Creatives Grab Coffee - 20 Years of Video Production and Corporate Storytelling | Creatives Grab Coffee 72

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

In the latest episode of Creatives Grab Coffee, we sit down with Craig from Spider Video, a seasoned video production professional with over 20 years of experience in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Craig shares the journey of building his boutique production company, navigating the evolving landscape of video technology, and the challenges of balancing creativity with the demands of running a business. From early days of mini DV tapes to mastering corporate storytelling, this episode is packed with insights for anyone in the video production industry. Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Background of Spider Video 03:06 Early Days and Evolution of Video Technology 10:19 Memorable Moments on Big Film Sets 14:16 Challenges of Balancing Work and Personal Life 17:39 Corporate Video Production in Halifax 22:04 Data Storage and Archiving Footage 28:30 Building Relationships in the Video Production Industry 34:00 Evolution of Camera and Lighting Equipment 42:53 Buying vs. Renting Equipment 50:39 Managing Multiple Projects and Teams 57:58 Conclusion and Final ThoughtsSPONSORS:Canada Film Equipment: www.CanadaFilmEquipment.comAudio Process: www.Audioprocess.ca🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2vHd8BdbkMQITFZmDJ0bo9🍏 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/creatives-grab-coffee/id1530864140🎞️ Produced by LAPSE PRODUCTIONS – https://www.lapseproductions.comTo learn more about the show, visit: https://www.creativesgrabcoffee.com/

Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee, the podcast on the business of video production. Creatives Grab Coffee is hosted by Dario Nuri and Kirill Lazerov from Labs Productions. Our goal is to share knowledge and experiences from video production professionals around the world. Whether you're a freelancer looking to start your own business or a seasoned business owner aiming to scale your company, this is the show for you. Join us as we develop a community of like-minded creatives looking to learn and help each other grow. Welcome to the business of video production.

Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee. Before we get started with the show, let's go over today's sponsors. Do you have a shoot in Toronto? Do you need crew or a strong production partner to help you with your project? Laps Productions is one of the top production companies in Toronto and your go-to video partner. With our strong creative skills and extensive network, we can help you achieve your goal. Laps Productions is able to offer you production services, white label services, or finder fees for project handoffs.

Reach out to us on our website at LAPSProductions.com to learn more. My name is Mehran, welcome to Canada Film Equipment. We are a boutique rental house based in Toronto. We are here to help you guys out with all production sizes. Feel free to contact us to get a quote if you are a production house and you're looking for lighting camera packages or lighting and group plan packages. You can see our contact information in the link below. We are more than happy to help you guys out.

Make sure you follow and subscribe to creativescraftcoffee.com. Thank you. Hey, what's up everybody? I'm Matt. Welcome to Audio Process. We are a boutique audio company doing location sound, sound design, post sound, ADR, Foley. We service equipment. We do all your audio needs here in Toronto. We got you covered.

Come on down. AudioProcess.ca. Don't forget to like, follow, subscribe, and all of the other internet things to creativesgrabcoffee.com. They'll be waiting for you. I'll be waiting for you. And we're all gonna have a real good time. And now, let's begin the show. Welcome guys to another episode of Creatives Grab Coffee. Today we got Craig from Spider Video up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Welcome, Craig. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate the connection we made before and the good work that

you did for us remotely was fantastic. Thank you. And you know, the funny thing is, is that usually it, we kind of did it the opposite way. We usually find guests and then work with them, but this time it was kind of the reverse where we, where we, where we got in touch with each other and then, and then now working together. So before we kind of the reverse where we got in touch with each other and then now working together. So before we kind of dive into it though, tell our listeners a little bit about you and your background. Yeah.

I have a small boutique production company here in technically Dartmouth, but Halifax, Nova Scotia. We've been at it for... I've been in video production for about 20 almost 22 years now starting from just small corporate work and just grew it organically until it became full-time work and changed the brand name a little bit through the years but settled on spider video probably 10 to 12 years ago and kind of stuck with that and we kind of stuck with that.

And we kind of do a little bit of everything. So anything you want to press a record button on and shoot video for, we're really up for that. But specialty is in corporate storytelling. We do hundreds, I've done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of interviews with people. And that's really where our wheelhouse is for doing good work. Usually

small teams that kind of work with it's myself and I have a number two not on full-time but I employ him fairly busily all through the year and then I have a amount of group of trusted individuals I bring with me for our shoots so probably similar to yourselves we have two to three persons, sometimes a little bit more crews, and then we kind of do a little bit of everything. So I kind of run the show in terms of director, producer, but also as cinematographer. Sometimes I'll lift all the gear and move the sandbags as well. So yeah, we kind of do a little bit of everything though within that realm. A number of years ago,

actually probably even before YouTube was, YouTube live, was doing, started doing live streaming as well. It just was kind of like a side interest that I had. And this was years before that was a real viable platform. So we were using things that just didn't exist before. Like knowing what Twitch was before Twitch was really what it is now, that was kind of new just coming on board then. And that's continued on through the years, so

we have a bunch of live streaming equipment. We've done, you know, multicam live stream stuff. And it's fun, it's also pretty terrifying from the live side, cuz so much can go wrong. I always tell clients, we've done all our good planning, everything's in place, but I gotta tell people, it could just not work on the end of the day, because it's the internet. Things could happen. You've been at this for 20 years and there's still the risk of live streaming not working.

Absolutely. Every time. every time. We've had so many requests, well not so many, but we've had a lot of requests over the years. I feel like especially in the earlier days we kinda got a little bit more of it. And I think it was in back in 2017 or 2016 time, more events were starting to ask,

oh, can we also live stream this to something? But even back then, there weren't many affordable live streaming solutions. And then finally there was this like this one Google box or something, Dario. I don't remember what it was that we got, but it was, it was something that we were able to kind of plug into and live stream directly to YouTube. But even then sometimes it wouldn't connect. Yeah. And I remember one specific project that was like for this like local TEDx events, but it was like a very small scale. It wasn't a really big one. And we, we managed to get everything set up,

but there were so many hiccups that were happening with it at the event that it started working literally just five minutes before the event started. No, the best part of the best part about that was that we went through all this hoop love, like trying to get it, trying to make it work, finally ends up working. And at the end of the day, there were only two people watching it. And one of them, yeah, two people watching it was one of the people that hired us to make sure everything was running. So one person watched it.

Really? What the hell? You may hear an occasional dog bark here. Oh, we hear it. It's all good. I'm running this from home. I do have an office. I have a separate office downtown Dartmouth, but that I store like all the gear and things like that. So Dartmouth is right across. It's like, for those that don't know, like Halifax is like here and like there's water like separating you two

So it's straight. It's like a bridge away like but it's not my work in Brooklyn. Yeah, it's like New York and Brooklyn It's very much like New York Brooklyn for sure. It's a great Halifax. So no like you Yeah, it's health. It's like the GTA, you know, Halifax though, no? They're like you guys are completely separate. Yeah, it's Halifax. It's like the GTA. You've got all your smaller kind of, I wouldn't call them boroughs necessarily, but smaller kind of mini cities inside the main one. And yeah, so growing up in Dartmouth, there's always animosity between Halifax and Dartmouth. It's a sibling rivalry kind of fun way. We always say Dartmouth is better because we have the good nice view of Halifax and Halifax. People are usually terrified to come to Halifax.

Maybe similar to maybe Mississauga and Hamilton. I was thinking Mississauga. Mississauga is not Toronto even though they all say it. I mean, technically to the rest of the world. Greater Toronto. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the, so yeah, but it's, it's a fairly big, population's growing, of course, over the number of years. And the film videos seen here has been developing over the long, long years. But they've shot and continue to shoot a lot of big movie productions here. So there's a large film crew group here, like Rips, Gaffers, Electrics. There's one primary rental house.

And there is crew around, but we are, I feel like a dirty cousin of that in some ways. We run the same things that they do. We talk about good lighting and use scrims and flags and all the stuff we need to in dollies and gimbals and everything and use the same set language but there's just like three of us instead of 30 or more and stuff like that. But yeah, they've shot tons of stuff. And like right now, there's a good tax credit, so a lot of Hulu and Amazon, Netflix stuff is being done here.

And large Hollywood productions have happened in the past as well. Like Titanic was here at one point and a bunch of things. Yeah. If you ever hear about the James Cameron Titanic, there's a story about how the Chatter was get laced with PCP and all the crew got food poisoning and or stoned and throw up all over the place. And so yeah, it's a quick Google search. You just hit us with like 10 different things there. Hold on.

How did they get laced? There was an after party. It wasn't even an after party. It was like a crew wrap meal or something like that and apparently like 90% of the crew got sick like throwing up it was the Caprio I'll bet you was a cap is playing a free young the Caprio young and I see what you got for killing me at the end of this one exactly I should have made it on the boat or the It was cold What you guys get for that? Yeah

But there was a seafood chowder apparently there. So the there's two theories one that was just yeah What it was just that it was? food poisoning, but the other theory is that someone put like PCP or something like some sort of theories that someone put like PCP or something like some sort of hallucinogen in it and people got all fucked up and there was like ambulances, people had to go to the hospital. Yeah, there's a whole myth around it and stuff like that. Local legend. But it's always with seafood chowder.

Anytime I hear someone getting really badly sick and they mentioned seafood chowder, I'm like, Jesus, that must be like a 50-50 toss-up. Yeah. Yeah. But when I first... So I went to NASCAD University and I did what's called media arts at the time. They didn't have a film program, of course, until I finished. But in media arts, you do a little bit of everything. So it's like video art. So we did lots of crazy weird video art kind of stuff and but you learn all the same kinds of things we learned we were learning how to edit this is at the beginning of digital editing so Adobe was a really ugly dirty program at the time Premiere final cut was in his super

super early stages and but all the same types of ideas like DaVinci didn't even exist at the time. And we were editing on something that's called Media 100. And we would use like something called like a zip drive or a jazz drive, which was like this thing about this size of a floppy. But it wasn't really a floppy, I wasn't like a floppy floppy, but it was like a hard disk, like a hard shell floppy.

And it only had like, I don't know, 100 megabytes on it, and it cost, you know, a couple hundred bucks. It was crazy. And you had to put all your stuff on that, so it was very interesting times. And when I finished there, though, I was like, okay, I'm going to be a film director, I'm going to do that kind of stuff. I worked on a couple big film sets. There was a movie called K-19 that was being shot here. I just did a week as a PA, like a bottom of the boot kind of PA.

And it was very interesting afterwards, because it was like the mesh of Star Wars, because you had Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson as the two stars on it. So it was interesting. So I get to actually walk them down to set from there from there. They were I mean we're talking 20 at least 22 years ago so they were even like probably it's not like they're more

famous then but they were like peak fame there. They're super cool. I mean it's very everyone of course wanted to be talking to them and kind of, you know, there was no like cell phones, there were cell phones in hand, but not cell phones where you had cameras to them at the time. Couldn't take a selfie back then, eh? The big brick, you know, you can't really. It would have been like, yeah, or it just would have been like those little, you know, you can't really. Yeah, it would have been like, yeah, or it just would have been like those little, you know, those point and shoots at the time,

or disposable cameras and stuff. So it was interesting because they trusted me to kind of walk them down, but also like just kind of not protect, like stand by the car and okay, now we're ready for Harrison to come. So the interesting story for that is me being Yeah, even though

I'm older so I was still you know, it was like 30 at the time or something like that and But absolute new to being on a real set. I'd worked like one Job as a PA before on a music video and you know that like one day so somehow I got in on to be in the AD department to do the stuff with Harrison Ford and Lee Neeson or just like the whole crew department I think also one of the stars and Peter Starsgard was there as well so but at the at the time so they're like okay you are gonna walk Harrison Ford from his trailer down to set, or to the truck down to the set where they drove him up to.

I'm like, okay, cool. So I've got my walkie on, I'm like, Mr. Ford, or like, we're ready for you, they're ready for you on set and I'm gonna walk you down. So I give him like the 10 feet of walking, I'm just gonna walk him, we're just walking down. And I said, over the phone, over the walkie, I was like, alright, yeah, I've got Harrison, I'm walking him down to set now. I see out of the corner of my eye, his head like snaps, like not snaps, like, but like

totally looks at me and I'm like, oh fuck, it's like what did I do? And I'm like, okay, so anyways, just walk him all the way down. He's all good and does his thing. I go back to the ADD department and I'm like, hey, this kind of weird thing happened. And they're like, where I told them the scenario was, they're like, yeah, I guess we kind of forgot to tell you, we don't use their names over the walkies. We say like number one or number two. So Harrison at the time was number one and and Liam Neeson was

number two or something like that I'm like shit like I just like piss off here like that's the code Harrison Harrison Ford you know his hand solo gonna gonna hate me forever because he said that so it was it was interesting but he was he was again he was super chill super nice off-camera doing his thing and Liam Neeson was it was even nicer like these just like some just like your buddy kind of walk around I heard he's really tall like he's really super tall. Yeah, and I'm not really yeah I'm only like five seven and he's he was like six two or something like a big big big, dude 5'7 and he's he was like 6'2 or something like a big big big dude

So yeah, so that's my birth by fire under the under the set and then I think I didn't go back to the next round Just because I was getting busy And no, I should say this is an interesting point for for video people and stuff like I was like I Was in it still in married and at the time and I was just like, I can't work 12 to 14 hour days for three weeks or three months at a time. I was like, I'm not going to be married anymore. This is not going to be good for me. So I'd done a few corporate jobs and I switched gears instead of trying to become a film director or work my way up in crew.

I just started doing more corporate work and little by little just kind of built it up to where I am now Yeah, a lot of them tend to just marry people that work like crew crew members or you know A lot of their marriages might end up in divorce because the hours are the hours are really wild I don't know how they do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like like on a consistent basis. It's crazy Like if you do it here and there, it's not that bad. Like maybe one a week, that might be a 12 hour or a 14 hour, but, or twice, but doing consistently for three straight weeks,

sometimes you have to fly out somewhere else. So you don't even get to come home where they could see you briefly like that. So it's like, I don't know how that lifestyle works for people who have like, who are married to people in completely separate worlds. I'm really curious about how that works. It doesn't work.

I think you're right. I think you're right. What I've heard from people that I know in the industry, they're like exactly what you said. They're married to someone who's also in the industry or they're not married at all. And definitely the benefit of doing this work, which is something I'll probably never actually truly be able to realize, is that I've never had to work in an office, like a nine-to-five lockdown kind of thing, for all my career as doing video stuff. So I'm able to, like, kick off at three o'clock and make sure the kids get home from school. Or I can go see the soccer game, you know, whenever it is, no problem at all. Or I can, someone has an early hockey practice, I can take the time to do that.

Because that flexibility and control within working for yourself is amazing. And my family and my kids have definitely benefited from that. And myself, I should say, as well. Of course, the downside of that is that you kind of work all the time. Otherwise, and sometimes as you both know, you don't know if you're going to work next week. So it's always an edge of terror that you're always on sometimes. I've always wondered what it would be like for the kids of professional, video professionals like us who have that work-life balance and flexibility where we get to kind of work work when we need to, you know, be able to make it for things that are important

as well. That might be normalized for them. Whereas like when we were younger, it was very normal for us that our parents would have to go to work from nine to five constantly. That was the lifestyle. And then it was almost like us doing this was like a rebellion to that. Will their rebellion be going into the into the nine-to-five workflow as well? I think once you get it it's hard to let go and you know I've talked about this before so it's like it'd be it might be

difficult to work for anyone else at this point just because the flexibility that we used to and stuff like that and you know I always tell people when it's when it's good when this job is good. It's amazing. You have you know flexibility You've got good income. You've got you creative all the time You get to do all that kind of stuff when it's when it's okay Like it's a there's a little more stress and anxiety and things like that and so on but still pretty good You know, it's like it's just regular, you know, everyone else has jobs that are not great This but if it was not great to see it's still not bad at all. But when

it's bad there is zero safety net. Like it is you have to, the anxiety and stress goes way way up. So it's just as long as you can balance that, that roller coaster that kind of happens with that, then I think you know it's a great opportunity to do. It's not definitely not for everyone by a long shot, but if you can make it work, it has great benefits for sure. There was one thing you mentioned earlier, how like when you were still in school,

you had like a 100 megabyte hard drive or disc that was basically your whole life on and wasn't exactly a very cheap thing. It got me thinking because this morning I saw this video from ColdFusion about how they just developed this new CD disc that can hold something like 1.6 petabytes of data, which is around 200,000 gigabytes. And that is one thing in our industry that people forget about in terms of the business side of things is like, what happens once you film everything?

What is the economics of storing all the data and everything? Because just recently we just filled up a lot of our main drives and then I had to go through this process of researching and finding the most cost effective storage alternatives. But I don't know like everyone's system is different Like how do you typically go about like storing and maintaining like the files from like clients and everything? For sure like interesting when I first started we were shooting on Mini DV cameras so like there's a there's a camera. I still love it's a Canon X So like there's a camera that I still love. It's a Canon XL1, I think it is.

It's got that big fluorescent lens on the front. It's like a zoom kind of thing. But it was all mini DV tapes. And mini DV tapes, you could review and watch. But for the most part, it was pretty difficult to do it. It's like, it's digital tape. So I have two or three boxes like that are, you know, two feet by three feet just stuffed full of mini DV tapes.

And that was the backup. There was no, that was the, like the, that's the source backup that you just kind of put on a shelf and at the time there was ways that you would, you're supposed to rotate them every year or something like that because there's really weird kind of Like gravity weight in pixels is kind of strange stuff. Anyway, I never did it

It's like hard dress today though you got to like put them up every now and then otherwise like the the lube's dry in the End of this and they won't turn anymore the same thing Yeah, so what I would get into habit of doing is basically I mean I always did double backup because in the video industry You know does doesn't live twice. It doesn't live at all So you always have that and maybe even a third backup for that stuff is super super important We do three we We do three actually. Yeah. Cause like the way we do it is since there's the two of us, like we would create like three backups where I would have like

maybe two main ones and then one goes to Dario because I typically have to access them more often than him, but he at least keeps a backup of everything once it's been set. Um, it's just a, like a P it's a, it's really just a peace of mind thing. But then there are times where we talk about like, how long do we store, keep people's stuff stored for? Like, you know, like we've say like, we were only guaranteeing for like two years or something like that with clients, but we typically just keep everything. Cause we've had clients even come to us

recently for a project that we did like four years ago say, hey, we need to change something from that video because so and so is no longer in, is no longer working with us. That's a one-off. It doesn't happen often. Like I would say like it's maybe one percent of the time they ask for something like that. Yeah. I do a similar thing. I tell people, I mean I don't even tell them, I just I always back up everything and I have a similar thing. I tell people, I mean I don't even tell them, I just, I always back up everything and I have a file cabinet that has, I used to just name them like ABC and something like that. Now I want to, I've gone through the alphabet through these drives and now we're into like numerical system. So I've got that as a back, so there's always

a, there's always that lives of backup somewhere, but I always tell people, basically, after the project's done, I won't guarantee that we can unarchive the footage. I say, we do archive it and just go since it's on a shelf, but that drive may not, like you said, it may not work. So I don't just tell them. How does your numerical system work? Like one, two, three, but then how does that correlate to what might be in that in that project? Because we do like, actually when we fill it up, we just type in

like the types of projects that are in there and like the year, right? So we might have client A, year. I have a spread, like we have a spreadsheet, like an Excel spreadsheet that basically just says like, this is the name of the drive, lapse driveS drive number one, LAPS drive number two. And then there's like a backup for each of those. So there's like each number is like a set of like three backups, right? Or two or three backups, depending when we started doing it.

And then in that spreadsheet, we write down what the projects are, which clients from what date to what date. So that way we have a faster way of like referencing and looking over like which drive we need to kind of access. And then we just label it directly on the drive as well with like a little sticky, it's like laps drive number this. You know what you should do, Carol?

You should take a screenshot of all the folders and then just collapse the subfolders as well. Take a picture and maybe link it to that document as well. It's easier to see. Yeah, I mean, I guess we could, but I just type it in because then... But then you can easily search it. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a little bit easier to search it. Like with that system, it's like, and I just reference it directly on the spreadsheet, which... Yeah. I wish I would have done the spreadsheet before because I do actually what you said Dario, I basically just take a file or a folder system screen image shot of what's in there and because it's usually like client XYZ and so on and if there is maybe some folders but then you have got clients going back like 10 plus years so forget so. Really?

Oh my god what? I don't get that though, because how like that footage, like camera technology has come so far, even like your own skills, and like, you know, skills of your freelancers have come so far that like, does that footage make a new one? Like what do you have that footage still good to use nowadays? Like that's what I know. That's why I feel like after like two years, it's like it's done, man. Like this footage is no longer usable anymore well, I mean

it's interesting segue actually because the camera technology where we're at now is I would say it's like plateau per se but once the advancement into like that everyone was on HD like 1920 by 1080 and Because most people deliver in that. Rarely even now, clients will want to deliver to 4K, because everything that goes ends up on YouTube or something like that, that they're either watching their phones or their laptops, and that's still in HD. So I think once we get to HD and then once we get to the 4K, that probably kind of plateaued in terms of camera technology.

So if we have stuff that is shot in HD from 10 years ago, if it was like a rare thing, like, oh, we want to do a retrospective of our CEO at the time. Do you have anything there? It's like, well, let me see if I can blow the dust off and it still should look pretty good. I use, yeah, but I use Vimeo for all my clients, client reviews of and transferring files and stuff like that for them to watch. You know, the master file will go there and they just download from there. And I probably had like, you know, 15 years of Vimeo files because once it goes up there, it can stay up there until Vimeo files because once it goes up there it can stay up there until

Vimeo doesn't exist anymore. But for some weird reason about two years ago I went through Vimeo I'm like you know what I just there's like thousands of videos here I'm just gonna go delete everything from like six years ago to the start of time except for maybe a couple of special ones that I really wanted and I went and did that, and less than a year later, client's like, hey, remember that video we did like a really long time ago? Blah, blah, blah.

It's always like that. And I was just like, yeah, I do, but it doesn't exist anymore. And I said, I can rebuild the entire thing if you want. So if someone does want something totally rebuilt, and that's the thing when you go back farther in further back in time you know project files may not even mash up and things like that it's like maybe the footage there but essentially it's a whole new editing project onto itself plus the

archiving as well and just because you know you spend time doing that I hope you're charging a fee for whenever you have to go back to the archive because that's what we do on our end oh yeah yeah for sure. Yeah, that's that's the only way to do it because it's it's your time everything you do Everything you do is time and that over the years Especially the last five years. I've kind of started to make sure that we charge for even just like emails administration that there's a there's a Budget line there somewhere that says, you know, we're gonna have 10 conversations over email. So it's just, it's producing time. So it's like an hour or two of time.

That you put a number. You put a number to the amount of emails. Not to the amount of emails, just I kind of will. I thought you said like, if it's over 10 emails, I'm gonna charge you for it. That's right. It's like 18 cents per email though. Yeah, it's usually just like I just know that certain clients are going to be a lot of conversations

or lots of conversations. So you can just ballpark. It's like, oh, this is going to be 10 hours of time or five hours of time over the course of the project that I'm going to make sure that I get paid because you know anyone else is working they're getting paid for that too. We do like a project management fee and we throw in you know client communications, cast and crew communications and general admin stuff. All communications. Yeah essentially. I know we got item, I just itemize it sometimes girls just so they know what it is because I've had them ask at the beginning like what is this and I'm like okay it's this this and that yeah it's

with this what we're doing right now that's what you tell them and people don't kind of realize yeah that they people just don't realize I think probably people work for themselves kind of forget that that is time and you know I probably could have made a lot more money if I had charged for, I put those budget lines in way earlier just to make sure that, because we're nice people, we want to help them out. So I respond to emails a lot, and you get back and forth.

But on a recent project, because I'm very much on demand, I have some clients who text me at any time of the day. And I'm open to that because they're great clients for me, and I like working with them, and not too difficult to do the stuff we need to do for them. But there was a different project we did and we were like, you know, we're 10 a.m. or sorry, 10 p.m. doing work for people. They were texting us directly and so like, yeah, this is just extra time so let's make sure we get paid for it. Yeah, that's good. What was the scene like when you started in Dartmouth or Halifax?

What was the corporate video scene like? It was a little weird, I think, honestly, because there was a lot of blend of the large scale productions, like television, because TV was big then, like broadcast television was still like news and all that kind of stuff was big. But then also when these shows would come in, they'd be doing EPK, so electronic press kits kind of stuff, so there was a bunch of people who did that. And then there was just a bunch of corporate stuff that was kind of some of it was just like boring like event stuff like oh dance recitals so interestingly enough like it goes far back enough so it was like you would make

a VHS so some I did some work for some people starting out where they were doing like dance recitals they're like okay we're gonna do this dance recital thing you know kind of, kind of boring stuff, but this stuff pays the bills as well. And then they would finish by mastering it to VHS and getting all those VHS tapes duplicated and people would buy them for 10 bucks. And then that eventually switched into CDs

for doing the same kind of things. And then that switched into, actually, maybe was, and then into DVDs, maybe was DVDs first, and then into CDs, and then now it's just purely digitally online and stuff like that. So there was a whole different world of doing that kind of stuff. And there wasn't, there wasn't many production companies around. There was a few more because there was a couple small, like actual real studios. But Halifax at the time was a small kind of place and I didn't really have a whole lot of people to lean on there's kind of one person that I kind of met

early days his name was Chuck Calder from 45 North and a bit of an icon in terms of the video production stuff and he was a great resource. At the time I'd rent like a, what was it called, not a Hi8 but like a mini DV but an HD mini DV camera. I think it was like a Sony HDV or something like that. I wouldn't know what I was doing at all really for the most part because although I went to school and would get trained in terms of media production, it was not like film training. It was not like, you know, I learned most things just by doing it and watching other people do it.

But like Chuck was fantastic. He was just like, yeah, you want to go rent that? Sure. And I've heard from other people who said like he would even like drive and drop it off to people's places and stuff like that and pick it up from them the next day and stuff like that and pick it up from them the next day and stuff like that. But he had a small production company called 45 North and they did a little bit of everything. They did the EPKs and then they eventually moved into doing a lot of live stuff as well.

And he was just a great person. He would walk in the office, just shoot the shit for hours about just talking. Because you don't run into people like yourselves very often where you can actually just talk industry stuff. Because people are usually very insular in terms of meeting other people because, oh, you're going to take my clients or you're going to take my clients. I did the opposite. I went out and actually met people and said, hey, can we

just basically did this but grab coffees with people. Like, hey, can we just basically did this, but grab coffees with people. And like, hey, can we just talk and find out about what you do or what should I know or what should I be aware of and how can it be better and stuff like that. So I did a bunch of that with meeting with people. And I also did that same thing with agencies as well. So get out, meet people like CEOs or ad agency execs and stuff like that. Just like, hey, can I pop in and have a coffee for, you know, the cheapest mentoring that could ever find for sure. And people are totally open to it. Here in the Maritimes,

seem like everyone's, yeah, we'll do that and stuff like that. So, but really at the beginning it was, there was a lot of crappyppy equipment a lot of like hot orange redheads and stuff like that you could bring yourself their host down with You know I did a lot of things with some weird equipment like no one sees Because I really took to the fact that no one sees was behind the camera right as long as things look pretty good It's fine like I get every line them with the light. No one can see what's behind things look pretty good it's fine like blind them with the light no one can see what's behind the mic to a stick and that's your mic yeah for sure like did I ever use a work light to to light a scene yes for sure I did that way back

it's like the shitty rigs yes there's there's DIY ways to do it you know I remember like one of my favorite Funny memories of this was once Daria and I had a had a shoot back in like 2014 2015 a light bulb one Oh, I had to I had to drop him I had to drop him off at one location to do some a shoot. So he took one of the backpacks, right? That we had and then I had to go to another location when I got there. I realized That he took the backpack with all the base plates. Yeah.

And I'm like, oh no, what's going on? What do I do here? And then what I did was I took my camera and then put duct tape, just duct taped it to the tripod. And that's how I conducted that whole entire shoot. But I got creative. I started doing things where I let things move rather than moving the camera. I'm like, okay, I got some cool stuff out of it. All right. But then when I met up with him later, I'm like, damn it, man, you took the bag with all the base plates. And he's like, I was like, oh damn, I didn't realize. I thought

you were going to mention the light bulb one. Remember we were doing it for that student group? I think the first time I worked with you on the student group video. Yeah, this was like the very first, because I started doing video like about a year before Dario jumped into it. And then he, when I started working on my own projects, he came in one day to assist and I had just gotten these new light bulbs or these new lights with soft boxes from Amazon. Yeah.

I mean, back then when you're starting out in 2013- Cowboy Studio, do you remember? Oh yeah, that's what it was. It was Cowboy Studio. Cowboy Studio, everyone knows. Yeah. I was on their site just the other day actually. They're still around?

Oh my God. Oh yeah. I still have a reflector from them from back in the day, you know, like that doesn't break. But essentially on this shoot, I had just gotten these lights from them. And it was that classic set of like three lights for like 200 bucks. And they had these light bulbs with... So ones that like spin or like, you know, they're circular? Oh yeah, they're almost like a compact fresh. Yeah, something like that. And then I turn everything on and it's running, we're filming a little bit,

and then all of a sudden we start smelling a little bit of smoke. And then we notice that like some of the light bulbs started burning out and then just filled the room with such such an acrid smell. If we get cancer in the future, it's going to be from that shoot. God knows it was a light bulb. It's like, it's a, it's a, it's a built in fog machine, right? It took a while for us to find lights that worked. And then in 2014, there was these, these like circular LEDs that we managed to find. And then,

and then we bought those. They weren't super powerful, but we knew at least that they were not going to run hot. They weren't going to burn out on us or anything like that. And, and, and this was like when LEDs were like still in their infancy for, for video production. And then, and then when finally Aputure came out, that just started to make things so much easier. I was like, oh my God, these LEDs are so powerful. And now- And then they got too expensive.

And then thank God for Nanlite. Yeah. I love Nanlite. Although I find though that, I've gone from halogen, like touch it and you'll burn absolutely, you'll scorch your hand off and stuff like that, to where we are now with the even just like light mats and stuff like that, and like the blow up soft boxes and things like that. It is amazing to be able to, I work with a friend of mine who's, I've known since junior high and he went off to become, not become become a grip but he worked in the film industry and is a great grip and electric

and I always trust whatever he says. If he says, yeah, how about we do this? And I'm like, I don't know if I want to do that. Make me a good idea. I usually afterwards always regret it. So anytime he says something I totally do it. But he has also come through this whole world and evolution of stuff. He's worked on the big film sets and the small stuff.

We just were talking the other day about how good lights are now, that they're consistent in color, they don't flicker, they don't burn anybody up, they're easy to operate, they're now waterproof basically. And the cameras themselves are relatively light, but they almost always look good. You have to work really hard to screw something up to make things look bad now with camera technology for the most part. It's such a time for people jumping into the industry

and even just to get started, I think we touched upon this in a previous episode where you can get a lot of really, really high quality equipment for basically, not no money, but very inexpensive, like what used to cost, not no money, but like very inexpensive. Like what we used to cause like for $5,000. I've always wondered like if we could do like this kind of challenge, like for $5,000, what kind of kit can you get yourself to get started in this industry? I'm sure there's like thousands of YouTube videos and everything.

If you go the user route, you could, you're set basically. That's what I mean. Like going the used route alone, cause there's a lot of great cameras that are that people are trying to offload because they don't need anymore like a C200 alone you could probably get for less than $3,000 which was like even less 10 grand even less than that yeah exactly it's like it's gotten so low to the point where like Dario and I we were talking about like oh dude should we sell? We were trying to no we were trying to sell them and then I was like I'm not I we were talking about like, oh, do we, should we sell? We were trying to, no, we were trying to sell them. And then I was like, I'm not selling it for 3k. Like we spent 9k on these things just for the sentimental value. I'm holding

onto it. Like, yeah, these things are great. Like, yeah, exactly. To your point there too, Craig, it's like, you know, like footed, like the cameras from like six, seven years ago, still shoot HD, still shoot 4K, that stuff's still usable. Like if- The cinema camera, the cinema camera, as we should clarify, the DSLRs, they have come quite a long way. They've come a long way, but at the end of the day,

like even like some of the DSLRs from like six, seven years ago, like you could still work with them, at least even if you're jumping into the industry, you could, there's so much you could do. I mean, like I remember when I jumped into it like every camera that was released had such a huge incremental Jump, so it was kind of like it was almost like wild whereas like now It's their incremental like smaller smaller jumps in quality So but you should remember it's it because the stuff from back then is passable but it's not like you know good good it's

passable if you have it's good to learn with no no no no no i meant like in terms of like longevity of the the the content that you shopped from back then because like if i think about i remember when we were remember when we were on we're still using sony's and we were looking at the 4k difference between our a7s2 and like our c200 like there was a noticeable difference between the 4k quality remember i remember specifically there was a difference between this a7s2 and the canon c100 back then which was a little bit wild yeah because the c100 was older well well the difference was that the C100 was better than the A7S II, which shocked me. Because the C100 had a camera sensor that was 4K downscaled

to 1080p, but it was only an HD camera. Whereas the Sony 4K, I did a comparison when I shot them. And the C100 HD was so much better than the Sony 4k which was almost shocking to me at the time like this doesn't seem right But it just goes to show like what the difference was back then there were such huge Differences between every single camera So it was really like that's why people got really into being gear heads because people would be like I'm so into this one because Of these benefits whereas I'm so into these one because of these benefits. Whereas I'm so into these ones because of those benefits.

Whereas now the differences are small. It's like, it's up to personal preference at this point between cameras and, and everything like that. Like the difference between a, like a Sony cinema camera versus a Canon cinema camera. It's like, it's small things, ergonomics, buttons, auto-focus is way better. Auto-focus. I mean, yeah, but my point is it's not something where it's a huge difference in quality. I'm telling you the next push is they're going to start introducing AI features in these cameras.

You think? We might see some big, big improvements once they start doing that. They just love to push that sensor size really. Blackmagic's got the 12K kind of stuff. I'm working on a project this Friday that they're doing, part of these projects being shot I think in Vancouver today, and they're shooting 6K downscaling to TikTok from that. Such a waste. Yeah, I'm like, I don't, it's like,

I don't think you really need that, like, it's fine. But even, I have like an event, there's an event happening here this week that I have, I'm not gonna shoot, but I've got some people to shoot for me, honestly, for a client, and they're still using Sony FS7, because the FS7 has been a beast of a workhorse.

It shoots 4K. It is pretty good for color and I nearly, I thought about buying that camera several times and when the C200 came out I was like, because I was using 5D Mark III at the time, which was a, loved this full frame sensor of that 5D and when the C200 was about to come out, a cinematographer in mind said, like, this is the camera for you. And I was, because it can shoot raw, which I maybe have shot like five times with, over the- Same as I think we did it once, and that was a couple times. It was never needed constantly.

No. And I, the, like the 8-bit footage turned, like, looked great on the camera right off the bat. It was awesome. I shot over a thousand more hours on that camera for sure. But I just loved how easy it was to color grade it. And I was on the Facebook groups for it. People were going crazy. Like, when is it going to be 10-bit? When's it going to be 10-bit?

It's just like, I don't need 10-bit. Hello, Pat. I was going to say, I was wondering what that little thing was that was coming out in the frame. I'm like, hold on, let me... Well, it definitely wasn't the dog from earlier, Kirill. No, no. Dog's tails don't go like this. Yeah When I was looking at the To I wasn't actually looking to upgrade from the c200 But I was thinking that maybe I need needed something a little bit better and I'm really Stingy when it comes to getting a new camera because you know once you invest in the camera You just don't ever spend money ever again But so I was looking at this the the FX6, the Sony FX6,

and the C70, which we're using here right now. And I wanted to buy the FX6. And this was probably two plus years ago now. It was just coming out. And that was the reason. Like I did, because the great thing was at the time They had Sony had 0% financing so it's like great. I'm gonna do that. That's why I did with my old camera I'm gonna do this this one. It's a great way to kind of finance a camera and get good good tech in your hands and

So I went through the whole process Sony was yet. We're good to go. And then they're like, oh yeah, so say it was like October, September, something like that. They're like, yeah, you can get it in like, might be able to get it in March. I was like, what are you talking about? This is like, I want it next week. What are you talking about? So I was just like, they're like, no, it's just, this is when the whole sensor problem, sensor shortage was in place, stuff like that.

And I was just like, exactly. So I contacted Canon, local Canon rep that I've been dealing with when I got the C200, and I was like, hey, what about that C70? And I used to have a little number on my whiteboard in my office where it showed the difference in size of the, in terms of millimeters for the Sony and the FX6 and the C70.

And it was like 10 millimeters bigger for the FX6, because it was a full frame. And I was just like, I don't know if I can. Really, that's what I want. But it didn't exist. So I called the Canon rep guy. He's like, do you still have 0% financing on the Canon? They're like, yeah, it actually just happened last week.

I'm like, great. Let's do it. I'll send the application in. I think I got the camera four days later or something like that. It just, it gets shipped. Yeah, shipped and I got a couple of lenses with it and I was able to, and an EF adapter. So, you know, I was able to use my EF lenses from the C200 as well. That adapter is awesome. Get an extra stop a light with it Mm-hmm. Yeah, so it was I do also the black magic pockets in the camera as well. I don't shoot much with but I Needed as a B camera one time and I got it and just started using it stuff like that. I love to see 70 fantastic camera

impressive every day Even the and when you pair that with the r5C as a cam, you know, it's like the combo is, it's fantastic right now. Like, like obviously every camera has its, uh, like drawbacks here and there, but overall they have been great. And the, at the time, and luckily we're actually just, I think, two months away from finally paying off the system as well. Oh, really?

Oh, that's great. Oh, that's like a thousand bucks a month extra now that we have. Yeah, exactly. I'm in the same boat. Oh, man. But that's the thing. When you're trying to look for cameras and everything like that, you have to think about what you also have. how much do you need that

other brand camera, like if you switch into that ecosystem, then you have to make a, it's like you're reinvesting everything again, so if you get two new cameras with all the associated lenses, and cards as well are not cheap, like when we got the R5C's, when we got the R5C's, we realized, oh, this is not with SD cards. Like it is like one SD card and one CF express type B. And Dario and I, we were looking at cards because usually it's good to have multiple. And then

I thought, okay, this is this is how we're going to do it, Dario. We're going to get one massive CF express type B card and a backup little one, but that big one is gonna be like the main card in the R5C. It's just like a thousand bucks. Look at that thousand bucks. It was two terabyte CF express type B

and it was $1,300 each. And, but it was like, what was the alternative? We get a bunch of like 256 cards that are 500, 600, $700. It's like that thing's gonna add up over time. And then we really only do it because we double record and we always do backups. So we said, okay, CF express lives in the camera. And then we just swap out the SD cards

as the backups for that. And then that'll be our workflow. And thankfully it's been very useful, but like it's crazy. It's crazy when you need to reinvest in something new. And like you said, once you get a camera, you're sticking with it for like three, maybe four years if you can push it, depending, right?

Or if there's some big push for a type of feature that you're gonna need for a client project or for certain projects that you start coming into, right? Otherwise, you make do with it, you know And that's why also a lot of people rent a lot of people in our industry also rent cameras for Depending on the needs of the project especially Directors of photography that do big-budget commercials like they're not gonna be not all of them are gonna drop

200k on an aria Alexa or whatever with all the associated stuff that you need. The occasional one will. The occasional one will because they use that as like a selling point, like hire me and then I come with my own Ari, you know, and that saves the production like, well, I don't know, they probably, they still rent it, but it's like at a discounted price probably then going through the house. There's a friend of ours that wanted to drop 80k on a Sony Venice and we're like, what are you doing, man? Yeah, I Rented from the beginning but then I realized especially in the corporate world is like you might get a call

Tomorrow or in two hours and like hey can shoot tomorrow and then like you reach out to the Rental host like oh no cameras all gone for the week So I learned early on that you need to have some type of camera doesn Does it have to be the best camera? Yeah, you just need to have something. I actually still have the Sony EX1-R HD. It's a servo zoom kind of like a advanced camcorder kind of thing. The first I bought that early on probably I remember specifically at the time buying it, purchasing it and telling my wife like oh yeah I bought cameras. She said oh great blah blah blah and then I was like she's like how much was that? I was like yeah it was about ten thousand

dollars. She's like how are you gonna pay for that? My god, and this is early days. It's called tax write-off But the funny thing was that that camera I still use to this day It's now you only use it for because it has a servo zoom and it shoots 1080 at its maximum but when we're doing like live streams 1080 at its maximum, but when we're doing like live streams It's a perfect camera. It is an absolute perfect camera for it and a friend of mine was dumping in one of his and he's like Hey, do you want it for it was like ridiculous amount of money? It was like a couple hundred bucks. Oh my god. He's like do you want you want to buy this from me? I'm like, I absolutely do it. So now I have two of them and they're perfect for doing live stream. Yeah, it was

And they're perfect for doing live stream. Yeah, it was It's basically two for one you guys, those cameras. Yeah, it's so weird and I shot a lot of footage on that camera And it was you know, it's not a cinema camera but if you use it properly it still looks good out of the box and stuff like that and It you know, that's like I don't get rid of technology because because of that reason I've got a lot of stuff I've got so I've got two of those cameras I've got the black magic my 5d which I shoot more of Kids hockey games and I do in the stills that I do with anything else with it anymore

But you know, it's still there and it can do stuff and yeah, it's it's definitely a big thing to consider Do you want to buy or do you want to rent? But when you're talking about renting or leasing If you can do the zero percent financing and lease a camera that you're going to use they got rid of that several times It used to be nice. They had zero percent financing. Oh, they got rid of it. Oh, yeah, it's like I think it's like four percent now. Well last time I checked months back. I think they raised it four percent You know when apple got rid of the 0% financing for their phones that's when you knew everyone else was gonna get rid of it. If Apple does it that's a bad sign. Yeah Canon was pretty good like

both Canon and Sony both had that like that's why and then probably the same as you too that's why you get this camera. Yeah. Sony has, I saw in like some camera shop they had a 0% financing for the FX6 at 24 months. So they probably still have it out. Okay. They still, yeah, this was recent and they probably have it come up as promotions every now and then, but like even if it's not zero percent, like the benefit of doing the financing

is that if it costs you like say three, 400 bucks a month to finance a camera, that's the same as a day rate for renting it out anyway. So if you see yourself using a camera more than twice in a month, then you're already getting your money's worth rather than just paying a rental house. And then at the end of the day, you get to keep it, right? So it just comes down to like,

what's the best business approach, right? And that's probably also what a lot of bigger productions also do, and like DPs, it's like if they see themselves using a certain camera multiple times in a month for depending on their gigs, it sometimes makes more sense to just buy rather than rent, unless you're someone who wants to keep trying different things constantly.

There's also the, again, when it comes to buying outright and financing or leasing, there's the tax implications, right? So if you buy it, you have to do five year amortization versus financing it. You could write off the full amount, I guess, or whatever. On a monthly basis, yeah. Because it's a different kind of expense system that you're doing, right? You can't amortize finance costs. Our accountant told us financing would have been better for us, so that's what we went with. Yeah, you just listen.

That's why you pay them to do that kind of stuff. We do something else entirely, not have to worry about that at all for sure. Not worry about it, but it's just like that. Also would have been hard to spend, like how much was the C70, like 6,000 bucks? Times two, that's 12, times another two, that's 24, it's like 30 Gs all in.

We have to get the extra battery too, because you can't just have the one battery. For sure. And those batteries are like 600 bucks each. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean.

Yeah, I was just saying, it's a crazy industry when it comes to this stuff, and it's like everyone's situation is unique, you know, depending on on your work and you just have to find the best solution that works for you Yeah, for sure and really cash flows is always super important super challenging and if you can manage that well, then you're having better it's just gonna create less anxiety for you and I Years and years and years ago because he used to be like super busy and then be quiet and busy again and then then quiet stuff like that and I at the time was like I could this needs to change like I can't be like super busy and then you know

Wreck my home life because I'm just working so much all the time and then then then then I'm around too much and stuff like I like What I wanted to is like I just want this to kind of be I said I remember saying at the time It's like I just I'm gonna try to even that those That sign curve from really big peaks and valleys to like just a nice even up and down So it's kind of like this and it happened But I don't think it was anything that I did necessarily but I definitely if you can kind of manage that so you can manage the

The work so that it's not all happening at the same time and get some of that control Which is kind of what happened the last? Slight like from March till about two weeks ago things were just like super busy all over the place great problem to have and The challenge for me and stress for me was just that I had I Didn't have as much control over the schedule all the time. If I have control of the schedule, I can be like, okay, we're going to shoot Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Monday, Tuesday and we'll edit this. But a lot of things are happening like, no, everyone wants to do everything on Monday and Tuesday and like five different clients want to do it.

So it's like, well, how can I make it work? So that's always a big thing. And I always tell people, if you can just always get back to people when you're trying to deal with in terms of communication, it's like don't leave your communication too long at all. Like if you can respond back to people right away, that's that people really, really appreciate that and it's our job to worry about trying to make things happen for them and respond you back and you know, most people on the client side, their job's not video.

That's what we're here for. So if we can make that easier, faster, more responsive to them, then that's always the best way to go for sure. How do you handle it when you have two or three projects on the same day? Because I don't think you mentioned you have other producers to help you. Maybe you do? No, I mean, I don't I've have a good trusted network. That's thing when I started out there wasn't It's me really and I have people I work with but really it's kind of I have to split my brain like four different ways

kind of make everything happen, but Kind of works out but if things happen if things have to happen on the same day I kind of works out. But if things happen, if things have to happen on the same day, I have a couple people that I trust to shoot. Like there's a lot of people that shoot well, for sure. But when we're dealing with clients that I want to build a relationship with or have a good relationship with and I don't want to burn it because it's not me there, there's very few people that I trust to kind of go shoot for me. Just because honestly, because most people, even though they're gonna hire Spider Video,

they're hiring Craig and his team versus Spider Video, Rando, who's gonna come in and do the work for us. So I try not to actually have multiple shoots on the same day. It's pretty rare, unless it's something where it's like, oh, it's just a B-roll shoot, or yeah, something that really, it's not working with clients.

From the interview side, I will not, aside from you two, where I can't fly to Ontario to kind of do it, I really rarely ever have anyone else do an interview, and even if I did, if someone do an interview, I'll do what I did with yourselves, and I'll kind of remote into it stuff I got yeah, it's just I just That is my specialty is dealing with people

Face to face and having them be relaxed on camera and getting them to tell their story whatever story it is Marketing or some sort of life story whatever it is having them be relaxed and authentic on on camera And that's what I'm kind of good at so I don't, it's not that I don't trust anyone else to do that. I just, I don't have another one of me but I have a couple people that work with me who I, I'm getting more confident for sending them out to do different things. And there's certain, there's a lot of cases I'll have them go and shoot different things but when it comes down to the interviewing side of things it's usually me on

on site for sure. It's very hard to find people that you can trust with that. Like luckily for Dario and myself is that there's two of us. So at most we usually we would have like maybe two two projects on the same day. Or if like one person has to handle certain projects one week and then the other one can handle other ones, at the very least we can both kind of pick that up. Similar situation as you it's hard to it's hard to find though other people where we where we would ever need it like occasionally we send out shooters if it's like something very simple and straightforward that that our client will be also here's the thing you also have to hire shooters that also know how to at least communicate and coordinate with clients well, because that is also a skill that is very hard to find.

And there's like very few people that we know that we can just trust to just go out and do it like that. Cause like there could be a situation like where Dario and I are tied up on a project and a client needs something shot tomorrow. It's like, okay, we call a few, like a handful of people who we know who can do it. And then that's it. But in terms of just pure producing, it's not, I mean, I don't, I wouldn't say there,

like we don't really have anyone specifically on that unless we're hiring another production company on our end to help us kind of like how you hired us to go in to help you because you were remote because there are situations like that where it's like okay maybe you you can fly because you're technically available but it's like what happens to all the other projects that you're working on back home it's it's very difficult like that right and like last year we did a project where we had a client needing something shot in North Carolina and in Seattle and it just made sense for one of us to fly out to just kind of produce. We hire

local and I was able to take care of that while Dario was able to handle some of the other projects that we had on the go in Toronto and it's but it's it's not always you don't always have that luxury of being able to travel you have to sometimes put your trust in the people that are local. Like we do with Jake, one of our previous guests who is out in the UK. We've hired him for a few projects for one of our own clients. And you have to find those relationships and build them. You have to take a chance at the same time sometimes.

But yeah, it's tough. Well, I've got a pretty strong network of people across Canada. sometimes, but yeah, it's tough. Well, I've got a pretty strong network of people across Canada and now some into the US. And because sometimes, same thing, I need someone to shoot in BC or Calgary or San Francisco, or I have a project upcoming that we need to find a couple of production companies in Florida and Philadelphia and things like that. And I've even hired people in the UK, in Ireland and stuff like that and even started looking at people in Mongolia and stuff like that.

Like it's all in the world. Oh, in Mongolia. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's like, is there even anyone that I know in Mongolia? But luckily the client has somebody already on the ground there. But yeah, it's being hand-based here and just having as much length of time working with people over the years. I can just usually reach out to people like, I think it was Adam Lawson that recommended me, you to me, and just only because I worked with him once or twice and I'm like, hey, do you know one in the area who can be like me?

Because he shoots like myself, very similar to myself, and I trusted his judgment. And that was the biggest thing. Even though you can Google search and find any kind of review you want and look at people on social media, really the best way is a recommendation from somebody who knows somebody.

You can say, oh, this person's not a clown or stuff like that. So that's the best way to do it, for sure. Yeah, that's the best way to get a good sense of who it is that you're hiring. Because, like you said, reviews, they only tell you so much. And a lot of the time, they're reviews from the client's perspective, right?

They're not reviews from people that have worked with them on the back end, in a way, right? And I wonder if there's some kind, if there's like some kind of like video production database, you know, where like people review companies that they've worked with. I don't know, but yeah, like you have, you have to get a personal recommendation because then it's like, okay,

they've actually worked with them and it went well. There was no problem from the client side or anything like that. Great, then now I can also trust them because I trust them. It's like a trust by association kind of thing. And that's how this whole industry works. You know, people tend to hire people when they have some kind of recommendation. That's why you're always seeing

posts on even socials where it's like, Hey, looking for a first AC on their like Instagram stories or something like that, because they're looking for people that they know to recommend someone, right? Because that's the best way to find people rather than just going on Facebook and just Googling for crew positions that are at random because you never know what you're going to get at that point. For sure.

And we had a large project, or we had two just recently like a month and a half ago, I had, we were going to do a four day shoot with Ford and Lincoln with a photographer friend of mine, and I had brought on another B camera person to be on my team. And so I said yes to the job on like the Wednesday before the Monday. And then the next day, another client of mine said, hey, remember that project we were talking about like three weeks or a month ago? They wanna do it Monday. And I'm like, oh crap.

It's like, how am I gonna pull it off? Because the relationship was super important to the client. Like my relationship to my contact was important and good, but their relationship to the end client was like extremely important. And I was like, okay, well I can send my trusted person down to do that. And they're like, okay, as long as you trust 100% that they can do what you do because that is really important to us. I'm like, sounds like I have to be there as well. But this one was, other one was already happening. So what I ended up doing was

that the the Ford project wasn't happening. It was kind of like following this media tour. So we, they were meeting about an hour and a half away from where we were shooting originally. So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go do the shoot in the morning. And then I'm gonna send my other person, B camera person, to go start the other project, or the other shoot. And then when I finish my shoot, I'm gonna get my other person to drive me to them

and meet them. So it was a lot of balls in the air for that one, but we definitely made it happen. It was pretty, again, things were, going back to the idea of when things are not in your control in terms of schedule, that's when things can get pretty stressful. So yeah, you just have to work hard at it and talk to your clients. Because sometimes people are like, okay, we want to do the shoot on Wednesday. So it's like, okay, well, does Happy Wednesday?

Can it be Thursday or Tuesday? Does it really matter? Because sometimes you're just like, okay, I'll do it no matter what, I'll make it happen. But it's like, well, maybe it's better if you do it on the Friday instead or something like that. Scheduling is always a challenging thing. And we actually just recently went with one of those kind of situations with our client for a shoot we did yesterday. Originally, that shoot was supposed to be today. And what happened was it was basically going to be today. And then the day before was like a setup day where I went

in and just kind of set up everything for an interview. It was an interview type setup, right? With teleprompter, nothing too crazy, but it's still important stuff for the client. And then on the Thursday, the client reaches out to Dario and says, hey, so we just found out that the talent is, he actually has his flight scheduled on Wednesday because he thought we were shooting on Tuesday, when in reality it was Wednesday. And so they were talking to us about like, yeah, we just ended up moving everything.

She said, is it possible to have to move the shoot to Tuesday? And luckily we did technically have the Tuesday booked off for the setup. So for the shoot itself was not a problem, but it was like, if we had something else booked on the Monday, then that could have been potentially a challenge because then like someone would have had to go to set up on the Monday for the Tuesday shoot. Cause the Tuesday shoot was scheduled to start very early morning. So we didn't want to spend any time prepping the shot, making sure everything looks fine. We wanted to have a whole separate half day that was just devoted to that. And then luckily it all worked out for us, but same thing on your end.

Imagine if we had another shoot on that day. It's like, okay, how would we have potentially... We would have been able to make it work, because luckily there's two of us. If both of us were on different projects and then that happened, though, that would have been able to make it work because luckily there's two of us. If both of us were on different projects and then that happened, that would have been tricky. At that point it would have had to have been a situation where it's like if they absolutely had to do it, maybe we could have asked another production company if they could have helped us with it, a producer that we know from another company. There's so many ways you can go about it.

Like at the end of the day, if Darin and I were both scheduled for a shoot on the Monday, it could have potentially been something as simple as like one of us would go for the client with this one and then hire another DP to kind of go with the other one on the other shoot. So every situation is different, you know, and it's, you have to find the best solution, like with the resources you have.

And Craig, yours sounded kind of crazy, but you made it work, you know? You know, sometimes that's that I, you have to do it like that. Like there, I've known some producers where they basically had like two crews and for two different shoots and then they started like half day with one and then go half day to the other, which is kind of what you did. You did more of like a Jenga type situation where you were kind of like trying to figure out like the precise timing of it, but you made it work.

And at the end of the day, as long as the clients are happy, then you've done your job. Exactly. And I mean, some things happened on the first shoot that really I needed to be there for, honestly. That the client was my first contact to the client was, that's what they're paying me for. Because they trust me to manage things and stuff like that. Yeah, always a balance for sure.

Sorry, I have a meeting in a couple minutes I got to run to. It seems like you guys don't want to chat. Can I just leave and then? Kill actually my my timings kind of getting tight here now. Okay. Okay. Good. Good. Okay, so let's let's let's end the episode then We're already at an hour. Anyway, yeah, that was good. Yeah, but Anytime you ever want to talk again like yeah, let me know I'd be more I love talking about stuff like that cuz like said there's not a lot of people you always get to talk again like yeah, let me know I'd be more I love talking about stuff like that Cuz like said there's not a lot of people who always get to talk industry to stuff with so it's great so guys if you want to find Craig go to spider video dot TV and you guys are based out of

My god forgot the name with Halifax, Nova Scotia. Yeah What are your what are your socials? Is it just? Spider Video across the board. Yeah. So at Spider Video, follow him on social media. And yeah man, thanks for coming on board. Well thanks. It was great to talk to you. And again, really appreciate the work that you did for us there a couple weeks ago. And the stuff looked great and you did you basically did exactly what I would do had I been there on the day and that's what I really appreciate. Thank you. Happy to hear. Thanks for listening to this

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