For those who don't know, the Nut Tree is sort of Northern California's Knott's Berry Farm (before Knott's got big and the Nut Tree went away)
The Nut Tree is back and bigger than ever and I had a great time doing a 2-day commercial shoot for them. This was about as great a shoot as one can hope for. Great client, great actors, great crew and a great location. Easy and fun. Most fun for the kids. Imagine spending two days at a theme park, riding rides and eating ice cream...
The first shot (and most challenging) we did was to mount a camera on the roller coaster. For this shot I used an Aiptek HD video camera. Key Grip Justin Coupe helped me mafer clamp the camera to the stem of a bogen tripod which was ratchet-strapped down in the front care and pointing back.
The AHD is a consumer camera and has no Iris control, it is a fixed iris at f3.5 and uses shutter speed to control the light levels. I had to tape on 2 37mm ND9 Filters in order to knock the shutter down to something that would intercut with our main camera.
Here is the final spot:
http://emrl.com/j/downloads/NT.mov
Here is a beta run on the coaster to make sure everything is secure (notice the monkeys in the front):
http://emrl.com/j/downloads/JCoaster.mov
