I shot a series of job recruitment ads for the Austrian furniture dealer Föger (located in Tyrol) recently. They offer high-quality design furniture.

Sorry, in German only!

I also wrote the concept, and it took only a week from the first conceptual meeting until the client approved the final edits. They will be aired on TV starting in a week or so, for 6 consecutive weeks.

The idea was to basically let current employees speak about the benefits of working at Föger, which is still a private company and family business, celebrating the specific qualities of each of their employees while emphasizing their push for quality and individualism even with their staff.

I used the great DitoGear OmniSlider for the moving shots through the room – and as usual, it performed perfectly. One great thing about it is the fact that you can pre-record movement (like I did in our motion-control test I blogged about before), which allows you to do the exact same movement over and over again. That makes you just faster: You don’t need to worry about choppy camera movement any longer, because it will just be perfect every time. You can concentrate on your actors’ actions much more, especially if you direct and do the camerawork at the same time.

For all the shots towards the employees’ faces I still used my Glidetrack HD. I don’t like it as much as the DitoGear OmniSlider, but the problem with the OmniSlider is that it is quite noisy and that makes it hard to record sound at the same time, that’s why I had to use the Glidetrack again. It’s MUCH harder to get smooth movement with a Glidetrack, as it doesn’t rely on a ball bearing like more sophisticated sliders like the KesslerCrane products or the Crankcam slider. So it took much longer, but in the end, it worked hard – if I had, say, a PocketDolly or a DitoGear Crankcam slider for that, I would have been MUCH faster with the whole shoot. (Both use a better bearing system.)

As for cameras, I used my trusted EX3 plus the 550D, but I ended up using only 550D shots. I used my Rode NTG-3 microphone to record sound straight into the EX3. The lenses used were the Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 and the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 wide angle, two of my favourite lenses.

As a holiday special, DitoGear told me that they give my readers an 10% OFF ALL THEIR PRODUCTS using the code THENINO10, but this is only valid UNTIL TOMORROW!

Use the discount code THENINO10 when ordering something from www.DitoGear.com, and they will give you the discount right there.

A side note:
I know my slider still says “DriveCam” on top instead of “OmniSlider”, but there is very little difference between the two and it is mainly a software upgrade that I am about to receive. I don’t want to confuse people by calling it DriveCam any longer as this name is not used any more. Anything I have done so far with it would have made absolutely no difference with the new model, that’s why I’m changing the name in these posts – in other words, it will be a proper OmniSlider very soon 🙂

Special thanks for this shoot to:

My camera assistant Patrick Goldbach, my gaffer Felix Federer, Robert Mayr, Werner Riegger from Tirol TV & Marinas. Plus, last but not least of course many thanks to Bernhard Fischer from Föger.

Happy holidays everyone!!