Shooting Architecture: A Behind The Scenes Breakdown

The Macquarie University Incubator; designed by Architectus, is a beautiful piece of architecture. Designed for manufacture and assembly, the building was orignially created as a relocatable structure but has since become a permanent landmark on the university campus due to its innovative design. In this video, principal architect Luke Johnson describes the design and build process of the Macquarie University Incubator building and its significance to modern architectual design.

Behind the Scenes

Now take a look at the process the GLOBAL team undertook to create the Macquarie University Incubator video for Architectus.

Rather than leaving the story for a narrator to deliver, it was important to the client to have the principal architect tell it. To compliment this, we wanted the film to really capture every facet of the design. With its wide open spaces and precisely thought out details, we believed the video needed to compliment the building, so it was important to us that we took a cinematic approach to how we filmed the Incubator.

As it is an inaimate object, classic, cinematic camera movement was the key to showcasing this building. Our aim was to push movement into the film by using classical cinema tools such as the camera dolly (a tool which enables to camera to smoothly track forward, backward or side to side), and jib (a small camera crane roughly 6ft long, enabling the camera to smoothly move up and down). Combining the actions these tools provide us with enhances our ability to add considered and classical looking camera movement.

Filming with our high-end RED Digital Cinema Camera (the same camera many Netflix and Hollywood movies are filmed with), coupled with a cinema grade Angenieux zoom lens and wireless follow focus, we're able to control the exposure, sharpness and clarity of the video image to an exceptionally high degree. And to further our cinematic approach, aerial footage was also captured during the day and after sunset.

The production involved a number of professional crewmembers, including Producer, Director/Cinematographer, Camera Assistant, Dolly Grip, Gaffer (lighting technician), and Hair & Makeup Artist for the interviews. The drone team also consisted of two operators - a licensed pilot to fly the drone and a second operator to perfom independant camera movement. The film was then finished by our video editor and delivered with a thoughtful musical track licensed through a premium sound library.

The video is now being used by the client across social media, website and stakeholder presentations to showcase this high-level architectural design.

That's a Wrap!

We hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes insight into this video production. If you have a video project you'd like to discuss we'd love to chat. You can get in touch with us here.