Owl Shoot

Today we had a commercial shoot for a political spot that will be bugging those of you still not smart enough to own a TiVo yet . . . We were asked to do a commercial for a politician running for an office in the state and he wanted an Owl to be in it.  Ok . . . So we called around and found Burt – a freakin awesome Eurasian Eagle Owl who lives in L.A.  He and his trainer, Glenn, made the trip up and we spent about 4 hours shooting some pretty cool owl footage.  I was the DMT (Digital Media Technician) for the day.  The RED camera’s shoot to either hard drive or Compact Flash and the data needs to be managed properly and backed up.  I don’t need to tell you how bad it would suck to shoot for 4 hours and then loose your entire shoot because someone erased the footage.  Here’s what my workstation looked like.  For those of you who care, I used a 2TB G-Tech G-Speed eS configured in a RAID 10 to backup and store the footage on.  The RED CF Cards come in 8GB and I used a FireWire 800 Reader to transfer the footage from the card to the G-Speed.  Took about 2 1/2 minutes to offload a single 8GB card.  Not bad.

So the politician already had some shots of him in a field but needed the owl so we decided to shoot the owl in front of a green screen and would then insert the same scene from the previous shot.  We had someone build a a mock barbed wire fence for the owl to land on.  

The owl was pretty good but got tired after about an hour or so and needed a break.  The trainer said they weigh him constantly to ensure that he’s not too hungry and not too full.  Too hungry and he gets crabby, too full and he wont pay attention to the trainer.  He did pretty good considering there was a camera in his face all day.  I’m not exactly sure when the spot is going to start airing but I’ll post it when it’s finished.  I’m interested to see how the key comes out and how things look.  Erik Espera produced the spot and Brian Hamm was DP.  Great combo so it should turn out great.  

One last shot of the crew.  From Left to Right, the trainer Glenn, Erik Espera, Brian Hamm, me and Ryan Todd.  Brian and Ryan worked on the feature “Sensored” we took part in.

TB