Rumble and Sway

This video is a mixtape of the 321 different shots we made over the two week period in NYC for the 2013 US Open broadcast on ESPN. One of our consistent gigs the past couple of years has been shooting and editing timelapse for broadcast. Now I'm not talking about live timelapse transmitting or anything impossible like that. We shoot scenics around the city, stylized shots of the stadiums, moving people and whatnot. In terms of this project, we also focused on elements like trophies, racket stringing, hyperlapses through the crowd, stadiums filling up, draw boards going up. Then we render these individual shots, deliver them the next day and feed them into the broadcast unit who in turn uses them to create daily teases, athlete features, and bumpers for the matchups. We give them these clip reels on a silver platter ready to go.

As far as gear goes, we shoot on 6 x Canon 5DIII’s and 2 x Red Epics. Might seem like a bit much but with a tight turnaround, there's only so many places we can be at once since there are only two of us. We set those cameras up at different vantage points around the city at secure spots and once those cameras are ripping, we take our motion control rigs out and go have some fun.

We shoot with a Kessler Crane CineDrive system and a few Dynamic Perception Stage Zero systems. Our glass selection is pretty specific. For most of the wide shots, we use the Canon 17mm TS-E or the Zeiss 15mm. Those two pieces of glass give you an ultra flat and ultra wide image. The other lens we use all the time is the Canon 8-15mm fisheye lens. We shoot these wide timelapses at 8mm and run them through an application called panolapse to flatten the circular image out and add a pan or tilt. The results are stunning. Other items in our kit include the entire Zeiss kit (15, 21, 35, 50, 85, 100) and the Canon TS-E kit (17, 24, 45, 90).

Music.- Jamie N Commons, Rumble And Sway (Monsieur Adi Remix).