Forrester Media's Atlanta Video Production Blog

Taking production to the next level

Every once in a while, we have a chance to stretch our wings a bit and take flight in one form or another. I recently had the occasion to pull two videos from our vault to show prospective clients different options for their productions.

Several years ago, we had the opportunity to work with an historic Atlanta institution, the Druid Hills Golf Club. They worked with a course architect to redesign their course and wanted to document the new course for members. We presented the course from an aerial perspective to give members a bird's eye view while the architect offered a great narrative of each hole on the course.

More recently, we documented the application of a decal to the side of a Boeing 737 at the AirTran hanger in Atlanta. The five-hour process needed to be compressed into a 20-second time frame, which we easily achieved by recording the process at a rate of one frame every second (instead of the normal 30 frames per second. We then took that 10-minute video and compressed it in our edit system to run start to finish in twenty seconds. Here's the result:

While your production may not need such specialty services, it never hurts to know 'sure, we can do that!'

Live business news from Augusta

It's no secret that a lot of business gets done on the golf course. Couple that with The Masters tournament in Augusta, Georgia and you're bound to get some movers and shakers in town. No doubt that's why one of our broadcast clients, Bloomberg News, decided to make a visit to Augusta and asked Forrester Media to once again provide crews, cameras and uplink for 3 days of live coverage from a private club just outside the gates of Augusta National.

We started each day at 3:00AM to prepare the outdoor set for the anchors who hosted the 2-hour morning show from the Azalea Club.

While we usually have potted plants brought in for background props, we didn't have to do that for this event. The pink azaleas were in bloom and bordered the artificial putting green where our talent was seated.

The three-camera images were fed live to New York where they were switched into the show. We downlinked both programming and teleprompters for the two anchors.

The set was lit with two 1200-watt HMI's, 2 400-watt HMI's and 2 200-watt HMI's along with some smaller Arri fixtures that had CTB gel applied to them to match the daylight-balanced HMI's.

To keep the light just right during the pre-dawn hours, the spill from the lights is controlled by a variety of scrims, flags and diffusion material.

The end result? A successful set of live shots and shows each day culminating with an interview with golfing legend Gary Player, also known as the 'Black Knight' who played in The Masters 52 times, winning three of the tournaments. Here's my view from behind the lens just prior to the live shot with Mr. Player.