Haunt Frustration

Here’s the deal when your building something or working on a project. You get started and your jamming along, you got everything off your shopping list and you have all the tools on hand. Then boom you come to a stop because something you needed is not fitting into place or properly performing its function. What’s next well usually some frustration sometimes a little anger or maybe you just say I quit and leave it all alone. The point of this post is that this is going to happen and its going to happen for sure in this industry because not everything is wrote down in instructions with an exact tools and items list of what is needed and there is no one who has done what your doing thousands of times to ensure it works smoothly. So rather it is a paint project, a prop project, or maybe in our case a video shoot, be prepared for the unthinkable and ready to work with it.

So here is our little story and how this post came about. We ran our survey and the one thing everyone wanted to know more about was paint and detailing techniques. Now we know what everyone wants to learn more about so we decide to take it to the next level and do video but not any video some good quality video so we build a small workshop set for shooting and get some walls up for the detailing work. I even borrowed some professional lighting gear from a friend so we could light the set evenly. Next was to get everything together and shoot some video. Well it started off pretty easy till the video part where we kept encountering little things, like a certain tool that should of been included in the overview was not on site, our paint mixtures did not go correct the first time so we had to try to re-mix it and then all the gear needed cleaning from it, and even better was the spray bottle that decided it wanted to sabotage our shoot and spray out the side of the nozzle all over everything including one of the cameras. At that point we decided to take it a step down and do some basic foam carving which because was not the original plan we once again did not have exactly everything needed so we got through bits and pieces before we realized that our 8 hours of video shooting just were not going to produce anything useful and we decided we would call it an end at that point.

Now that might sound like an epic disaster or fail but it was a tremendous success for us. I know now your asking how in the world is that a success. Well not only do we have a pre-built set now for future use and video but we have a ton of b-roll footage for anything in the future. The best part is we know we can make our video look great and of good quality, we learned that since we had seperate cameras that settings may not be the same and some will need changed so we now have widescreen and regular footage so that was another learning point. On top of all this we know what little items we need to make sure we have on hand next time along with the kind of time we need to perform a full video since there are drying times involved with letting the glue set on foam and paint to dry. Since I was experimenting to begin with on the foam gluing by using great stuff foam I learned several tricks to get a can of great stuff unclogged which will become a whole post in itself next week. I am sure there is atleast another dozen things we learned from our 2 days of setup and filming but you get the idea here.

If your going to do something be prepared for the unexpected and that you may not get anything produced, however if that is the case make sure you pay attention and learn from whatever it is that did not go right or that you did wrong. I must say I am not at all frustrated with what we accomplished because we now have such a better understanding of what a large undertaking it is to shoot some good quality video where you get all the small details on film so the viewers can see exactly how everything goes. The basic lesson here is if you mess up or encounter a problem that might ruin your day make sure you learn from it so you can improve and not encounter it again.