DP Hawks shoots Olympic athletes for J&J spots with JVC GY-HD250

In less than eight weeks, California-based Circle Take Media traveled throughout the United States, UK and Canada to interview 13 Olympic athletes for Johnson & Johnson’s “Thanks Mom” campaign.

The “Thanks Mom” campaign, shot with JVC GY-HD250 Pro HD cameras, features Olympians thanking their mothers for their love and support.

Director of photography Jim Hawks had a small production team and a limited time with the athletes so there was no room for error, he said. The GY-HD250 cameras’ support for interchangeable lenses gave Hawks the ability to switch between 13X and 16X Fujinon lenses, he said. Hawks used the Fujinon 16X lens for portrait shots and the 13X Fujinon wide-angle lens for capturing B-roll.

Hawks used two GY-HD250s with DR-HD100 hard disk recorders for each shoot. To match the cameras, Hawks relied on their interchangeable memory card support. Being able to take the settings from one camera and put them into the other camera saved a lot of time, he said.

Because time was so limited, Hawks captured his 720P footage on hard disk recorder and transfer it to an external hard drive as well as simultaneously recorded to tape for “collateral capture redundancy,” he said.

At the end of each day, Hawks transferred the media to a portable hard drive and shipped it overnight to Johnson & Johnson’s edit house. In some instances, the spots were shot, transferred, edited and posted to the Johnson & Johnson’s Web site within 10 days, he said. The spots rotated throughout the Olympic Games in the United States, Canada and the UK.

For more information, visit www.jvc.com/pro.