With Covid 19 mandates becoming less strict, the world of entertainment has given us large scale outdoor events to produce again and our team couldn’t be more pleased.
This is great news for everyone in our production offices but especially most fun for our event film crew as they get to not only be fully immersed in the experience before, during and after the show is over.
Producing an entire festival has many moving parts which will cover in future blogs, but for now, Vision Matrix will like to give you the opportunity to learn about what filming for a festival is like.
Preproduction, Production, and Postproduction
During the pre-production phase, the production team works hand in hand with the marketing department to determine the style, subject, and the number of films in advance of the festival. These days are the calm before the storm. Creative juices are flowing, everyone is well rested, showing up with fresh ideas and planning to execute the best content for the days production will take place. These are the days production film crews are well rested.
That is until they have way too much fun during the actual day of the production. They are completely immersed in the festival experience running around with a camera capturing every single exciting moment that happens as well as capturing specific shot list of items requested by the marketing and festival directors. It’s the one part of production life that’s really thrilling. This is because when a production team is contracted to film festivals, they are usually given lots of creative freedom and there is little to no regulations of what can be filmed.
Once the festival footage is captured it is then handed to the postproduction team. The most patient and meticulous of folks. They must sift through countless frames of footage. Every frame of video and picture captured is looked over, then either discarded, edited, or used for promotional material. Not only that, but it must be done in a time efficient manner as all this content is time sensitive. The longer a festival film crew takes to put out content, the less momentum and marketing advantage festivals have.
TLC for the Event Production Film Crew
As you now know, their job requires hours of labour and often they can walk up to 10 miles a day easily so as head of production is it essential that we treat our crew like family and we must take precautions to ensure their safety, health, and protect their film equipment.
Here are a few things that we must consider regarding safety, health, and equipment for a festival film crew.
Requesting a safe location solely available to the video production crew or the DSLR flock filming festival personnel.
Purchasing adequate meal tokens to cover the whole production crew for the festival period.
Making sure they take time off when they are supposed to.
Planning for media passes ahead of time for the festival.
Ensuring accommodations for your film crew to stay as most festivals are 3-4 days long.
Expect the unexpected, get insured.
One thing about film crews at festivals is that they all their equipment is insured. Ensuring that their equipment is insured before the day of the event is extremely important because they will be working in a fast-paced and choppy environment. Working festivals are risky for camera equipment because the film crew is out on the field, elbow to elbow with thousands of people, who are often intoxicated. A camera or lens breaking happens all too often due to these factors and having equipment insured up to 1 million dollars is taken care of before an event takes place to facilitate a better working environment for the film crew. It avoids unnecessary disturbances and accidents