Decks Gone Wild

In June I did an industrial video for a company that manufactures decking material for boats. I know nothing about boats and very little about construction, so as always, it was a bit of an education in both fields. While the primary purpose of the video was to promote the brand, it was presented as an instructional video about how to add a finish and maker repairs to a deck.

It was a 2-day shoot with a crew of 4. We shot on the trusty old HVX-200 because we needed to grab a LOT of coverage in fairly tough conditions. On the first day we filmed all the procedures inside the factory as well as outside, on an artificial piece of a deck the facility had built especially for the shoot. The visual style needed to be like the Discovery show “How It’s Made” where you only see machines and worker hands doing things in studio-lit environments and that’s exactly what we achieved. We also used my 12-foot JonyJib for a few beauty shots of the deck which worked extremely well well the long, sweeping calking lines of the product.

The second day was dedicated to a greenscreen shoot of a host introducing the viewers through the procedures. We rigged the set up in the facility’s lobby in such a way that the client was able to observe the filming process directly from his office desk. The talent was great, if inexperienced and, as I expected, we burned through quite a few takes before he finally got his second wind and aced everything.

On the post side of things, I was on my own. After throwing all the P2 media into Avid MC, I first assembled a rough cut of the host intros. The greenscreen needed to be replaced with abstract, animated backgrounds featuring the company’s logo. The agency producing the video put together Photoshop mockups of some of these graphics and I used those as a basis for animated versions for all the shots, created in After Effects.

Once the agency was happy with the host sequences, I rendered final versions out and imported them into the Avid. At this point I also received voiceover tracks for the procedure segments. Having laid out the host parts with the voiceovers, all that was left was to fill in the visual footage of the procedures. This was a series of straight-forward inserts with occasional cutaways to explanatory animation shots, for which I would jump back into After Effects, as needed.