Back in September of 2011, Joel Haslam, from the Ottawa CTV TV station, contacted me
about doing a segment of their TV show "Regional Contact" on woodgears.ca.
Regional Contact is a local TV show, although you can also
watch older episodes online
on the internet.
I agreed, and so they came, show host and camera man, to film in my workshop
and around the house for two days.
The show first aired in October 2011, and again at the end of January 2012.
Having produced YouTube videos for some time now, it was interesting to see their
approach to filming. There is much more attention to detail than I put into
my videos. Here's the setup for doing an interview, with a big
powerful lights set up. To my right is a reflector to add more light
from the other side.
There's a light with a pink filter in front of it in the background to add a bit
of colour. I thought that was a bit odd, but having watched a number of
the show's episodes online, I see they use that technique in other
episodes as well.
Here's me showing off the pantorouter.
The low ceiling, and even lower ductwork in my workshop made it challenging
with the big lights. One of the lights was an 800 watt halogen bulb. That
sure warms up the place.
I'm much less discriminating about lighting myself, and shoot with regular compact fluorescent bulbs as my main light source. I can keep a lot of these on for hours without things getting too hot. I recently replaced all the CF bulbs with ones that all have the same colour temperature. That really cuts down on how much colour adjustment I have to do during editing.
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Because the videos are an important part of the website,
they decided to show how I shoot video. Here's shooting
the screen of my camera. I like this shot because it really contrasts the size
of my camera vs. theirs.
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High definition or not aside, lighting actually makes much more of a difference
than how good the camera is. Here's setting up the shot of my homemade
sawmill. We went back and forth over where best to set it up. They settled
for setting it up in the shade and adding light with a reflector.
A few days later, I shot my own video of the
sawmill in action.
Not putting as much effort into lighting, I just dealt with the
spotty sunlight that I had. Contrast the lighting on my shot at left, with a frame grabbed
from the TV show above right.
But this is a fundamental difference between YouTube and TV. With TV, the cost of production is high, so when shooting, it's all about the production, so the action follows the camera. Whereas with YouTube, one mostly shoots life as it happens. If the lighting is too hard to fix, you just live with what you have. It's a trade-off either way. Not having TV, and watching a lot of YouTube, I look at TV from a different perspective. When I see TV, I admire the high production values and concise editing, but miss the everyday genuine aspect of YouTube.
Here's Joel Haslam shooting a short segment, to introduce the show using
my marble machine 2.1. Basically,
it's a segment that plays before the commercial break to keep you tuned in.
They took quite a few takes before they were happy with it.
I could relate - sometimes it takes me five takes
to get the intro to a video right, and even then it's not always very smooth.
They also shot some segments of Joel playing my
homemade organ,
which was intended to be
another teaser segment. As far as I know, they didn't use that segment.
I wish they had - unlike me, Joel knows how to play keyboards, so it was
nice to hear some actual music coming out of that organ!
They shot way more video than they ended up using. That's another difference between their production and me shooting YouTube videos. For my videos, I can always go back and shoot more video if I find I'm missing something while editing. But it wouldn't be realistic, or professional, for a TV crew to come back and say "can we shoot just one more segment?". As for my production, I try to leave things as they are in the shop until I finish my first pass of editing.
And here's the TV show. They said they were OK with me uploading it onto YouTube. The show aired in October 2011, and was rerun in January 2012. As far as I know, they run each show twice. But you can watch all the previous episodes on the CTV website
In February 2018, Rogers TV approached me about doing an interview for
their show "Celebrate Ottawa". The interview was done in my shop on February 24,
with the show airing less than a week later and uploaded to YouTube March 27.
They only took two hours to do the interview vs. two days for CTV.
Perhaps YouTube has forced TV to tighten their production in the intervening
six and a half years.
I gave them permission to use various clips from some of my videos for "B-roll" clips to show while I was talking.
They also uploaded their video onto their YouTube channel:
The project I was working on that day was this rack of boxes.
In November 2022, CBC new brunswick became aware of my YouTube channel and that I'm in new brunswick.
So they sent a guy to interview me. They wanted to film me doing my thing, and it so happened
that the camera guy got into frame while I was filming. So he got a cameo appearnce in
this video about making small desks that I was working on
at the time.
The article and video are up on CBC new brunswick
See also:
Brain Pick with Bob Clagett interview (2015)
Odds and ends vlog (2015)
Back to my woodworking website
Article and video about me on CBC New Brunswick
Workshop tour 2012
Homemade pipe organ
Homemade bandsaw/sawmill
Marble machine 2.1
Guest apperance on Chad and Steve have a podcast