I met Eric Piette in the videography school of Brussels. With him being a poet, we quickly became friends. Kindly he gave me some of his poems to read, lucky me, they were published in french, his mother tongue and in greek, my mother tongue!
When he told me he would be reading his poems in front of a live audience I was thrilled, let’s make a video about it, I told him!
I packed my trusty Canon camera, the 24-105L lens, a hypercardioid mic and a wireless omnidirectional lavalier mic. A few extra batteries and that was all! I don’t like to bring a lot of equipment just for a simple aftermovie, pack small – play big is my motto for these instances.
I arrived very early, I think I was actually the first person to arrive, of course after the owners of the bookshop & music boutique. I took various b-roll early on before the crowd arrived. For the establishing shots I had to wait for the sun to come down a bit and the people to gather, so I did them just before and just after the reading.
When Eric arrived I hid the lav mic in his clothes, we tested the audio and had no scratching from the clothes. When you wear all the hats in a small production like this, it’s best to prepare well. I knew he would read for about 20 mins and I needed just a minute of two of good audio. Later I carefully EQ-ed it since a hidden lav is a bit too muddy and too dry.
The editing was done in less than 3 hours. I just took some parts from different poems, and found a nice jazz song without lyrics/vocals. Some color correction as the white balance was in constant change between 3200K and 6500K. I prefer to shoot with fixed values, I remember I did about 4000K for the interior and 5500K for the exterior shots. Shooting in 8bit per color doesn’t leave much room for correction but I find that you can easily adjust ±1000K in post.