growTECH Fest 2021

We had the opportunity to capture media for growTech Fest in October 2021, a local entrepreneurial conference held in Chico at the El Rey Theater & Stoble Coffee. The event featured business leaders, nonprofits and local government officials from the north state where they discussed solutions to issues entrepreneurs are currently facing. It was a fun event that allowed us to listen to speakers and interview local business leaders and owners. 

We used two C70 Canon cinema cameras, a 45mm cine lens, and an 85mm f/1.2 lens, which allowed us to capture high quality media in the dark theater. Interviews were conducted with Tascam mobile recorders – directional microphones that could pick up the interviewee’s voices in the loud setting. Our goal was to compress the two day event into short clips that were 90, 60 and 30 seconds long, to be utilized for a commercial in the upcoming year. 

 

growTech Fest in 2021 was a fun project that we worked on. It’s a local entrepreneur conference where it brings together business leaders in this community that are looking to continue to inspire and educate and provide some sort of a community for entrepreneurs that are starting their own businesses and building their own businesses. And so they bring in successful entrepreneurs that have business throughout the north state, and Chico was the host, as in years past. We were hired to do the media for this event. So we were hired to compress two days of events down into 90, 60, and 30 seconds long. And so the attendance of the event was fun. We met a lot of people. We got to listen to the talks. We got to interview different business leaders and owners in town, and it was hosted at the El Rey theater here downtown.

 

I mean, as an entrepreneur, it’s fun to be surrounded by other entrepreneurs. And I really enjoy that event and being able to capture it. The media that we were capturing is going to be used for promotion for years in the future. And it really was this coalition of some people in local government, it was business leaders, it was nonprofits, and all coming together to say, what solutions can we provide to the problems that entrepreneurs are facing? These could be macroeconomic shifts, changes in the economy, the response to the pandemic. It’s all about creating some sort of an incubator for businesses to start and hopefully thrive. And if they don’t thrive and they fail, then they’re a part of this larger system that is actually making the economy stronger. So even the failed entrepreneurs, you can keep trying.

 

And I think that was a themed message at the conference, and that’s something that’s a Silicon Valley saying, is fail fast. If failure happens, failure’s not the only option. You can continue to try again. So it’s just an interesting conference. It was a cool project to work on. We captured it with two C70s Cinema cameras from Canon. We had an 85 millimeter 1.2 lens, and we had some cinema prime lenses. And that allowed us to capture media inside of the El Rey, which is a really dark theater downtown. So low light capabilities of these lenses that are fast, as they’re called, allowed us to capture high quality media in low light.

 

We did two cam interviews with each of these interviewees and we used these Tascam mobile recorders, the DR-10Ls, which allowed for really close proximity to the speaker. We were conducting the interviews in a really loud room, and so with directional microphones, we were able to capture the interviewee. There was some bleed in of that background noise, but we were still able to hear what the interviewee had to say. In an ideal environment, we would’ve been in a separate room with the interviewees, but given the circumstances, we had to be flexible. We set up lights, two cameras, and then the interviewees were right there.

 

So that’s kind of how we did it. And then post-production, all in Premiere Pro. And the edit itself, I think we had five hours of content and we cut that down to a 90-second deliverable, and ultimately a 30-second commercial, which will be aired next year. So you start with this much content, and that’s the editing process is you whittle it down. So that was growTech Fest, and we really enjoyed being a part of it.