When the University of Charleston was picking its team for a recent fundraising campaign, they called our number. In less than four weeks — 19 work days to be exact, MotionMasters had the initial meeting with the UC staff, scouted shoot locations, shot four days of video, conducted on-camera interviews, scripted, edited and delivered a video for a capital campaign with a goal of $8-million.
In all, 10 interviews were recorded in various locations across campus using two cameras. As usual, senior producer Diane Dimoff made the interviewees comfortable and drew out great comments to bolster the school’s case statement on why the funds were needed.Lo ok closely at our interview with baseball coach Andrew Wright. We chose to conduct his interview in the batting cage at UC. The primary camera was a locked off medium shot with the coach framed on camera right.
Here’s how the effect was accomplished: we chose to utilize Camera One’s locked position, shooting the coach framed right without the players in the background. After we finished the interview, we brought in the two baseball players and left Camera One in its locked position, making sure the players positioned themselves frame left. In post-production, we merged the two images from Camera One so that it appears the baseball players are practicing behind the coach. This technique gave us the ability to choose the player action we wanted in the background. The effect accomplished our goal of an easily identifiable dynamic interview setting.
The finished video is less than 7 minutes long. And according to our client, we scored a big win!