Case Study - Classic Car Shoot

For more information on shooting/selling stock footage check out my other posts:
GETTING STARTED
KEYWORDING
WHAT SELLS?

I am always keeping my eye open for an opportunity to shoot something unique. My father in law has a completely restored 1940 Ford that I have been wanting to shoot for some time. He is a little bit protective of his car so I had some reservations about asking, but when I did he was excited to get the car out and take it for a spin. It reminded me that people with a unique hobby or interest are often eager to share, all you have to do is ask.

I could have planned better for this shoot. I only had one thought-out shot in my mind, a classic 40 Ford crusin around some s-turns up in the hills. I had a general idea of where I wanted to go for that. Then I had a bunch of still shots in my brain of close ups on the chrome bumper, the wheels, hubcaps, taillights. Shooting out of the back of another car leading the Ford down a windy road. Something through the side or rear-view mirror. Out of laziness I figured that I had limited time, and I should just concentrate on getting 1 or 2 useful shots.

Here's the gear I brought with me:

Canon t2i (550D) - $650 - This camera has the same censor as the popular Canon 7D (about $1500), the t2i's construction is a little lighter, it feels a little bit like a toy, but I just want to be able to shoot the 5184 X 3456 raw still images for time-lapse, I want to shoot shallow depth of field, I want to shoot HD 1080p, and I want to be able to shoot 60fps slow-motion. This camera has what I need, so I saved on the camera body to be able to buy the more expensive glass.

Canon EF 70-200mm f2.8 with image stabilizer - $2300
For high quality images, the most important part of your set up is your lens. You can have the biggest sensor in the world, but your lens is what projects the image of the world onto that sensor and a low quality lens will limit the actual resolution of your images. This lens is the best in its class, and a standard for many professional photographers. f2.8 allows you to shoot in fairly dim conditions for a long lens, and can give you an extremely shallow depth of field. The icing on the cake with this lens for Video is the image stabilizer, many pro-sumer video cameras have image stabilization built in, but DSLR's do not and an unstable image is unusable for stock footage. I try to ALWAYS use a tripod, however, there are many times when a tripod is not practical, the stabilizer makes a world of difference. Especially since longer lenses magnify any small movements you make with your unsteady hand. And your hand is unsteady, I guarantee it.

Canon EF-S 18-55mm f3.5 - $70 - Sometimes you have to sacrifice quality for budget constraints, I purchased this lens to allow me to shoot in the wide/normal range, it is not ideal. The Canon DSLR is a new setup for me, so I will be purchasing a few more pieces as I go along. For now, this will do.

Sachtler DV2 Sticks - $500 used - for stock footage a good fluid-head tripod is vital. For the casual hobbiest, a large tripod is inconvenient, and annoying to cary around. Anyone who is serious about stock footage will find that any temporary inconvenience a good set of sticks causes pays off when you get your footage home.





The Shoot
I was glad I didn't have any more equipment. With just 1 small bench seat, and a father in law that is damn near 7ft tall, I was happy that all my camera equipment fit in a small camera bag, and my sticks could lay in the seat between us. Less equipment is a little more casual and it also draws less attention on the side of a road from authority figures that might cut your shoot short.

As we headed toward the canyon, we chatted for a while then I pulled my camera out to make sure I had my settings right. I wanted to shoot HD 1080 (the highest quality video that the t2i shoots), I put on my wide lens, made sure it was clean, I checked the exposure in sun, and as we went through shadows. I rolled 20 seconds through the front windshield. Primarily to test that everything was working correctly, but I always try to shoot something that could be useful.

The shot was very shaky, but there was a nice moment when we passed a 40mph sign on the road, I'm not sure if anyone would make the connection that this was a 1940 Ford, and it said 40 on the road, but sometimes those little coincidences get people excited about the footage and it can turn into a big seller. Symbolism sells. I may try to run an image stabilizer on this footage, you never know exactly what will sell, so when in doubt, try it out.

We finally got to a spot on the west side of a hill that still had some good light on it. I jumped out on the side of the road and told my father-in-law that we could communicate by phone and I'd have him do a few passes up and down the hill so I could grab a couple different shots. With just a small bag and a tripod "guerrilla" shooting is pretty easy. The legality is questionable... technically you are supposed to have a shooting permit in most cities. It is a little bit dangerous to be hanging out on the side of a road and anything dangerous is generally frowned upon by local law enforcement. But it's not like I'm writing graffiti or something, just taking pictures.

I had a specific shot I wanted to get, but I made sure to find a shot as the car drove off to turn around.

I am always looking for shots besides the one I have planned, sometimes the best shots are impromptu. In between passes, I would run down the road a ways to change my shot up. I always strive to get quality shots, but the BUSINESS of stock footage is about quantity as much as quality, so the more usable shots the better.

One time while I was waiting for the car to turn around I noticed that a purple thistle flower and some yellow wild flowers were nicely backlit by the setting sun, and they lined up pretty well for a rack focus.

Although flowers are way over shot, I had nothing better to do in that moment. Purple and yellow happen to be complementary colors, and an interesting rack focus between the contrasting plants made for a decent supplemental shot. It also gave me an idea to rack focus from the thistle to the car as another variation on my main subject shot, it was also a good way to utilize a key feature of the t2i/70-200mm combo, the shallow depth of field gave the shot a more cinematic look.

We shot for about 45 minutes, and I probably got 4-5 shots that I was happy with, that is a pretty good day.

There were probably 100 more shots to shoot, and if I were out on my own I could have easily spent 4-5 hours with that car. I decided to save those shots for another day. I was happy to knock out a few shots, have a little fun with the father-in-law and have some fresh footage for my stock library.

As a bonus, we stopped to fill up with gas on the way home. Never missing an opportunity, I had him hold on for just a second, I quickly jumped out and framed up a shot, gassing up the 1940 Ford. To be honest, I have a feeling that the impromptu "gassing up" shot will probably end up being my best seller. It would have been easy at the end of the day to just let that one go, it ended up looking pretty nice. But who knows? The true test is when you get the footage on line and let the buyers decide.

The next step is to process these clips. In Final Cut Pro, I have selected the clips I think are the best, they were a little short so I combined two short shots into a mini-sequence to give the buyer a little more bang for their buck. There will be a coming and going shot combined in to one clip. Then I will use my thistle rack focus shot, a stand-alone wide angle shot of the 40 Ford going by, and a shot gassing up.

I trimmed the clips to be just the best part of each shot, I made sure the clips were longer than 5 seconds but less than 30 seconds. I will do some minor color correction then I will convert the shots to 1080X1920 HD, square pixels, with a Photo Jpeg Compression (for progressive scan shots) and save them into my library. The shots will be organized into my "Transportation" sub-folder and the file names will be something like, "TRN-0063 Classic Car Fillup.mov"

Next step is to plug each clip's info into my Google Doc Database (See my post on Stock Footage Organization)

Then I'm ready to upload the clips to iStockPhoto, Pond5, Shutterstock and a few others.

That's my process, for a Saturday afternoon stock footage shoot. Next, I wait for the $$$ start rolling in after a few months, and before too long my unpaid day of fun with the father-in-law turns into a healthy payout that just keeps coming year after year, and maybe if we're lucky we'll get to see the 40 Ford in the title sequence of some street rod restoration documentary.

Thanks for reading, Happy Shooting!
HDCineman