Production

For the re-do of our first film project, we mostly the same gear as on the original shoot. Read about that in Terms and Conditions Equipment.

For the re-shoot, we changed little:

Camera Support: Pan-Tilt Head

We did add an inexpensive pan-tilt head for this shoot. In the end, we decided against trying a fancy moving-camera shot. It takes practice to get good at that and we just didn’t have time.

Audio

We added a second shotgun microphone for those shots where we would both be in-frame and speaking. We used the short version of the Marantz Audio Scope SG-9P. That was hooked up to our Zoom H5 which supplied the mic with phantom power and already had its own shotgun mic attached.

Lighting

This time around we dragged the two soft boxes up from the studio and used those to light the interior scenes. These are inexpensive Neewer boxes on Cowboy Studio stands using LED light bulbs. The commercial with Iggy was filmed using those lights plus a ring light and small fills for the green screen. All of the outdoor scenes were shot using only natural light.

Post-Production

Video

As in the original, Final Cut Pro X is used for everything video. Two third-party plug-ins where used in the re-make. Cosmo II from Red Giant, a “digital makeup” effect, was used for Iggy. Setting most of the controls to maximum provided a plastic, unnatural look to Iggy’s face.

A planar-tracking plug-in was used for the shoe display effect and it worked much better than the original. However, we weren’t terribly happy with the plug-in, so we won’t mention it by name. Suffice it to say that if you need good planar tracking, be prepared to pay a fair amount for a good tool. That said, the tracking built into Final Cut Pro is getting better all the time.

Audio

We’re big fans of the iZotope products. We used RX 7 to fix some issues in our soundtrack. We also used iZotope’s VocalSynth to give Iggy his robot-ish voice effect.