- Hey you guys, Jonathan here.
Just another Wednesday or whatever day it is
when you're finally watching this.
Hanging out with a couple familiar faces,
Marques aka MKBHD is interviewing Elon Musk.
(upbeat music)
- The first part will be a sit-down interview
which is like normal, I've done this before
but it's like a talking tech or talking Tesla with.
- [Jonathan] So I'm sure everyone's seen part one
but here's a look inside the room
before everything went down.
As far as cameras go, what do you need
to interview Elon Musk?
On the A cam is Marques' RED Monstro full-frame
monster of a camera paired with Sigma's
24 to 35 millimeter lens.
The B cam is a Canon C200 and shout out
to Brandon Havard for locking that down.
- You know my job I think is to just make sure
reflections don't occur and hope that Elon
doesn't post anything on Twitter before we get there.
- [Jonathan] And as far as the audio goes,
we got a pair of Rode wireless lav mic's
that is being fed into a sound devices MixPre-3.
I wanna quickly give the biggest, biggest possible ups
to my guy Rich for taking some of the highest pressure tasks
and handling them like a champ.
First up was laving Elan and Marques,
this is an interview with Elon Musk,
not something you do every day.
There's no second chances, there's no re-dos,
if you screwed it up, that's it.
Fortunately though, Rich nailed the audio
so let's give a giant thumbs up for having ice in his veins.
I do also want to mention that Elon
was one of the chillest dudes that I've ever met.
There is no camera off, no camera on mode,
it kind of made you forget that holy crap,
there is a mastermind billionaire in the room,
rather it kind of just felt like everyone
was hanging out talking Tesla.
The amount of passion and energy and joy
and just excitement that he showed towards Tesla
kind of changed my whole outlook on him
and honestly he might have sold man a Tesla
without selling me if that makes sense.
So once the interview was done, there was no time
to celebrate because things got a little bit crazier.
Luckily though, prior to the interview,
we tried to be as prepared as possible
going through everything from balancing the camera
down to the interview.
- Dude, you're all over the internet for various reasons,
let's talk about Tesla.
When is Rich gonna get his car
because he's had some issues
and I know you've seen his tweets.
(laughs)
- I've definitely not seen his tweets,
I've got a million mentions every day.
- Yeah, I appreciate your time.
- [Rich] Thank you.
- [Marques] Let's go on a little factory tour.
- [Rich] Alright.
- [Marques] Tell me what you do out here.
- [Jonathan] So remember when I said Rich was awesome?
As soon as the interview was done,
he went from running sound to running downstairs
to balance the next RED on the DJI Ronin 2.
We had about three minutes to get everything ready to go,
Elon's walking down the factory and again,
there is no room for air.
Also I want to give a shout out to DJI
because the Ronin 2 was amazing and honestly
was what allowed us to get everything set up so quickly.
So this was a total team effort.
The idea here was I would run the RED on the Ronin 2
and then behind the scenes there was secretly
a ton of pressure on Vin who had to wirelessly pull focus.
Gotta pull focus, hopefully I know how to use it,
I'm pretty sure it's pretty straightforward, right?
Just look at the eyes, we good.
- The way that is done
is there's a TeraDeck mounted
onto the RED that is wirelessly sending an HDMI
over to another SmallHD where he then
pulls focus on the DJI focus.
So when it came down to go time
in the high-paced environment,
this contraption is called a ready rig and the idea is
is that it helps offset the load with the Ronin 2.
The problem is is we did not set it up properly
and there was no time to fix it.
The Ronin 2 with the RED and the Zeiss Otus
and the TeraDeck and the monitor,
that is a pretty heavy rig so you can definitely use it
in short bursts but if you're trying to use it
for something over 10 minutes, it is torture.
When you watch the interview,
everything kind of seems smooth and calm
and graceful like if you played jazz music,
that would fit perfectly.
(soothing jazz music)
But in actuality, it is just pure chaos.
There's people and robots and cars and flying objects,
and you're trying to dodge things.
All the while, we didn't have
the ready rig set up properly so all the weight
was just like killing my arms.
Again, this is an interview with Elon Musk
so you can't say yo, can we pause, my arms are tired.
You just got to kind of roll with it and that's what I did.
To top things off, we were all in steel toe boots
which kind of just iced the cake in terms of the challenge.
So we're walking and dodging things
and I'm just trying to keep my arms from falling off
and there was this one walk that just felt like eternity.
The entire uncut video was about 26 minutes
so by the end of things, I was just toast.
Somehow though, we pulled it off
and as challenging as it was
and as sore as I was the next day,
this was no doubt one of the most memorable moments
I've ever got to be a part of.
So thank you guys very much for watching.
Thanks Marques for having us out, for trusting us.
Thanks Elon Musk for being just a genuinely cool dude.
If you missed Marques' full video
which I'm sure you've watched, I'll link it down below.
This is Jonathan and I will catch you guys later.
(beep)
Biggest bonus of the day, getting a sweet,
it's like a stealth ninja hard hat.
It looks like a baseball hat
but there's like plastic in there
so for pure science purposes.
You missed the padding!
(laughing)
Right here, man!
- [Rich] I missed the shot too, you gotta do that again.