Making a Brand Film With One Working Arm: Behind the Scenes of the SC First Steps 2024 Film
- Jonathan Palance
- May 23
- 4 min read
There's a version of the production world where the person with the camera is also doing every other job — operator, editor, lighting tech, gaffer, grip. Small crew stuff. Now, we aren't THAT small, but traditionally Jonathan (the boss) is directing, acting as DoP (lighting and framing) as well as cinematographer (camera operator). That was us, for years. The 2024 SC First Steps brand film challenged that setup.
A few weeks before this shoot, Jonathan had shoulder surgery. he physically couldn't hold a camera on interview day. And we had a brand film due for a client whose work matters too much to phone in. So we did the thing we'd been telling ourselves we'd do "eventually" for years: we grew a little. (Think of the Grinch's heart growing in that old cartoon.)
A Real Lighting Truck (Finally)
For the interviews, we brought in a dedicated lighting team with a truck. That might not sound like a big deal — but for a one-person operator used to dragging C-stands out of the back of a truck solo, it's an entirely different kind of shoot day. We rigged a giant silk overhead — huge. We're talking 8 foot by 8 foot. A real parachute. Then, touch of negative fill to keep contrast in the eyes. A small spot behind each subject to push them off the background just enough to give them shape.
It looked great. It looked like a film we'd been wanting to make for years and hadn't been able to physically pull off alone. Ever since then, we've been quietly collecting lighting to cover as much as we can without having to call in the big guns, but sometimes we still do. Usually at the higher end of a medium-sized commercial shoot and up.
Three Interviews. Three Perspectives.
SC First Steps' whole mission is supporting parents, guardians, and the children in their care during the early years that matter most. The video had to feel like that. We had to see, hear and feel the love and care going into these folks.
So we filmed with three of them — a provider doing the work directly with kids, a parent who'd been on the receiving end of the program, and somebody on the operations side who could walk us through what the network actually does day to day. Three different angles on the same thread. It's always amazing listening to the story unfold directly in front of you. Editing doesn't start after you load footage into your machine: it begins when people start telling their story.
B-Roll, Four Weeks Later
By the time ol' JP was physically cleared to shoot B-roll (and out of a sling), four or five weeks had passed. We headed back out to capture the world the interviews lived inside. We filmed providers in classrooms, parents and kids playing, the public library, swing sets, the small daily moments that make up an early-childhood story.
This is where our favorite outtake of the shoot lives. We tried to film a little girl on a swing. She was, in technical terms, not having it. Beautiful kid, full attitude, zero interest in collaborating with us. I mean, she was, like, four. We worked around her for a while — peekaboo from behind the lens, following, no pressure to do anything specific. Eventually she lightened up enough to give us a smile and some real playtime. The shots we got might be our favorites in the whole film. (Toddlers are honest critics. If they hate it, the footage will show it. If they trust you, the footage will show that too.)
We finished our images with a shoot days later capturing another group, a family, near the river. Some handheld images, some aerial drone stuff... you know the drill.
A Note for the Gear Heads
For most of these interviews, we were on a 50mm f/1.2. (Sorry — we know.) At the time it was our wide-shot lens of choice on long-form. It looked gorgeous when it nailed focus, and that's what you see in this film. We've since pulled back for lots of compressed "wides" — at 1.2, anything that drifts even a hair off focus turns to a milky blur, and we'd rather have margin. We nailed focus on this, but the look of a 35 or 28 for the wide shot is just... muah 🤌🏻
Why It Worked
The SC First Steps team does work we admire. Helping early-childhood providers and the families they serve is the kind of slow, important, generation-shaping mission that doesn't always get the spotlight it deserves. Our job was simple: make a film that made the people doing this work feel seen and the people who might benefit from it feel invited.
There's another post coming about their 4K program — that one's a whole story of its own. But this one, the 2024 SC First Steps brand film, will always feel a little extra to us, because it was the project that truly took us into a group collab mindset. Sometimes the best thing for the work is admitting you need a team.
If your nonprofit or organization has a story like this — quiet, important, and easy to undersell — that's exactly the kind of brand film we love making at Soda City Films. Drop us a line.
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