In a few days I am heading to Haiti.  Our new video guy and I are traveling along with our senior pastor, worship leader, and director of global missions.  My church has been involved in Haiti for a while, our global missions director is from there, and goes back often.  So for me this is an opportunity to do some documentary style story telling about an area that our global mission has been actively involved in.  The challenge opportunity that I am most concerned interested in solving embracing is getting all our gear there.

Most of “our” gear is “my personal” gear, which we will be taking on a plane.  This means I need to fit it all down to travel size.  One of the first issues is on our typical day-to-day shoots, we can bring a soft box with 3 optional fill lights, boom stand and shotgun mic, teleprompter, and other random large pieces of gear that will not fit on a plane. This had required me to rethink my gear list quite a bit. For those of you unfamiliar with how much video gear goes in to a typical shoot, let me put it this way; if it is just me, it takes me 5 trips out to the car to get everything in and the trunk and back seats are full. This most likely means we wont get to use some of the tools that I have become accustomed to having on location; like an iPad, as I stated in an earlier blog.

I know for sure I am taking my Canon XH-A1, in my TSA (carry on) approved pelican case. To go along with the A1 I purchased something I have been waiting a long time for, a Canon 7D.  The whole HDSLR revolution thing has really been lost on me until the past year.  However while back we hired a videographer for a job that shot on a DSLR, and it looked spectacular.  After a few shoots working with our new video guy (who shoots on a 7D) I was pretty much sold. To compliment the big boys I am also taking a Go Pro Hero with us.  I am expecting to mount this on the hood of whatever vehicle we are in to get some good traveling shots, and maybe set up so quick time lapse stuff as well.

We leave Monday morning early so tonight and this weekend are all about packing.