Has anyone here ever shot an Every 15 minutes assembly? This is where the CHP recreates a drunk driving accident at a high school and uses students as the victims.
We're shooting one tomorrow, this is only our second. The first one was a neat experience.

We have never shot one but will do our first on April 18th. I have watched a few to get some ideas, any ideas you could share would be appreciated. Ours will cover the accident, ambulance, medevac, hospital, morgue, police station, court, parents notified, funeral home and a funeral. Still waiting on a timeline to decide how many cameras we will need.

My nephews high school "media" team shot theirs - pretty good stuff, if the "acting" is good, you can get some intense dramatic footage. Be prepared to travel light and move fast, or have a couple camera crews from what I could see - again, think edge-y, intense shots, not necessarily your "typical" pro shoot style.

Sitting here doing the overnight edit of the crash scene.
Last week and earlier this week we shot the drinking party scene, hospital, court, jail and parent notification for the deceased students. Those were edited earlier in the week just need to drop in the completed crash scene.

Today for the accident we ran 3 cameras. I was already on scene covering the arrival of the first responders. One of my shooters rode in on the fire truck and the other in the police car. We each took an area, fire, PD, EMT etc... It ran very smooth. I made the mistake of shooting on a DSLR, it worked fine but having to chase the focus was a pain. My other two shooters were on traditional cameras.

We also did the PA system and mic'd up the main people. It

Big recommendations would be talk to the officer coordinating it and assign your shooters different areas to cover. Feel free to ask any questions.

Great idea shooting some of the scenes before the day of the crash. I am going to suggest that when we meet with them. We have three cameras and hopefully a couple from the school so maybe we can cover everything.

When we did it 2 years ago we had 4 cameras. 3 worked great. While you don't want to miss anything keep in mind you will probably need to have it edited for the next day. 3 vs 4 cameras can help speed up the edit. Also you will have a preset length that the entire video can be. Mine ended up being 34min overall from the drinking scene to the court room. The crash scene was only 9min.

While you may be thinking the more cameras the merrier it can also complicate things. We also had a photographer from the local newspaper, 2 tv news reporters and a school photog getting in our way the entire time.

Thanks Adam, we are not on a deadline for the edit so that makes it a little less complicated. I have a feeling we will also have news teams and photogs present to get in our way. We have a couple of meetings with the group before the day of so hopefully we can get our part organized.

James, I'll try to load the one we just did on vimeo next week if you want to check it out.

I would very much appreciate the chance to see your edit. I really appreciate your insight into all this. I'm real excited to have the opportunity to film one of these videos.