A few minutes after I hit ‘publish’ on this blog post I am getting on the Crossrail Elizabeth Line train to Heathrow and flying to Cape Town to shoot a series of short documentaries for the Imagining the Ordinary City project, on which I’m the filmmaking research assistant. It will be my first time in Cape Town and my first time in South Africa. My main focus is to make a series of documentaries about “Everyday Journeys” – regular Cape Town people moving through the city living their ordinary lives. We’ll pair up those journeys with those of South African emigrants living in London, which I’ll shoot later this year.
Much of what I’m planning to achieve artistically is affected by what I can reasonably expect to do with the resources at my disposal. I’ll be working with one assistant, but they’re primarily a research assistant, not a trained film crew member; we need to stay discreet and light on our feet particularly so we don’t attract petty theft (unfortunately, rather common in Cape Town); and I need to fit my kit into one bag that will go in the overhead bin on my BA flight.
I know some people out there get quite excited by kit and packing, so here is an image of what I reasonably expected to take with me.
On the left is a tiny action camera and some grip equipment to help me mount it in various places, including on people’s dogs (because, yes, I am planning some Laurie Anderson style doggy-cam shots). The most important thing is that the action camera is tiny and can be discreetly mounted on people’s chests, just outside their clothing.
Moving right, the next column comprises two Fujifilm mirrorless X series camera bodies. I’ll be shooting primarily with the Fuji X-T3 because it shoots in Fuji F-Log, which makes grading a lot more do-able. The X-T20 is my backup just in case. It’s my pocketable travel camera and it’ll have a pancake 27mm lens on it most of the time. Hopefully I won’t need to use it to shoot any of the actual documentary.
Then in the top middle are 2x2TB external HDDs, which I hope will be big enough for the rushes. We’ll see!
And the rest of the kit is mostly sound: two Sony wireless lapel mics and a dinky Rode wireless lapel/vlogger mic, and then my trusty Sennheiser ME66 and a Zoom H4N. None of this stuff is new or fancy, but it gets the job done.
And then I have a lightweight collapsible carbon fibre travel tripod, which has been worth every penny of the £100 it cost about five years ago. And of course, a first aid kit which normally goes hiking.
Most of this stuff packed into my camera backpack, which then went inside my Easyjet size carry-on wheelie duffel, along with items that were awkward/too big for the backpack. Somehow everything you see above went into this:
So now, with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, it’s time to wheel my luggage out of the door and into a new adventure.
