This week we went vertical! We supplied a 12’ Jimmy Jib Rental in NYC for a live product release. The end client’s viewing experience is set up for vertical and they pulled out all the stops to make it work….so did we. The impressive thing was how much care the client put into designing a set that worked perfect in 9x16. In that frame size, we have tons of vertical space to work with and almost nothing on the sides. The background was a video wall, there was a basketball hoop over it, and numerous tables displaying products on the foreground. All the content on the video wall scaled perfectly for that narrow frame width with just a single presenter in front of it. It was really impressive how this truly work out great! Everything looked like it was supposed to be there!
Now let’s talk about the jibbing. Rigging up a camera to sit on it’s side was not easy to figure out. Fortunately I had a prep day!. The camera kit was a Black Magic Studio 6K with a Canon Cine Servo 15-120. I added the camera kit onto a shoulder VCT so it could have rails to support the lens and a gold mount plate. The VCT plate got mounted to a very heavy duty Wooden Camera L bracket on the vertical side. On the bottom of the L bracket, I added an arri dovetail style slider plate made by Smallrig. When the camera was rigged up to the L bracket, I just had to slide the entire thing onto the dovetail. It was a graceful build, easy to balance, but added around 6-7lbs to the camera load!!
Actually rolling shots was an interesting process at first. You can’t get the wide look that you’re used to getting on the jib and need to focus on making the vertical looking full. Since other cameras are shooting head to toe shots, it was difficult to sell shots to the director that looked different. Having a program monitor helped a lot to see the building blocks the director was using and to be able to drum up more functional shots. What wound up working well included profile wides, straight on wide with the arm far away, starting in very tight on the products to widen out to mid shots, and getting shots that used parts of the lighting fixtures.
All in all, this couldn’t have gone better. The clients loved it, the launch was successful, and it was rather stress free figuring this all out despite it being the first time dealing with mounting the camera on the side. Prior to this I’ve always rolled in 4k, set some center guidelines, and cropped the edges. Hopefully more of these trickle in, it was fun!