CASE STUDY SEAN VILJOEN
SHINING A LIGHT ON WILDLIFE KIT SAFARI SELECTION
Filmmaker Sean Viljoen reveals the contents of the camera bag he uses in the deserts of Africa
WORDS ADAM DUCKWORTH
W hen it comes to the right equipment for a multi-day shoot in dusty, hot conditions, nobody has more experience than conservation and wildlife filmmaker Sean Viljoen. The South African knows what’s needed to survive the extreme temperatures, dust and bumps you get from travelling in everything, from bouncy four-by-fours to small helicopters. Space is at a premium, reliability is paramount. You don’t want to spend weeks tracking animals, only for equipment to fail at the key moment. But you also want the highest-quality footage. Viljoen recently finished his documentary 12 Cheetahs , a film about an
us?’ I work with a small crew, so we don’t have a lot of hands free to carry masses of checked-in baggage and move our kit from place to place. We also find ourselves shooting in pretty confined spaces – inside helicopters or vehicles, so I lean towards as lean a rig as possible. I try and keep it to the bare essentials.” Cameras “I have been using Blackmagic’s Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro for a year. It’s a much smaller camera than I’ve worked with previously, but image quality is better. I don’t think there’s another camera on the market that can deliver the same quality, in that form factor, at that price.
ambitious mission to reintroduce a dozen cheetahs from South Africa and Malawi back into the Zambeze Delta ecosystem in Mozambique. We asked him to run though his current choice of kit to find out what works best.“When it comes to gear, I’m always asking myself: ‘How can we maximise the production value, but minimise the amount of kit we take with
“We don’t have hands free to carry masses of checked-in baggage”
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