American Gut Project Video

Back in October of last year, the 100 ACRE FILMS team was off to Boulder, Colorado to start production on a video for our good friends at Illumina. If you’ve never heard of San Diego based Illumina – don’t worry…you will. Their technology and innovation in genomics is going to have a huge impact on all of our lives.

We spent two days shooting at the University of Colorado, Boulder, interviewing two scientists and shooting b-roll in the labs. The scientists are working on the American Gut Project, and they are doing some fascinating work! One of the more interesting aspects of the shoot was the weather – when we arrived in Boulder, it was rather warm. But on the second day of shooting, the weather completely changed, and we had snow. While this did provide some nice shots of the mountains, it was odd to go from comfortably warm to snow in a matter of 24 hours. But, we’re told, that’s pretty normal for that area.

The snow arrived on day 2 of the shoot.

We took the Sony FS700 and Canon 5DMKII DSLR with slider for the shoot. We rented lighting gear from MP&E, and Scott (our contact there) really took care of us. If you need to do a shoot in the Denver/Boulder area, give them a call. Our grip for the shoot was a local – Will Beckingham, and he was a tremendous help. We used a K5600 400w Joker for interviews, and what a great light that proved to be. We used LED lights for most of the b-roll in the labs.

Director and Camera Op, Eric Addison, lining up a shot

Eric, Pat Espinosa, and Will Beckingham get ready to shoot.

Once back in San Diego, editing started at 100 ACRE FILMS HQ, and script changes occurred. A new interview was scheduled for January of this year, and while our two scientists from Boulder didn’t make the final cut, we were able to use some of the lab b-roll. We also had Greg Neumayer from Antifreeze Design do all the animations in the video, and he did a great job at creating graphics to describe the process involved with the American Gut project.

After a number of editing revisions, we reached final cut, and we’re proud to share with you the finished video. It was a longer road then expected to get here, but we’re happy with the results. Have a look, and learn all about this fascinating project.