I received a call from the Animal Farm team asking if I was interested in working with them on a documentary-style project for Cisco. Naturally, I said yes. Over the next several months and many pre-production meetings, we landed on a visual direction for the project and started planning for the shoot days at the Cisco headquarters in San Jose.

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Since I knew the story would focus on cybersecurity, I utilized a lot of quadrant framing and shot the interviews using an EyeDirect during production. My role was to direct the on-set production and serve as the director of photography. We worked with a great crew in San Jose, California, and Raleigh, North Carolina. The crew mentioned how helpful it was that I mocked up a lighting and camera diagram prior to production so everyone was on the same page.

Noah—the Creative Director for the project and founder of Animal Farm—conducted pre-interviews, wrote the scripts, and conducted all the interviews on set. I utilized a Hudson Spider Redback (with a Mozzie silver umbrella) as the key light for all the interviews, and we recorded the dialogue using a Sennheiser 8050 microphone.

The team at Rebel Sun in San Jose designed a rig so I could get overhead shots of a desk and webcam. Brandon and I dove through menus to get a signal out of the Canon C500 Mk II for the Teradek and client monitors. In the monitor setup, Noah (Left - Creative Director/Founder, Animal Farm) and David (Right - Principal, Sans Serif) made sure everything was looking just right.

The Animal Farm team handled all the post-production and brought me on to color the film. This production was so much fun to work on! You can read more about the project and see a short cut of the film on the Sans Serif website.

A production of Sans Serif x Animal Farm.