Equipment Hire

We are permitted to use the college's equipment, but for the sake of creating this video we decided we would look what professional equipment we could possibly hire for use during filming in addition to what we already had to use.

First and foremost, we needed somewhere accessible we could hire equipment from that was at least somewhere close. With a bit of research we concluded that there was nowhere in Cambridge that was offering professional grade filming equipment, therefore we needed to look outside the box. We eventually found a location near Stansted Airport that offered a huge range of top-tier grade equipment. We then proceeded to look up the various pieces of equipment we needed.

vmi.tv

Camera
We had been using DSLR cameras in our other photography work inside college and we've become quite used to using them; whilst we've been using them for taking photos, they offer the ability to film high definition video. We've been looking at the results on video sites such as YouTube and we're thoroughly impressed at the quality of video produced. Based on those factors, we wanted to use a DSLR instead of a traditional video camera to record our footage. We picked the Canon 5D Mark II as it was a good trade-off between great quality and cost.
Daily rate:  £80


Tri-pod
A tripod is a stand a camera can be mounted on, extended and moved around to get a stable shot. We wanted some of our shots to be still and stable, therefore a tri-pod is pretty much essential for us.
Daily rate: £15









SD Card
Filming HD footage requires a lot of digital memory as multiple video files are large in size. We wanted a large sized SD card (the type of storage a DSLR uses) so we wouldn't have to worry about running out space to record footage. Once we complete filming, we can simply plug the SD card directly into the computer and import the footage; it's easier than using a camera which has storage built into it.
Daily rate: £18




Dolly
Dolly's are movable platforms can be attached to tripods or to cameras. Moving a dolly that has an attached camera translates to smooth movements in the recorded footage. We wanted to experiment with this video a little so we thought it would be a good idea to try using one of these. Dollys come in all shapes in sizes, but we wanted to keep it simple and chose on that could be attached to the bottom of a tripod.
Daily rate: £15






Computer
This will be essential for off-loading and editing the resulting footage that we record whilst filming. We already have free access to school computers and our own personal computers at home that are already loaded with the required software we need to edit the film. But for the sake of this evaluation we will factor in the costs of hiring a computer (a MacBook Pro with Final Cut pre-installed in this case).
 Daily Rate: £100

All of the prices added up comes to about £228 per day which is far beyond what we'd be willing to spend to shoot this music video. We're unsure of all of the dates we will need to be filming on as we may need additional days to film more, therefore our expenses would skyrocket for every additional day we filmed. We decided we wanted to negate these costs by looking for equipment we could readily acquire for free which meant asking our team members and / or college. In the end, we were able to get the dolly, tripod and computer from the school whilst we planned to use my own camera (Canon 550D) and memory card. By doing this, we effectively negated the costs down to nothing. If we were in need of equipment under certain circumstances (such as my camera breaking) we'd be ready to hire out equipment from vmi.tv and pick them up from Stansted.