Shooting MI:RNA's overview film

The schedule for this one fits on half a page. Call at 05:30 on a farm outside Dundee, in the air for golden hour at 06:00, interview on the farm mid-morning, travel at midday, second interview at 13:00, teardown at 16:00. 1 day, 2 places that have nothing in common except the company that connects them.

The note against that first line in the brief was minimal equipment, focus on being ready for sunrise. That is the most useful instruction on the whole page. Everything else in the day could move by half an hour. The light could not.

Shoot people where they work

Dr. Robert Coultous is CSO and Co-Founder of MI:RNA, and he is also the man who feeds the cattle. That is why his farm was the location, and it is why I did not build him a neutral interview set.

I put him in the cattle shed with the pens and the straw behind him, in the coat he was already wearing. He is explaining relative expression profiling of microRNA, which is not a subject that normally arrives with livestock in the background, and that mismatch is a large part of why the film works. The science sounds less like a press release when the person saying it is standing in a byre.

2 audiences, 1 edit

The hard part of this brief was not the science. It was that the film had to land with 2 groups who want opposite things.

A vet in practice or a farmer wants to know what changes on a Tuesday morning. An animal health company, an investor or an academic partner wants to know the science holds. Shoot only for the first and you sound thin. Shoot only for the second and you have made a conference talk.

The way through was to let the 2 founders split the job rather than have both of them cover everything. Dr. Eve Hanks carries the origin and the ambition. Robert carries the mechanism. Underneath both of them, the b-roll answers the question the voice track is raising at that exact moment: cattle in the pens under the herd management line, a cat and a kitten on a kitchen floor under the companion animal conditions, a gloved hand at a bench under the machine learning.

The first 12 seconds

The brief asked for a strong hook inside the first 10 to 20 seconds. That is a request I would much rather have written down than left to chance, because it decides what you shoot at 06:00.

The hook is 1 sentence and it finishes at 12 seconds, over an aerial of sheep and a walk down a farm track with a dog: I'm Dr. Eve Hanks, I'm a veterinarian and I believe that MI:RNA, a company that I founded six years ago, has the power to change and revolutionise diagnostics forever.

Nothing on screen underneath it is a laboratory. That is deliberate. The claim is enormous, and the pictures carrying it are a Scottish field at first light, which is what stops it reading as a pitch.

1 person, 2 locations

I shot this on my own. The drone, both interviews, and every frame of b-roll on a farm and in a laboratory, inside 1 day.

That is a defensible way to run a job like this, and it is not a way to run every job. It works here because the 2 setups are small and sequential rather than simultaneous. Nobody is flying while somebody else is lighting an interview. It stops working the moment 2 things have to happen at once, which is why an evening with a reception at one end of the room and flight sessions at the other takes 4 of us and this took 1.

What it costs is redundancy. There is no second operator to catch the thing happening behind me, and there is no second body already rolling when a subject reaches for something. The answer is not to work faster. It is to accept that the shot list is shorter and make the shots on it count.

What the day actually costs

An 05:30 call for a 16:30 finish is a long day, and the part that gets underestimated is the middle of it. I was on the farm until late morning and inside a working practice by early afternoon, which meant 1 teardown, 1 drive, 1 setup, and no second chance at either interview.

The protection against that is unglamorous. Both interviews got their own location scout and setup block written into the schedule before the subject ever sat down, an hour on the farm and half an hour at the second location. That is time that produces no footage and saves the day.

Filming in a working laboratory

The afternoon list was long: reception, the bench, the analysers, sample handling, the diagnostic process itself, scientists working. A lab is a good place to point a camera and a bad place to get in the way, and the rule is the same one we use on a job site. Work the edges, shoot what is already happening, and do not ask anyone to repeat a step for the camera.

It is also the half of the film that has to do the credibility work, so the detail matters more than the movement. A rack of samples and a gloved hand on a pipette say more than a slow push in on a machine.

The ending is the beginning

The film opens and closes on the same ground in the same low golden light, a dog coming up the track toward the camera, and then the MI:RNA mark with one line under it.

That symmetry is the argument for the 05:30 call, stated in one shot. A day that ends in a laboratory still needs both ends of its film shot outdoors, and that hour is the only place to get them.

First light, then the lab: shooting MI:RNA's overview film

Shoot people where they work

2 audiences, 1 edit

The first 12 seconds

1 person, 2 locations

What the day actually costs

Filming in a working laboratory

The ending is the beginning

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