Adam Plantenburg: Nice Owen Garitty: Nice Adam: You want me to smile at the camera?
Stoic?
Just chill?
Owen: Are you going to do the [makes a serious face] Hold on, should I have my tea?
Probably.
I’ve been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to figure out how to intro this video, so…here’s
the intro to the video…I’m Owen with FPW Media.
Adam: I’m Adam from FPW Media.
Owen: And we’re here to talk about a video we recently did called I AM APEX for Timber
Products Company specifically for their Ampine division, specifically when they came to us
about launching their new product Apex, which is a composite panel product.
We really worked hard and thought about how can we make that visually interesting?
We decided to have the story of the production of one of these panels be told from the perspective
of the panel.
So we shot the whole project on a Red camera.
We shot on a Red Epic W and a Red Epic Dragon.
What is really interesting is that the mills are really, really, really dark.
Like…you can attest to this…
Adam Plantenburg: Insanely dark!
Owen Garitty: Insanely dark.
So we shot most of it at 3200 ISO (I think)?
Adam: Yeah.
Owen: Is that right?
That seems about right, yeah.
Which is nuts.
And I mean, it looked fantastic.
We shot it mostly on Canon still glass L series lenses, with a cinema lens here and there
thrown in.
I’d say it’s an artistic decision but it was also driven by necessity but it was
really awesome how it worked out in that the lighting…we knew that going in lighting
was going to be a huge problem.
We’ve shot in a lot of mills before so we decided to embrace that lighting was going
to be a challenge and actually psychically show a lot of our lights in the shots because
in the mills there are all sorts of different lights that are different bulbs, different
color temperatures, and we knew that we were going to have no control over that.
Adam: Yeah, because a lot of the times it looked like what we’re shooting is a spot
that needs to be examined anyways, so it could be a light that’s spotted on there for a
specific reason.
Owen: Right.
So probably one of the hardest shots (I would say from a safety perspective and just like
a planning perspective) was our shots in the furnished room where the dust comes in and
the furnish comes into be made into the board and the graded footage (you can’t really
tell) but there it was so dusty that when they were moving, it was probably like a whiteout
almost.
I mean, Adam was basically…and I don’t actually know, were you behind me?
Adam: Yeah, so I had one hand on your safety vest just kind of pulling you around, making
sure that you didn’t run into anything.
That if the loader was coming at you, we weren’t too close and then at one point your safety
glasses fell off and you must have just been filming blind essentially.
Owen: I basically was.
I mean it was like I kind of knew where I could see where the loader was and I could
kind of see the camera, but I was just imaging the framing because I couldn’t even see
the screen because the screen got completely covered over with dust at one point, but it
turned out really well.
Adam: And as soon as the take was over it would be us running out putting the camera
on the stand and then just blowing it off like crazy…
Owen: Oh, no!
Where did Adam go?
I’m sitting here with Jake, our senior editor at FPW Media to talk about the post-production
process on I AM APEX.
Jake do you want to kind of take us through our last product shot where we get back into
the narrative?
Jake Sullivan: Yeah, and sometimes that’s great because that one was actually really
easy.
That was kind of borne out of the camera movement and then all I had to do was really dip to
black there and pay close attention to where we were making the actual cut in both of those.
Owen: And we kind of threw you a curveball in that one a little bit because that part
of the project wasn’t shot until almost the whole edit was done, I would say so you
had this kind of gaping hole for most of the edit where those product shots were supposedly
going to go.
Jake: And those were also kind of fun because we had a lot of visual effects to cover things
that we couldn’t get in camera.
Owen: So you added more fire, what else?
Jake: More fire in the studio is kind of hard to not light things on fire [laughs]…so…
Owen: Right.
And then on the moisture scene, you added a couple layers in front?
Or how did that work?
Jake: I added a couple layers of smoke in front and then I masked out the actual piece
and added a couple behind it to give that sense of depth that it has.
Owen: All and all, I think it is one of the projects that I’m most proud of.
We had a blast filming it and if anybody has any questions about the production or the
gear we used or anything like that, please reach out to us and make sure to watch the
video in full.
Thanks for watching!