It was lights, camera, metal molding at Cincinnati, Inc.’s FabTech 2022 Booth!
We’ve been to our fair share of conventions and conferences throughout the years. World of Concrete for Concrete Combat, REBUS Now! for our good friends at Longbow Advantage. But we’ve gotta say: the amazing technology on display at FabTech 2022 really was something else!
Now, why were we, a humble production company, at North America’s largest metal forming, fabricating, welding, and finishing expo, you might ask? To capture some awesome content for our great friends at Cincinnati, Inc., of course!
The ask was far from simple, however. Not only did CI task us with capturing a wealth of interviews and product b-roll, but they needed to roll out the first video within 24 hours of capture. No small feat, that. Luckily, we had just the team for the challenge!
Pre-Fab to Fabulous
“One of the best parts of this project was just how awesome the client was to work with,” recalls Sr. Producer Melissa St. Clair. “In the face of what they knew was a tight timeline and a super fast-paced project, they were just a breeze!”
Of course, Mel’s hyper-organization and general communicativeness helped a ton, but still – it was a joy to have such a wonderful vendor-to-client rapport from the jump.
As for our on-site production super team, Director of Photography Haley Fusia and Sound Mixer Matthew Harriott were tapped to make the proverbial magic happen.
“Honestly the hardest part of the shoot was the fact that, due to the nature of the event, we weren’t able to scout ahead of our first shoot day,” says Haley.
“Yeah, that was tough,” quips Matt, “and as a result we had to sort of ‘kitchen sink’ it on the first day. And THEN we discovered that we had to park an unideal ways away from the convention floor…so it was a workout just to get the gear to set,” Matt remembers with only a slightly traumatized chuckle.
Once they had all the gear in place, though, everything was easy-breezy without a single extra challenge along the way!
…just kidding. You show us a production with no challenges and we’ll show you a flying pig!
“The good part of capturing the interviews during the expo’s set-up day was that we avoided a ton of foot traffic. The bad part was that they were still setting up, meaning lots of forklifts, scissor lifts, etc. Unideal audio conditions, in short,” says Matt.
“There were definitely a few unavoidable pauses in production,” Haley chimes in, “but we were super fortunate to have interviewees that were both super excited to show off their gear, and who were incredibly patient. It made the process much easier!”
Following the interview filming, it was up to Haley to capture some stunning b-roll of Cincinnati, Inc.’s state-of-the-art technology. With our trusty Ronin 4D 4-axis gimbal camera at her disposal, she made short work of the job – and caught some of the coolest industrial footage we’ve filmed to date!
Fresh Off the Production (Expo) Line
While Haley & Matt were hard at work at FabTech 2022, this project’s editor Sebastian Chamaca waited patiently back at ECG HQ, eager to get his hands on the footage.
“Going into the edit, I knew getting that first video out would be a unique, fun challenge. On one hand: the timeline was a no-joke fast turnaround; but on the other hand, having such a specific ask freed up my mind to focus solely on the task at hand.”
Seb didn’t have to wait long, either: Haley & Matt returned from day 1 of production around noon with plenty of Cincinnati, Inc. highlights to go around.
Footage in hand (hard-drive?), Seb settled into his editing suite and got to work.
“Priority #1 – as is always the case with videos like this – was the dialog. I’m lucky to have a ton of experience with those kinds of edits, so I managed to knock that out pretty quickly,” says Seb. “After that, it was just some fun trial & error to get the feel just right. If I remember correctly, I think I had a rough edit by 5:00 PM that evening!”
That he did.
With the rough edit prepped, Seb also applied a clean, punchy, & cool Lumetri color grade in Adobe Premiere. To the point yet with enough contrast to be eye-catching, was the mantra.
The last step was a standard addition of denoiser, EQ, and compression on the audio front, and then video 1 was off!
The Results? Pretty Metal!
The sprint to finish the first video wasn’t the end of the project. No, no: we still had 2 more red-hot spots we needed to put together!
With the help of another ace ECG editor, Kelsey Cherney, Matt & Haley’s hard work on set was molded into 2 more amazing videos.
At the end of the day, the folks at Cincinnati, Inc. were over the moon with the results.