IBM's International Series on Diversification

[Michael Y Wong]

Hello guys,

Before leaving my old job, I was commissioned to direct an international series before my tenure @ IBM was finished. I didn't have much say with regards to the content itself; but was lucky enough to be granted with complete creative control on the project.

Each episode was allocated a 3 hour shooting time (for both interviews and money sequences); unfortunately for most episodes I had to shoot alone - but the more later episodes I was lucky to have Patrick's help.

Although the content in the material itself is obviously not wedding related; I wanted to share these with this community since the fact is that most of the workflow and techniques used in the shoot from the entire series is 100% stemmed from experience gained from shooting weddings. Most notably shooting run and gun with inflexible time constraints, creating & designing sequences in efforts to tell a story; in addition to dealing with exposure issues in a non-studio/set environment.

The basic workflow for the series are interview shots using the Brevis35 adapter mixed with some flying footage that for the most part is unseen in the corporate world.

The series is now playing internationally within IBM and I was recently given legal permission to showcase these 2 episodes on our website; if my memory serves me correctly these episodes were shot about 6 months ago.

http://stillmotionblog.com/?p=408

Enjoy! Honest feedback and contsructive criticism is always appreciated.

Michael

[Peter Szilveszter]

Hey Michael

Love the job you did and totally agree this kind of style of corporate videos don't really exist. I would hope IBM is very happy with what they got, even large budget tv production miss this kind of production value.

The Steadicam shots really give it a good energy and a friendly feel to what would normally feel like a talking head telling you how good a company is.

I think the only thing I would criticize on is maybe if Alvaro had a male voice to try to make the audience connect with him better.

I think the 2 episodes give some great insight for anyone doing interviews in weddings so totally applies both workflow and content wise. :)

Keep up the great work.

[Randy Panado]

Holy cow, that is some great stuff!

It is VERY professional and given the situation where you had to come up with something interesting to shoot (rather than shooting something interesting happening to shoot like an event), you did a wonderful job! Shows a lot of creativity and diversity (heh) of style on your part.

Thanks for sharing.

[Barry Gribble]

Michael,

Great job... they look great and deliver the message well.

[Michael Y Wong]

My apologies for the late reply (caught a terrible flu bug in London); thank you for the warm comments.

Peter, good call on the male voice translating on top of Alvaro's; I've yet to hear anyone to mention that. The voice of the translater is actually Alvaro's wife; originally the piece was to be driven entirely by subtitles but upon hearing Alvaro's wife's voice I immediately wanted to use it for the video.

Luckily for us, IBM has been extremely pleased with the entire series!

[Bill Grant]

Micheal,
This is incredible really! What lighting were you using in the interviews, it looked like only one light. Very nice.
Bill

[Michael Y Wong]

Hi Bill

Yup, I was forced to use as much natural/available lighting that was available.

From there I just used a 10/20 watt Sony video light with a Stofen Filter to key/rim what I needed depending on what lighting was available. The rest was touched up in post to push as far as possible what was available.

Michael