Well I recently accepted some freelance camera work on a friends documentary project that he was commissioned to produce by Creative Scotland. The project was to produce a film of the national festival of dance that is The Big Dance, it is currently still taking place across all six of Scotland’s cities and is due to run in one form or another until the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

I was to be the B Camera operator on some days and a camera assistant on others, the shooting days I have been involved with thus far have covered Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Inverness. With more filming to be done in Glasgow, Dundee and Stirling.

The shoot breaks down into two types if filming, Documentary and staged shoots with a more cinematic style. The documentary shots used various cameras, Mostly HDSLR’s and a Canon XF305. The cinematic shoots are shot on a single camera, a Canon C300.

The C300 at the first cinematic shoot at Edinburghs Dance base.

The Documentary shoots where pretty hectic, they mostly involved running round city centers with several pounds of kit to get to key locations before a performance started. Some were more sedate with more than one camera present some were a bit more manic.

Getting kit together for the first day of filming in Edinburgh.

Filming the first cinema style shoot using the C300.

The shoot has taken us all over Scotland, and as such we end up getting some pretty iconic imagery as set up shoots, like this one under the Kessock bridge at Inverness.

Some of the documentary stuff is a bit more formal, like this days shooting at His Majesties Theater in Aberdeen.

Here the local dance studio City Moves put on a massive show of 33 acts over two and a half hours of dance styles ranging from childrens classes, Ballet, Jazz, Hip Hop and even through to over 60’s. The show ended with a finale which involved all the performers being on stage at once, needless to saw it got a bit crowded.

The Theater also sold out with over 1000 seats sold.

The project is still ongoing with more cinema shoots happening in August so I’ll post updates on them when they are done.