Dallas Video Crew on the Perfect Shoot with Nickelodeon
Dallas Video Crew Hangs with the “Dudes”DUDE! PERFECT! If you’ve never heard of these guys, then you are probably assuming that I’m trying to talk like a gnarly surfer dude. As much as I’d like to talk like a gnarly surfer dude, I’m talking about the guys from Dude Perfect, the internet trick shot superstars. For this shoot, we traveled a few minutes north of Dallas, to the Dude Perfect HQ in Frisco, TX. Upon arriving we were given a tour of the facility, which includes a hockey rink, soccer field, basketball court, theater, along with a workout gym, offices and lots of other spaces.
Our mission was to shoot a series of promos for Nickelodeon for the upcoming season of the Dude Perfect Show. We had a tight timeline of only a few hours to work with, but plenty of crew to make it happen.
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B-Roll and a BasketballFirst things first, I had my grip and utility set up my 9 x 15 green screen in the hockey rink to be used later in the day. I decided to light the talent with my 400w HMI, filled in as necessary with Kino Flows and light my main green screen with my Kino Flow Divas. I also sent my B-Camera operator around to shoot scenics and B-roll of the entire Dude Perfect HQ to be cut into the promos as needed. While my crew was doing all this, I was walking through the shoot and scripts with the producers, blocking out actions that the Dudes were going to take to make the shoot flow smoother once talent was on site. Tough Gear for a Tough ShootFor this shoot, we opted for two Sony Fs7s and a GoPro Hero 5. The FS7s gave us the ability to quickly switch between shooting 4k and slo-mo, all while staying nicely in the client’s budget. The GoPro was used as our main camera for one of our promos. We attached it to a basketball via an elastic headcount, which held up for most of our “stunt work.” The GoPro took a lot of abuse every time a shot missed and it hit concrete or a wall, but it held together nicely. Shoutout to GoPro for making nearly bombproof cameras.
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Tossing Around the GoProOne of the promos we shot involved and the Dudes catching a basketball, delivering a line to the camera (in our case, the camera ball) and passing or kicking it on to the next Dude. We did this series of ball passes and transitions from Dude-to-Dude (sounds like a great title if they decide to ditch ‘Dude Perfect’) with our camera ball, which inevitably ended up getting tossed into a basketball net and kicked into a soccer goal. For the final shot I pulled out my DJI Osmo to get an awesome trailing/tracking shot of one of the Dudes on a go-cart catching the final pass and leading to a group huddle cheering finale. Back to the green screen! This was by far the most unique part of the shoot. It involved a single Dude at a time performing different actions that could be edited together with the Nickelodeon logo. An example being, lifting the heavy logo above their heads, or hitting it like a baseball. Once each of the Dudes did their take on the actions, we brought in the Dude Panda! (I don’t know if that’s what it’s called, but that’s what I came to call it.) This involved the Dude Perfect panda suit, performing the same actions in both real-time and in slo-mo. |
The final shot culminated with me shooting a dancing panda on a green screen at 120 frames-per-second slo-mo, while our production team chanted “Go Panda! Go Panda! Go!” Needless to say, it was a good way to wrap it out. The Dudes were awesome to work with, and I look forward to my next shoot with Nickelodeon and MTV!
Check out the full episode here.