Beneath the lining

Filming of the Dirty Laundry instructional video and 30 second short happened in about 2 days. Ando was in Brisbane for a weekend, so we made the most of the opportunity. It’s best practise to have a script or storyboard so that you have a rough idea about what you want to achieve. Ando worked on the voiceover script before we intervened. So when it was time to shoot, we didn’t have to muck about too much while we tried to figure things out.

Luckily we both share a hobby for photography, so we were able to throw together this basic setup and record these 2 short videos. As you can see in the photo below, there’s not much equipment involved. We used my dining room, the dining table and it’s ceiling lights 😂. The ceiling lights were the key lights and the small LED lights were support. The small LED lights offered a bit of edge glow on the cards and to stop our hands from casting shadows on the table top. We also had to position the camera and tripod so that the ceiling lights wouldn’t cast a shadow.

We used the Sony ZV-1 to film, it’s a brilliant little camera, and left the settings on auto. We were so pleased that it has great autofocus, the camera would focus between our hands and cards without any issues. It also has a little flip out screen so we could see where we were positioning the cards, to make sure it was in frame.

Equipment used:

• Sony ZV-1.

• Benro tripod.

• Manfrotto Pixi EVO 2.

• Selfie stick.

• 3x Aputure MC RGBWW.

• White table top.

Masking tape was used to indicate where the edge of the frame was, so that we didn’t have to constantly look up at the screen while we were moving the cards in and out of shot.

A little trick we used was to film everything at 4K, that gives us the ability to crop in or straighten any of the footage when things where off-centre or crooked. Below is how the video turned out.

Written by Quokka Jono