adjusting my distance from the subjects, I was also able to ‘pull’ focus between speakers. As the trek was so steep I even decided to forego an Easyrig for a number of reasons. Firstly, I new that we would be doing a lot of stopping and starting along the way and constantly attaching and releasing the camera from the Easyrig slows everything down. With the Ronin-only set-up we were able to move really fast and jump straight into a shot as soon as the talent was ready to speak or move. Secondly the Easyrig is not only hot and uncomfortable for an uphill hike but I have noticed that often, on uneven terrain, the support rope can actually end up accentuating the up and down movement caused by walking, which rarely looks good.
I also had my trusty Blackmagic 6k in a small cage rig set-up that allowed me to grab steady handheld footage at a variety of focal lengths whenever there was a pause in the hike
This set up was a bit harder on the back and arms but thankfully we were able to take a lot of breaks along the way and our amazing crew meant that all went super smoothly on the day and we got some great shots. This shoot was a good reminder to me as a videographer to always think about the practicalities of the shoot as opposed to just throwing as much tech as possible at a project.
See the full film here.