When it comes to health care, children’s hospitals operate differently from your typical adult hospital. They offer specialists, services and technology catered specifically catered to children and involve everything from treatment to rehabilitation and education. At the same time, they try to eliminate the hospital feel of it, giving off a more family-friendly atmosphere. This is exactly what Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami wanted to express in a series of televised commercials.
As one of the most renown pediatric care centers in the world, Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami, Florida admits over 10,000 children every year. The hospital recently opened its new 6-story 213,000 square ft. building decked out with new treatment technology and family-centered facilities. To complete the expansion, the hospital wanted to promote their services through a series of commercials to air on local TV. They asked N2 Productions to handle the acquisition.
“They wanted something that would feature the new pavilion as well as the latest developments that their world-renowned surgeons were working on,” said Neil Nunez, founder of N2 Productions and Director/Producer of the commercials. “It had to be something that captured the hospital’s new look and informative at the same time.”
Capturing a Cure
N2’s tasks were to set up in multiple locations around the hospital to interview different researchers, doctors and surgeons and to get a bunch of B-roll footage to mesh together for the video.
Nunez and his team used a Sony PXW-FS7 video camera to record to Quicktime ProRes on an Odyssey 7Q+ recording monitor. A Prompter People Proline teleprompter was attached to the camera so the talent and faculty could read off prerecorded text during the interviews. The Bolt 300 transmitter took the audio/video feed from the FS7 camera and sent it to a Bolt receiver in their video village outside of the interview rooms, which feeds lossless video to the team’s Flanders Scientific BM210 director’s monitor so Director Nunez could watch the shots.
The hospital wanted to do 12 reporter-style informative commercials highlighting the new building’s many family-friendly features. This involved shooting moving shots with the talent/reporter Beatriz Canals and frequently jumping to different locations around the facility. It was a workflow that required a lot of mobility.Nunez’s rig was set up on a Fisher 11 Dolly to move around the hospital smoothly. The first part of filming featured Beatriz walking around in the lobby showing and talking about the sleek and child-friendly design of the interiors. After, they filmed in the floors above and outside of the facility, constantly moving from location to location. This is where the Bolt came in handy.
Positive Side Effects
“When you have the camera mounted to a dolly and all of this other equipment, you want to keep that camera as uncluttered as possible,” said Nunez. In order for Nunez to see the shot without running cables to his mobile workflow, he monitored the shot wirelessly with the Bolt 300 sending lossless feeds to the director’s monitor.
In scenes which involved moving into doctors’ rooms and narrow hallways, the camera operator could move freely without needing to account for extra cables. This helped to save time on the production. Instead of having to readjust their setup for every scene, they could transition to the next scene smoothly.
“It’s so nice to have the ability to get into the scene without having anything tethered to the camera. It really helped us easily get into position so we could just shoot and move.”
Special Thanks
“The service was amazing at Teradek,” Director Nunez added. “We really needed the wireless downlink the next day for a shoot at 2pm. I talked to a guy named John Hall, and he had the Bolt at my front door by morning. So yeah, excellent service over all!”