Bonnie and I (Robin) had a great shoot day at ORCA in Montpelier.  I borrowed some equipment from HCTV in Hardwick and headed down.  It took us two hours to set up the studio, we had budgeted one hour.  Next time we’ll know, but this was the first time and so there was some learning curve as we figured out the best way to do this.

ORCA’a main wall is UltraMatte Green and we did NOT want to green-screen this.  Their only other wall is black, which is what we wanted, so we set up the studio 90˚ anti-clockwise.

I hung HCTV’s little camera over head, my two cameras as flanking close ups and I used to of their studio cameras as flanking wides, and I operated their middle camera.  The young guy that knew their studio the best had no idea how to tell the switcher what it was being fed, so for our first act my two cameras were in B+W because we were feeding YC signals into a composite input.  I later looked into the manual and found the menu to switch the inputs to YC.  Bonnie ran the switcher and sound board.

We had three different ‘guy with guitar’ acts, so we only needed two mics.

First up was Mark LeGrande.  He performed some new songs.  We got at least 12 songs (I don’t actually know how many).  We did three songs and then I changed the gel on the backlight.  He wore his hat and so the key shadowed his eyes, I set up the fill low so we could see one of his eyes when he looked straight ahead.   The fill was only a stop or so below the key.  I used HCTV’s inky as the backlight and ORCA’s house  fresnel and Lowell Omni as the key and fill.

Bonnie and I couldn’t communicate so we did the best we could.  I would hit the camera cable while trying to dolly and she’d cut to my camera when I wasn’t ready.  I had meant to roll tape in a couple of cameras but ran out of time.  I did that later in the day.

We recorded Peter Mayhew next and then finished with Scott Graves.  Scott mixes sound at Positive Pie Montpelier and so he borrowed a direct box for his acoustic guitar.

At the end of each act we had then talk a little about themselves and where they were with their music.  We invited Mark to bring his whole band in someday.

Since we were running behind, our plan to stop at 4PM didn’t happen.  We went until 4:30 and then wrapped up.  I didn’t get everything out until 5:30.

So now we know, we need two hours to setup and one hour to wrap.