Name: Nico Sabenorio, director/DP Bout That Bout (2009), footage for National Geographic and CNN, and Life After Meth commercials (2011)

Situation: As an independent DP/director, you may need to get as much shot as possible during a single day—and have a great reel to show the next morning.

With the economy and budgets being what they are, it’s becoming increasingly important as a documentary director to be a one-man army. At the time I’m writing this, my first national ad campaign has just begun airing—a series of 30-second television spots about crystal meth recovery, plus two extended online documentaries. Even with a small crew, I was tasked with directing, DPing, and editing. Here’s an example of one day working on this project.

Wednesday, Show Low Arizona

It’s 8 a.m. I wake up, grab a quick continental breakfast in the hotel, then get straight to editing. I use a MacBook Pro, the latest version of Final Cut Pro, and a pair of 2TB external LaCie FireWire 800 hard drives. We’ve been shooting for three days, and I need to make sure the footage is working out and refine our shooting plan based on new information and emotional plots that are emerging. I also coordinate with our producer to make sure we’re on track for some critical shoots at the end of the week.

10 a.m. The production coordinator and I head out early in our rented SUV to track down a new lead who’d make a great subject for the film—the probation officer who turned our protagonist’s life around. He’s retired, and his old phone numbers are disconnected. We can’t get through to the last people to work with him through phone or email, so we drive to his old office and ask around. We get an address outside of town that we’ll have to check out later.

11 a.m. I assemble my Canon 7D and Redrock Micro shoulder rig while the production coordinator drives us to the location—the high school baseball field where our protagonist, Steven, coaches. I’ll need to move fast, without much time for lens changes, so I select my 24-70mm Canon L Series. We arrive, I meet the players, and we begin preparing to shoot, knowing we have limited time before the kids leave and we lose our light. It’s December, so the sun sets early. We’re a little ahead of the producer, executive producer, and client representatives, which is how I like it, as it gives us a chance to build momentum and work out any kinks before the brass arrives.

I ask Steven to gather his players. I brief them on what the day will be like, thank them sincerely for coming out, then ask them to start warming up as they would before a typical game. I’m DPing as well as directing, so I hike the 7D on my shoulder; the camera is attached to the weighted shoulder mount, which is mandatory for eliminating the rolling shutter issue these SLRs have when doing handheld work. I also use a follow focus and a Zacuto Pro 3X eyepiece, which I need to make sure my shots are in focus, as the 7D has no viable auto-focus feature for live shooting, nor does it allow for focus assist while recording. Shawn, the coordinator, has once again been recruited to run sound for me. We clip a lavalier mic on Steven—a rented Sennheiser transmitter with my Sanken COS-11D PT mic. Shawn booms while running both tracks of audio to a Zoom H4N digital recorder that fits on his belt. We go to work—getting baseball moments, interviews with the players; staging hits and catches, bits with Steven in action with team members; and interviewing Steven about how baseball played into his addiction and recovery. The sun is harsh at first. I recruit baseball players to bounce light with the shiny side of my 32-inch Photoflex LiteDisc. I explain as much as I can to them about what they’re doing and how it’s helping the commercial so that they’ll be as engaged as possible.

Once the clients show up we’re already in full swing, but the producer keeps me on track and lets me know when we have to move in order to get everything we need for the day. We move to staging Steven talking to his team about drug addiction and film for a while, having him give his speech a few times so I can capture multiple angles. I narrow down key points he’s making and ask him to repeat himself, just to be sure I have what we need in various shots—these angles will allow me more cinematic freedom in the edit, and repeating the action often leads to new moments and interactions. The risk when asking nonactors to repeat themselves is that it will become staged. To avoid this, when needed, I talk to the subjects about what they’re doing and why, to keep their attention off saying certain things and on their intentions and motivations.

We need to move again, and the producer has already begun wrangling the parents for their interviews. For efficiency, the parents are gathered together in the stands and we ask them questions as a group, then zero in to single shots on whoever answers. We get good stuff here, honest reactions to the idea that their children are being coached by a former drug addict—how they felt about it at first, and how Steven has earned their trust.

We’re running out of time, as always, and the sun is getting low. We gather all the players and start speaking with them as a group about Steven. We get great answers here—honest reactions to his stories about drug use and praise for him as a great coach. The sun is getting low, but I don’t want to open up the ISO too much because then we’ll get grain.

We move to portrait shots. The Canon 7D can shoot 60fps (its only advantage in performance over the Canon 5D Mark II), which allows for true slow motion. When shooting in 60fps, it’s important to increase your shutter speed in order to get rid of unnatural motion blurs when you slow the footage down in post. I’ve used slow motion in many of the action shots, and now I use it for artistic portraits of Steven and the team. From the portrait shots, I direct Steven to say the key phrase for this ad campaign: “Recovery is possible.” I direct him to play with the phrase and say it in different ways: speak to the team from your heart about how they are a part of your recovery and how recovery is possible; speak to me about how the team is important to you and your recovery and that recovery is possible; just say “recovery is possible” to the camera a few different ways. This is the crux of the campaign, so we take some time with it. The more options I end up with in the edit room the better.

We only have a few minutes left. I ask Steven and the team to just hang out together, say their honest good-byes for the day, and . . . “Lift him up?” one of the players asks. I can tell he’s amped to mob the coach. I ask them to hold for a second. I get my camera set, then yell, “Get him!” and the team swarms on Steven, lifting him up and running off with him. I wish I had a second angle of it, so I tell them to do it again. They mob him, and I get a second angle. With that shot in the bag, it’s time to let the players go. It’s a school day, they have homework, and we’ve kept them long enough.

Everyone is ready to go. Shawn, Steven, and I stay behind for a few minutes after everyone leaves. It’s the magic hour. I feed Steven lines to riff on about his addiction, simplified from the extended interviews we’ve been shooting and the months of preproduction conversations leading up to the shoot. I ask Steven to look around at the field and reflect on what his life could have been. I don’t ask him to say anything; I just capture the moment in slow motion. I ask him to hit a few balls out into the outfield. I film some shots exposed for Steven, with a slightly blown out reddish sky overhead; then I stomp down the exposure so he’s in silhouette, with a deep blue night-looking sky above and the moon looming brightly.

7 p.m. We follow up on the lead from the morning and head into a residential community in the middle of nowhere. It’s pitch black, and most of the road is unpaved and unmarked. Our GPS is little help. On the drive, I use a power converter to run my laptop off the car battery, connect a portable USB 2.0 drive and a card reader, and start downloading all the media from the day. Simultaneously, I use a program called MPEG Streamclip to translate the cumbersome 7D files into a format that Final Cut Pro can work with smoothly. This will save me time later and let me dive straight into the edit at the end of the night. We ask around and show up unannounced on the doorstep of the probation officer. He’s home, and he agrees to show up during an interview and surprise our protagonist.

8 p.m. I get back to my room and set the remaining footage up to download and backup onto our pair of 2TB external drives. While this is going on, I break for dinner with the clients and producers, then leave early to edit the day’s footage. I use a program called PluralEyes to automatically sync up the scratch audio from the 7D with the high-quality audio from the Zoom. This saves me a lot of time and aggravation and was well worth the $150. I use the lines I fed our protagonist to give me an easy bookend to this rough clip; this gets the momentum going for the relatively quick edit. My goal is to create something emotional and thematic, with good-looking shots and solid audio to impress the clients and give a taste of what our fieldwork is equating to on screen. I do a little color correcting as I go, using the three-way visual color corrector in Final Cut Pro. I stay up until 4 a.m. cutting what turns out to be a three-minute clip of what we shot during the day—a roughed-in story about Steven’s addiction and recovery, with baseball B-roll and temp score. I compress the video, upload it to my FTP site, then email the link to the on-site producers and the production company CEO back in Los Angeles for their reactions and approval to show it to the clients. I order a wake-up call from the hotel, use my cell phone alarm as a backup, then finally crash out.

In the morning we meet in the lobby. I show the dailies, the clients love them, and we head out for another day of shooting.

Takeway: The restrictions and difficulties of an independent production can give you some of your best work. You can see the dailies Nico cut together that night after one day of shooting here: www.sanpedroprison.tv/Nico/AntiMeth/Baseball03.mov.