JEAN-FRANCOIS RODRIGUES CASE STUDY
cage for the GH5 and various accessories. This added to my existing Rode VideoMic and boom pole and a video tripod and fluid head and totally ate up my budget. As with so many self-taught creatives, I used YouTube as my font of all knowledge. This persuaded me that I was still lacking on the audio front, so I subsequently splashed out on a Rode NTG3 broadcast- quality microphone, taking on the £650/$850 cost via hire purchase. Having played with it, I felt the NTG3 – with its rich, deep sound – was worth the extra expense. I also decided to go down the 4K route, not because I was chasing the biggest and best, but because the extra resolution this offers delivers more options when framing in post-production. Broadcast quality My previous mini docs were pieced together using a run-and-gun approach, but for this more adventurous project, I was looking to reach a much bigger audience. I realised from the outset that my production needed to be broadcast quality. I knew that, with my limited experience, the only way I was going to stand a chance with the kind of distribution I was looking for was to enlist some expert support – not easy considering the limited budget I had to play with. Ultimately, I set up a filmmakers’ meet-up group and this made a huge difference. Before long, I’d been joined by an audio specialist, a producer, production assistant and a friend of mine with photographic experience who agreed to help out. Meanwhile, I took on the role of director, writer, director of photography, co-producer and editor. In total, there were five of us working on the project. I have previous experience as a journalist, so my overriding aimwas to
get the story at all costs and, as a relatively novice filmmaker, I hadn’t fully taken on board how this might affect the project we were working on. As I went through the early stages of planning, I realised the ten-minute production I had anticipated wasn’t going to be anything like enough. To fully explore the intricacies of the subject, I had to be a lot more ambitious. Subsequently, it expanded to become a full feature-length, 90-minute documentary and, as we went through the planning, it became clear to us all this was still a tightly told story – it was just that we were now exploring it properly. The format of the film revolves around a series of interviews with a number of leading experts in the field of palliative
“I decided to go down the 4K route, because the extra resolution this offers deliversmore options when framing in post-production”
BELOW To film Searching for Meaning, Rodrigues used a Panasonic Lumix GH5, Proaim blimp with dead wombat, a Tascam DR-60D audio recorder and a JTZ DP30 cage
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SUMMER 2019 PRO MOVIEMAKER
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