The Fordham Law Difference, a film I created in late 2012, has been hard at work churning out hundreds of thousands of views. Yes, it has had a captive audience, it was on autoplay on Fordham Law School’s admissions page for many months, but in the interim the school built a new building. So, a refresh was in order, one highlighting the new building and the spaces within it.
Here is the 2015 version:
This biggest challenge on this project was the sound. The majority of the 2012 interviews had to be done on site during an admitted students event. A few hundred people on a concrete plaza, hemmed in on two sides by buildings, one of which was the new law school under construction. The noise was intense.
We got the mic as close as possible to each subject (a test on site had shown a shotgun to be better than a lav) and made the best of it. One change between the first video and now was the use of Isotope RX4 to filter the sound during post production. In many cases, the construction noise, the random clangs and the staccato rhythm of work tools, has been filtered out or toned down significantly. While nothing can fully eliminate what was present, in the new version the interviewees’ voices have been further separated from the surrounding noise.
Last fall I also filmed the dedication of the new building. It was a two-camera shoot with one camera locked down on a video platform directly across the crowd from the podium. That camera had a 300mm f/2.8 L IS Canon lens with a 1.4x Teleconverter. On the c300 it was the equivalent of a 630mm lens. The second camera worked the podium and the crowd from up front. Sound was via the event feed run into the platform camera. The second camera had a shotgun for ambient sound, as a backup to the other camera, and for eased syncing between the two.
This is the same building where I had documented the launch of construction back in 2011 and 2012.