Feeling like a professional ;)

As I mentioned in my casting blogpost, Jake took on the task of managing the cast and their schedule; I managed our equipment. Though we could technically shoot with Jake’s vlogging camera or even with our phones and achieve the same quality of technique, we wanted to deliver the best possible quality of the overall piece and to do that we need to be able to manipulate as much of the equipment as possible. Since we don’t have thousands of dollars worth of media equipment laying around our houses, we decided to go borrow it from a student film program at BECON TV. 


BECON TV is the local TV station owned and operated by Broward County Public Schools down at Nova University. The station creates and broadcasts various original shows and short films created in-house and features a lot of student films from around South Florida in a daily show called “Short Cuts”.  In order to facilitate content production for the show, BECON lets high school students check out professional equipment; all we have to do is ask and get some training. 

We borrowed a few pieces of equipment from BECON for our filming weekend, and surprisingly we owned a lot of the equipment we used ourselves. We borrowed a DSL camera ( Sony a7 III), an external mic, and a hand-held automatic stabilizer. I had borrowed a lot of the equipment in the past, so thankfully I’m used to how they work but I asked Jim from BECON TV to give me a refreshment crash course.

We have the equipment until this upcoming Sunday, which is hopefully the last day we will need to shoot. It may be hard to obtain the same equipment for a while past that for reshoots (which hopefully don’t have to happen). Every night before filming I will check, clean, and reorganize our equipment to make sure it is as efficient as possible the next day. Jake and I are also using a lot of our personal mics, tripods, lights, etc. I’m excited to start filming on Friday but until then we have a lot to get done! We are planning on finishing the script on Wednesday night and location scout on Thursday (even though we’ve had a general idea of where to shoot since we made the settings). This is going to be an exciting week!