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  • Writer's pictureGlenn

Tartan Challenges

Filming an event brings with it a number of challenges. Firstly, it takes a major time commitment- both on the day and in post production. Secondly, with the advent of mobile phones, there are movie makers and photographers galore at every event ready to point, shoot and load it to the web.


BMM decided to rally behind the request to shoot Tartan Day 2019. We had 6 cameras and a team of 9 on hand for the shoot. It was a long day, running from 9am through to 3pm, with something happening the whole time. This meant that we would have a lot of footage- in fact, we ended up with something like 60GB+ ! The upside is that we had a lot of footage from various angles, including gimbals. The downside was that... well, we had a lot of footage!


Short but deadly!

Post production was going to be a challenge. Normally, we would bring footage on a hard drive to a club meeting and share it. For something this big, it wouldn't be practical. We decided to employ the use of Vimeo Pro to help manage the footage. We could upload the footage from everyone's home to Vimeo. From there, we could: view the footage; select the pieces we wanted to include; and download them to our own computers. Vimeo allows for the creation of a project folder, which we did to collate all the pieces together.


As a new initiative, it kind of worked. Moving forward, we could do it better. This exercise showed the importance of a common file naming system. When there are so many pieces, it is important that we capture the essence of a piece in its file name. For instance, 'Highland dancing girls on gimbal' is much clearer as you don't have to open it to know what will be there. When you have so much to see, time is of the essence.


When you have people uploading media immediately from an event, you need to consider the outcome you want before you commence. We wanted to offer a product that offered the client value over and above what could be done with a smart phone. It was going to come down to the editing. We decided to ask members to volunteer to edit a specific Tartan project. In all, we decided to make 5 short videos, as opposed to one full length documentary. From here, the client will have edited footage that presents this event in an exciting way, that can be used on their websites or Facebook or whatever.


Overall, it was a beautiful day, and an amazing experience. It was a treat to be engaged in presenting these extraordinary cultures on film.


Here are our various pieces:

The first one is called 'Pipers and Sword Fighting' and it shows a variety of groups presenting a performance.



The big event of the day was the Main Parade. This definitely required a focus, as quite franky- it was spectacular! There have been two versions created: The 'long version' runs the entire length of the main parade; and the 'short' version' includes fade outs to just show highlights.

The Main Parade- Long:


The short version of Main Parade:


One of the great opportunities we saw for filming this day was to create a short documentary. We took the time to interview various participants. Here is our final result:









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