This past season I was lucky enough to work with the amazing folks at Loon Mountain to produce a series of historically inspired videos to celebrate and commemorate their 50th anniversary.
Interviews
We started the production back over the summer by capturing interviews of some of the key interviews for the main people for the videos. This was extremely beneficial because it allowed us time to edit the interviews before the start of the busy ski season. It was also essential because we wanted to roll these videos out prior to and during the season, and it would have been a challenge to do that on top of the already busy video production schedule that takes place during ski season. The interviews were shot on location using the mountain and facilities as a backdrop. To ensure a consistent look, the interviews were lit with one kino flo diva and a small led light, allowing us to move, setup, and breakdown quickly in a variety of different locations. To make the actual interviews as short and simple as possible for the interviewees, we chose to use a boom mic to capture audio, allowing them to step in and stop out. The interviews were shot on the Sony A7rII in 4k captured to a Atomos Ninja Flame, allowing us to use one shot to create multiple angles by resizing and recomposing the shot. This way we didn’t have to setup multiple cameras. As a one man studio, its always a balance of finding the best cinematic options with the smallest gear footprint.
Post Production
As this series is about the historic stories of the last 50 years of Loon Mountain, we were working with mostly archival photos. In order to create a more cinematic look than the standard “Ken Burns”, we decided to turn the images into 3d graphics, rotoscoping and layering different elements of the photos and then animating them in 3d space using Adobe After Effects. It was by far a much more time consuming task as some of these images are 40 or so years and not the most crisp focus so cutting out the different elements took alot of attention to detail.
The project was one of the most exciting that I worked on because the stories behind them were so amazing. I’ve always had a fascination with history and being able to be a part of telling the story of a mountain as historic as Loon was an incredible experience.
