Well, it’s finally time to release the new film and now that it’s out, I’m still thinking about that title. Sure, it’s a cliché (A New Normal) but in reality, that’s exactly what it was. The film follows students, faculty, staff, and administrators as the struggle to keep campus open at rural institution Ferris State University.
I’m also a faculty member there, so I have a special perspective to bring to the film.
Initially, I hoped to interview a few people for a short film about how Ferris’s eLearning and IT staff were able to work quickly to get faculty and students set with technology after our state went on lockdown. Initially in March, 2020, the idea was that we would be teaching and learning online for about two weeks. That all changed very quickly.
So as I started the documentary, each person I interviewed had more and more stories to tell.
Side angle of Dr. Emmanuel Jadhav, Public Health Professor at Ferris
I started production on the film in February, 2021. It was -15F, windy, and at the height of COVID in Michigan. Cases were high, campus was socially distant and about 50% of all courses were offered online.
Our first Cam A shot from a New Normal
Trying to convince interviewees to go on camera, in-person, was difficult at first. I ensured everyone that I would be double-masked, with an N95, and will maintain at least 10 foot social distancing. This meant I had to make sure everything was set up and ready to go before the interviewee arrived (a good rule of thumb anyway).
Luckily, the film’s first interview was Emmanuel Jadhav, a professor in Public Health. The perfect interview to start this endeavor because of the pandemic implications on Public Health education.
The conversation took us in many different directions, and I was lucky to have a Ferris student on set to help out with the first interview. It would be the single time I had help during production until I was nearly finished with the project. I thought it was smart to keep our crew small to limit the possible spread of COVID. After all, I would be asking the interviewees to take off their masks, if they felt comfortable. Having the least amount of people in the room was a matter of safety…but it created a TON of work for production.
Ferris Early Education student Olivia Rockafellow shares her experience teaching during the pandemic.
The other consideration I made was how I would film the interviews. For Dr. Jadhav’s interview, I chose to shoot with the Sony FS5 as the main camera and running into a Shogun Inferno and recording in RAW. Each interview would be shot with a B camera which ended up being a Sony A6500. After the first interview, the idea of shooting everything in RAW was nearly impossible. We are talking 400GB for every 1 hour interview. The flexibility of shooting in RAW is unparalleled and color grading the footage was like slicing through butter…but it just wasn’t realistic. So I used this opportunity to test out different codecs, eventually settling on ProPres LT. If I were to do it all over again, I probably would have shot in ProRes 4:2:2 HQ, but with the film project totaling 3.78 TB, I’m glad I made the sacrifice.
“I don’t think we’re ever going back.”
Bill Jung-TDMP Engineer
The film took on many phases after interviews started. First, I needed to form a story from the already completed interviews, and I needed to formulate a plan for how I would tell this story. With my previous films, I used narration to tell the story. With this film, I knew right away that I would let the interviewees tell the story. That makes thinks a little more difficult because I needed to find perfect sound bites that would lead into each other…and scripting really wouldn’t work. So instead, I wend into each interview and found ONLY the best sound bites. These “perfect sound bites” would then help tell the story.
Outdoor setup with athletics announcer Sandy Gholston.
Another challenge was working on this project while teaching nearly 18 credits at the university. I managed to do it all during my off-time during the day and I realized that I would soon run out of time. It was definitely important to reach out to students and hear their perspectives before they left for the summer. Luckily, I was also able to get students from Ferris’s International Office to share their unique perspectives during the summer.
In the edit room, the biggest challenge ended up being matching the FS5 and the A6500. Sure they are both Sony cameras, but with different sensors and other differences, including picture profiles. During production I shot everything in Slog-2 with both cameras. The log profile gave me much greater flexibility in color grading, but since the FS5’s footage was 10-bit (because I was recording into a Shogun Inferno) and the A6500 was 8-bit. The differences were quite noticeable during color grading, and the A6500 colors broke down a lot earlier than the FS5’s.
I decided in the beginning to shoot 4k and finish at 1080. This would give me much greater flexibility with the shot composition of each interview. I could feasibly, if everything was sharply focused, zoom into certain shots at least 50% without losing quality. This meant for the interviews where I only used one camera, I could adjust the shot in post to make it seem like there was more variety to the shot. It was a great idea, and it’s unlikely many people will notice the difference between 4k and 1080p footage. The other positive to this is downscaling footage tends to still create an even sharper image than native 1080p footage.
The last 7 months definitely were exciting, challenging, and interesting and hopefully the film captures all that (and more).
A “book light” setup for an interview in the television studio with TV Engineer Bill Jung
