Behind the Scenes: Crafting a Brand Film That Feels Like Home
A Brand Film is a short, cinematic documentary capturing the essence of your brand — what you do, who you impact, and why you do it. And interviews — from the owner, team members, and happy clients or customers — form the structure of the film.
Capturing heartfelt, meaningful interviews isn’t just about getting the right shots — it’s about creating an environment where people feel comfortable, natural, and confident in sharing their stories. For my client, Crystal — the owner of BIJOU in Fort Worth, that was the top priority.
When the camera comes out, so does everyone’s insecurities: what am I going to look like, is this angle flattering, do I sound weird? — It’s totally normal to have these feelings, and I myself have to sit in front of the camera often just to get used to the feeling.
But what if there was a way to get your mind off the camera?
I’ve found that by sitting right next to the camera, instead of behind it, and having our interview subjects speak directly to me while my assistant kept eyes on the cameras, they felt much more comfortable, which allowed for natural, authentic conversation where they felt like they could naturally express themselves.
As the film’s director, it was my job to maintain a personal connection with the on-camera talent. They needed to feel more connected to me than they were to the camera — because a single person is easier to talk to than the impersonal lens and red tally light staring into your soul.
For this shoot, we used a Panasonic GH7 with a Sigma 18-35 f/1.8 as our A-cam, filming in “Open Gate” — a recording method that expands the image to a taller 4:3 aspect ratio, making more use of the camera’s sensor and the lens’s image circle — a bigger image means more flexibility in editing — I’m able to crop these images for social media (vertical) and long-form (horizontal), without losing quality either way. This allows for easy repurposing of content, like this shorter, vertical version of the same BTS video above:
We used a Panasonic S5 as our B-cam, getting an alternate angle to help cover up pauses and filler words: um, like, and so I was like…. and so on. If they stumble, we can cut to the other camera seamlessly. We had a 24-70 f/2.8 lens on that camera, zoomed in all the way to 70mm. This camera did not do Open Gate, but we were still able to frame it such that cropping for social media wasn’t impossible.
For lighting, we went for a soft, natural, bright look, which felt appropriate for the Brand Film we were producing. For our key light, we used an Aputure 600D with the LightDome 150, set to camera-left and cranked to 100%. To add some contrast, we used an Amaran 200X with a small softbox, tuned to 3200K, its light brushing the back of the shoulders and hair — this gave some separation between the subject and background, and a subtle golden kiss to the image — also appropriate given the story we’re telling. The white walls and ceilings bounced light everywhere.
For audio, we boomed a Sennheiser MKE-600 overhead, running it straight into the camera. This is an easy workflow that mitigates having to re-sync the audio later. There was a tiny bit of noise from the air conditioner — however, this was in August, it was 110 degrees out, and a bit of room noise was preferable to sweaty on-camera talent — especially for a beauty salon video! I was able to cover up some of the noise, in the final video, with the soundtrack and signal processing: some EQ sweetening, noise reduction, de-essing, and AI voice isolation — I hardly crank this past 7% though — a little goes a long way! — got the dialogue sounding crisp. Thankfully, the studio where we were shooting was its own building in a quiet area of downtown Fort Worth, so we didn’t have to fight competing noise.
