Last week, we wrote about the need to go easy on ourselves in during this crisis, and not expect to get everything we want to do done, but this week, I want to write about a couple of things that we’ve been working on, things that will make us either more prepared for life after quarantine, or possibly allow us to become somewhat productive and profitable while still in quarantine.
Last week, one of my big projects ‘around the house’ with my son to keep him occupied, was that we reorganized our garage. You have to understand that our garage is almost certainly never going to have a car in it. If we emptied it entirely, my Honda Civic would be hard-pressed to fit in there. What we do have however, is enough space for a small studio, and last week we cleared almost enough space (a couple of well placed bike racks, will complete it) to have a studio. This studio will essentially allow me to begin product videography, with a space like that we can do short glamour shoots for small products like beverages.
In addition to the studio space that we’re working on creating to allow ourselves some more ability to work, I’ve been working on learning all about the available functionality (mainly the stuff that I’ve never used) with my current equipment. Mostly this has consisted of learning how, and practicing using the motion path functions on my Zhiyun Crane Gimbal. I knew that the function was in there, but had never bothered to play around with it, and of course it’s a super smooth and important function which will help us immensely on future shoots.
Lastly, as part of Vimeo and Vocal’s “Pay It Forward” contest, we’ve been working on a video, something that we’ll be proud of regardless of how it does in the contest. After about a week of coordinating with a local business, and planning out a video, we filmed yesterday (while following all social distancing best practices) and will hopefully have the video ready for next week’s blog post. Even though there was at least 6 foot difference, and masks and gloves were being worn, it was kind of great to be interacting ‘face to face,’ and to use all my newly found gimbal skills to get great shots. It was certainly the thing we needed to feel like we accomplished something.
So all of that means that our current roster of projects, is:
- Vocal/Vimeo commercial, which will hopefully have an ETA of 1 week or less.
- Cheerwine Spec Ad, which is taking longer than expected but will hopefully be ready by the end of April
- A couple of short product glamour shoots, once the studio is done, in the next month or so.
- A real-estate reel video. (I had talked about this at some point before the quarantine, and having learned as much as I have about the Gimbal and motion tracking, I think I’m much better prepared.) This one is probably not going to happen until we’re completely out of quarantine, because it would unnecessarily risk exposure to the home-owner I am hoping to use, and it seems as though I have enough to keep me busy without rushing this as well.
Chocolate Diamond Media 