I drove 350 miles to make this video, but i'm not sure if i still feel the same way.
Hey does this seem like a cool youtuber outfit? Please don't rip my jacket,
it's for a 12 year old boy.
So i get the same question a ton – Phil, what kind of gear do you use for one man
run and gun journalism shoots? That's a good question, so i want to show you my setup,
whether it's in a controlled setup like this or out in the uh...field.
See, usually when people say field they mean a location that's not in
the studio but i'm in a literal field — I gotta go find a stick.
There's David Sandberg. He is this super deadpan Swedish director he made uh shazam and Anabelle:
Creation, but he also has a youtube channel it's called pony smasher. And on his youtube channel he
gives a bunch of great tips for how to do stuff in a really cheap way, and the way he does it is
he doesn't say get the most expensive gear, he's like "another thing is that the gear i use might
not be the best option out there it's just what i happen to use at the moment."
I really love that, because getting good gear is not always an option. I bought all my own gear
and i want to tell you how to do it cheaply.
And are the solutions you come up with janky sometimes?
Yeah, sure, maybe a little. But if they work, they work.
So that is what i want to talk about. So i'm gonna split this up into five
sections of gear. They're all gonna be one-man band gear operations that
i really use in the field by myself. Uh, i'm gonna start with the most
interesting section but as the sections go on and get more boring i'm going to
make the places more interesting and harder to reach if you are not part of a one-man band.
So hopefully there will be a little adventure here too.
Am i in heaven? No, we're just in my basement, and that's because i'm talking about the headline
stuff here: the camera and the lens. And I only have one camera, and I only have one
lens. I'm a little bit of a weirdo that way. This is a true one-man band operation, so
to show you what i have i'm gonna switch it out with this bad boy. This is the insta360 one r.
So yeah that's it. This is the camera I use, it is a Sony a7iii. And right now i'm plagued
by a giant inferiority complex because of the Sony a7siii, which just came out
it seems awesome. But you know, the thing is is that this one is good enough.
As soon as i can justify purchasing the a7s3, I will do so, and in doing
so I will fill a hole in my heart that can only be built by material objects.
I have the g master 16 to 35 on here and that is a very intentional thing.
I got this lens because I wanted my storytelling to be shaped by the lens that I used and in my
case I had a bunch of noticeable weaknesses that I thought a lens like this could help me with.
First of all, I'm addicted to shooting in as shallow of a depth of field as possible and it's
a weakness, because as journalists we're supposed to be telling stories about the environments that
we're in. God this is gonna be disgusting. This is what all my videos would look like if i were left
to my own devices. For me, i'm really trying to internalize all that advice that I get from other
people that the camera and the lens, and even the nd filter, are all just tools to telling a story.
Sorry, I had to stop pretending that the weather hadn't changed and that i'm not uh
freezing right now. Very cold. This is a cheapo amazon boom pole stand and this is the boom mic
that I use for almost everything. It's the rode videomic pro plus. I think I got that all right,
and it works great. It records on two channels so that there's a high and low
channel, which gives me lots of flexibility in post
and it is directional. But what about if your subject is away from the boom pole?
You can still hear me right now even while I do cool parkour all around this stage
and that is because I'm wearing a lav mic. It is the built like a rock Tascam
that I love. This Amazon stand right here is the best cheapo Amazon purchase that I can recommend
by the way — a lot of the other ones are too janky and fall down on me. This guy is consistent
and you don't really need a sandbag or anything else. You just bring it with you and you roll.
I'm a journalist, this is journalism.
Find me a crew that can do this.
My ronin is uh spazzing out right now. Actually,
maybe I should leave it like this to give you a taste of how life really is.
You probably knew this is what I was gonna be talking about i've got the ronin s right here. Um
it's a little embarrassing because they just came out with the new ronin s2, which is even better
and not outdated, but you know, this guy works. Um I use it typically for b-roll in the field,
it works pretty well. Sometimes I think that a slider would be better for establishing exterior
shots, but this thing is convenient and there's an extra hack that i have
which is that I've propped it up on top of my super portable Manfrotto BeFree tripod.
So I can have this standing up and just stand it up like normal interview stick
or like right now or have it on my ronin on there on the tripod and then I can pick it up.
And I can go straight into gimbal mode without slowing down at all, so I recommend it.
What uh song are we gonna play over this?
So it looks serious? Jazz? Country? Stock music hip hop?
Hopefully the idea of accessories will be slightly more interesting because you
want to see me fall into the river to my death. Most of them are pretty commonplace: football;
wipe; stickies — totally awesome; nd filter, right here; creepy little brush thing that i
used to massage my cheek; forgot about my backpack. It's a backpack. It holds
stuff. Honestly it's a commodity item. People have strong opinions about them,
but they also have strong opinions about bread, and if you get down to it it's
just something to put the cheese in between. Did that sound folksy? That was really eloquent
or the stupidest thing i've ever said. That's pretty much it. For the last thing,
I want to go a little bit further. Somewhere where only one person can go.
Somewhere where i can talk about the point of this entire video.
So I am circling the periphery right now, and see it's fenced in. Old Economy Village.
This is the final home of the Harmonists, which is this society that was sort of in
the sweet spot between religion and cult. Really they're a cult,
but everybody's just too nice to call them that. And their big idea — it is self-sufficiency.
Does that sound familiar if you're trying to build your one-man band journalism gear setup?
They have the beefiest squirrels here. Look how beefy that squirrel is. Hey fat boy.
They had a bevy of somewhat unusual beliefs but among those beliefs were celibacy.
They were so self-sufficient that they became extinct.
But old economy is not the end of the story. Old economy becomes Ambridge:
American Bridge, which becomes this. And it is the completely prototypical steel town,
from its rise to prominence, literally girding the economy with
steel, to its fall in the 80s. As a lot of production shifts overseas,
so does American Bridge, and so the very company for which Ambridge is named goes away.
So what does any of this have to do with
anything? Let's go back to David Sandberg. He is a guy — you remember him, right — he is a guy who
has worked for Ambridge. He has been in Hollywood making content, digging down in the content mines,
but he's also done stuff on his own. He has been the harmonists creating their own little society
in Old Economy. He's done both of those things, but not everybody can.
So this is the dilemma. Do you want to be in the Harmonists creating this incredible society that
dies out or would you rather be working at American Bridge, impacting the entire world,
and then the place you work for decides to pivot to doing something else, to working somewhere
else? This is the dilemma. The dilemma is not what kind of gear should you get how should you trick
out your a7iii, it's what kind of producer do you want to be in an economy that is more uncertain
than the one that faced Old Economy in the one that faced Ambridge? What are you supposed to do?
I have no idea.
But bring duct tape.