Darling Harbour, The Museum of Contemporary Art and Gerringong Public School

It’s been another busy fortnight with filming all over Sydney and Wollongong. We’ve been out of the office on film shoots nearly every day for the past two weeks.

Here’s a rundown of what the PipeWolf team have been up to recently:

Filming A Tech Company

On Thursday 26 May Dave filmed a 6-hour live event for a tech company in Waterloo. This was one of the many camera operator jobs we have booked at the moment which means we were filming for another video production company.

It’s always tough not being able to show off the great footage that Dave captures. Event videography is challenging – you need to be able to move quickly and record fantastic footage and audio on the go.

It’s important to ensure you’ve packed all the essential camera, audio and lighting gear that you need – you only have minutes to set up to film an interview or capture a vox pox before the next formality in the event starts.

Event videography is fun through – the time goes really fast and the real bonus, there’s always great food!

In Front of The Camera

We are really comfortable behind the camera but occasionally we have to be on camera – giving us a fresh sense of empathy for our video production clients!

Being on camera can be really daunting – especially when you’re being interviewed and there are no scripts.

Fyona was interviewed by WIN News about a recent Airbnb listing for the upcoming UCI Road World Championships in Wollongong later this year.

We had a great chat with the camera operator – it’s rare for us to be able to see other videographers or camera operators work – so when we do there’s plenty to talk about.

Dave also drove down to Shellharbour to pick up a VHS order that needs to be digitally transferred. About 90% of our media transfer orders are dropped off and picked up from our Berkeley office, but we do also offer a home pick up/drop off service from Thirroul to Shellharbour.

Wedding Videography

When we first started PipeWolf Media one of the best pieces of advice we got was to separate our weddings from our corporate videography work – so we created PipeWolf Media for all our business video production and PipeWolf Weddings for all the wedding videography.

It’s been a good move from a marketing point of view – there’s still a bit of a stigma in the corporate world around wedding videographers – people almost smirk when they ask if we film weddings.

The thing is wedding videography is bloody hard work! It’s tough to capture all the audio from the day, the vows, and speeches, you have to run multiple cameras at the same time to film everything, especially when guests are moving around.

They’re long days, but the editing is even longer. Pouring through 10-hours of footage to put a fun, dynamic and engaging 8-min highlight film together is a true art form.

Thanks to Covid – we’re filming all the weddings we booked back in 2019 this year.

We filmed the first part of Lauren + Tyler’s wedding in November 2021 in Kiama – but some family couldn’t make it back from overseas, so they had a mini-wedding in May, this time in Fairy Meadow, which we filmed.

The venue was low light but thankfully our Sony cameras still work well in low light situations. It was Connors first time filming a wedding – this 2 hour mini-wedding was a good trial wedding before we start capturing 10-hour weddings again towards the end of the year.

Video Testimonials

One of the most powerful marketing tools a company can use it a professional video testimonial. We headed up to Sydney last week and spent half a day in the office of a company that specialised in AI and custom application development. We filmed one of their clients, a large retail company with over 5000 stores world-wide, sharing their experiences and results after implementing the technology solutions into their POS and online systems.

One thing that makes a testimonial video so great is that you can show the product or service in action via the cut-away footage (or b-roll) – but when the product is computer code that’s installed on a server for the customers POS algorithm – and nothing can be shows publicly it’s challenging to shoot relevant b-roll. Thankfully we were able to rope in a few generous office workers and create some team-meeting shots that have worked really well into the final edit.

Funeral Live Stream in Thirroul

We live streamed another funeral last week – this time in Thirroul. It was such a windy day – at times it felt like the old church room was fighting to stay attached to the building.

The lighting inside the catholic church was really dim, but we were able to capture a clean crisp image of the service. This funeral had family and friends taking part in the service which meant lots of cuts between our two-camera set up allowing us to smoothly transition between people speaking behind the podium or lighting candles near the casket.

Despite the wind, our internet bonding technology allowed us to stream the entire funeral service without a single glitch – live streaming is always stressful because no matter how great you shoot the live event, if the internet isn’t playing along, your live stream is dead.

School Filming in Sydney

On Thursday Dave headed back up to Sydney, out to Prestons this time, filming an in-school workshop where a large road transport company was delivering a program to a local high school.

Live filming like this requires Dave, as a camera operator, to watch and listen closely – anticipating who is going to speak next or when people are going to move. You can’t interrupt the event and ask them to do something again because you missed it! You have to stay on the ball and filming everything as it’s unfolding in real time.

Darling Harbour, The Museum of Contemporary Art and Gerringong Public School

What does Darling Harbour, The Museum of Contemporary Art and Gerringong Public School have in common? That’s all the places our team worked on Friday.

In the morning Dave drove to Darling Harbour to film a charity and NAIDOC week event at a Thai restaurant in the Harbourside Plaza at Darling Harbour. The filming included capturing interviews, b-roll and people presenting on camera.

Later that day Connor and Dave met up at The Rocks and headed to the Museum of Contemporary Art to capture an Italian National Day event – the brief was to capture all of the event presentations in full, the audio from the speeches, and enough footage to make two separate event highlight videos – each designed for different brands an audiences.

With Vivid providing a colourful backdrop over Circular Quay the event videography was a huge success.

Meanwhile, Fyona and Kirra packed up the outdoor cinema set up and headed down to Gerringong Public School to set the cinema up for their P&C Fundraising event.

It was a cool June night but thankfully not too cold – under an hour Fyona and Kirra were able to get the entire cinema set up and ready to go – great news for the 200-300 parents and kids who turned up to watch the movie.

Video Editing

While Dave has been out filming nearly every single day for the past two weeks, the rest of the team have been editing their little hearts out. As a rule-of-thumb, every hour of filming it approximately 5-hours of editing.

We finished editing the Birdblack Design walkthrough videos for two properties plus a handful of social media videos and Instagram reel videos.

We create a highlights edit for a wedding celebrant that we worked with in November last year. It’s tough for wedding celebrants to get great footage of themselves and what they offer during the ceremony – so whenever we capture a wedding we offer a celebrant-edit video package which has been a really popular offering.

We finished the Micromobility Conference promo videos for their upcoming Micromobility Conference in November this year, which we’ll also be filming and live streaming.

We’re working on a round of changes for some educational videos we shot at feedlots in northern NSW late last year – it’s been a big project wrangling the 16-hours of filming (and even more footage across both cameras) down to 7 videos but we’re nearly there.

We transferred a handful of audio cassettes on our new audio cassette player (very rare to get new tech to use for our media transfers!).

Plus we’re still editing two weddings, a funeral video for a client, making changes to a rental walk through video and, finally, starting to edit all of the content we captured last week.