It was August 5th, 2024 – 7am and hurricane Debby was just finishing up having her way with us here in Tampa Bay, Florida… It was cool, dark, cyclone windy, wet, and rainy with major flooding, electrical outages from down power lines, and broken tree limbs everywhere! The perfect setting to interview Navy Seal show instructor Q and team leader/military specialist Billy Billingham for the hit FOX tv show SPECIAL FORCES: World’s Toughest Test.
Once we tested power, internet, camera, 2-way teleprompter, Zoom stream, and wireless video feed functions the day before during the front of the storm in the office, we then set up the ERROL MORRIS style Interrotron system in the actual studio room on the morning of the shoot. For this setup, just one pro cinema camera was needed to send audio and video of the talent to a Zoom computer via HDMI that in turn sends the overseas Zoom video of the interviewer back out to an iPad Pro via wireless HDMI as it rests in a standard teleprompter rig for the talent in our studio.
In this way, London could see, hear, and communicate back & forth in real-time with the local American talent, eye to eye, directly as framed and recorded by our Sony FX9 cinema camera that is double recording video for redundancy in ProRes HQ Log with dual microphones also setup and recorded separately using a wireless Sennheiser G4 lav and Sennheiser 416 boom mic. Lighting was frontal butterfly or loop with a 44″ softbox at 5600 Kelvin just off center with a 5600 catch light panel or lantern just underneath. A diffused light panel back/kicker/hair light at a warmer 4600 Kelvin was mounted to the ceiling grid just behind talent and another softbox used to light the Manfrotto 13′ popup green screen that covered the studios’ native 8’x20′ LED video wall.
